shores*. In the battle of Nineveh, which was fiercely fought from day break to the eleventh hour, twenty-eight standards, besides those which might be broken or torn, were taken from the Persians; the greatest part of their army was cut in pieces, and the victors, concealing their own loss, passed the night on the field. The cities and palaces of Assyria were open for the first time to the Romans. By a just gradation of magnificent scenes they penetrated to the royal city of Destagered, &c. The first evening Chosroes lodged in the cottage of a peasant, whose humble door could scarcely give admittance to the great king. On the third day he entered with joy the fortifications of Ctesiphon. It was still in the power of Chosroes to obtain a reasonable peace; and he was repeatedly pressed by the messengers of Heraclius to spare the blood of his subjects, and to relieve a humane conqueror from the painful duty of carrying fire and sword through the fairest countries of Asia. But the pride of the Persian had not yet sunk to the level of his fortune; he derived a momentary confidence from the retreat of the emperor; he wept with impotent rage over the ruins of his Assyrian palaces, and disregarded too long the rising murmurs of the nation, who complained that their lives and fortunes were sacrificed to the obstinacy of an old man. That unhappy old man was himself tortured with the sharpest pains of mind and body; in consciousness of his approaching end, he resolved to fix the tiara on the head of Merdeza, the most favoured of his sons. But the will of Chosroes was no longer revered, and Sirois, who gloried in the rank and merit of his mother Sira, had conspired with the malcontents to assert and anticipate the rights of primogeniture. Twenty-two satraps, they stiled themselves patriots, were tempted by the wealth and honours of a new reign: to the soldiers the heir of Chosroes promised an increase of pay; to the Christians the free excrcise of their religion; to the captives liberty and rewards; and to the nation instant peace and reduction of taxes. It was determined by the conspirators that Sirois, with the ensigns of royalty, should appear in the camp; and if the enterprise should fail, his escape was contrived to the imperial court. But the new monarch was saluted with unanimous acclamations; the flight of Chosroes (yet where could he have fled?) was nearly arrested. Eighteen-sons were massacred before his face, and he was thrown into a dungeon, where he expired upon the fifth day. The Greeks and modern Perians minutely described how Chosroes was insulted and famished, and tortured by the command of an inhuman son, who so far surpassed the example of his father: but at the time of his death, what tongue could relate the story of the parricide? what eye could penetrate into the tower of darkness? The glory of the house of Sassan ended with the life of Chosroes; his unnatural son en * Gibbon's Hist. vol. viii. pp. 245, 246. joyed only eight months' fruit of his crimes; and in the space of four years the regal title was assumed by nine candidates, who disputed, with the sword or dagger, the fragments of an exhausted monarchy. Every province and every city of Persia was the scene of independence, of discord, and of blood, and the state of anarchy continued about eight years longer, till the factions were silenced and united under the common yoke of the ARABIAN CaĻIPHS."* "And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth; and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth," &c. The Roman emperor was not strengthened by the conquests which he achieved; and a way was prepared at the same time, and by the same means, for the multitudes.of Saracens from Arabia, like locusts from the same region, who, propagating in their course the dark and delusive Mahometan creed, speedily overspread both the Persian and Roman empires. More complete illustration of this fact could not be desired than is supplied in the concluding words of the chapter, from which the preceding extracts are taken. 'Yet the deliverer of the east was indigent and feeble. Of the Persian spoils the most valuable portion had been expended in the war, distributed to the soldiers, or buried by an unlucky tempest in the waves of the Euxine.-The loss of two hundred thousand soldiers who had fallen by the sword, was of less fatal importance than the decay of arts, agriculture, and population, in this long and destructive war: and although a victorious army had been formed under the standard of Heraclius, the unnatural effort seems to have exhausted rather than exercised their strength. While the emperor triumphed at Constantinople or Jerusalem, an obscure town on the confines of Syria was pillaged by the Saracens, and they cut in pieces some troops who advanced to its relief: an ordinary and trifling occurrence, had it not been the prelude of a mighty revolution. These robbers were the apostles of * Gibbon's Hist. pp. 255–257. FROM THE Mahomet; THEIR FANATIC VALOUR HAD EMERGED When Christianity was promulgated, Rome was in its prime. A colossal paganism was moved from its base by the lever of truth: and a bloodless triumph was achieved by light against darkness. Taking up the cross, and preaching it also, the apostles of Jesus and the other missionaries of the gospel braved, without a frown, the hatred of all men for his sake: And, in reversal of the fabled battles in which armed gods became earthly warriors and came to the help of men, the very gods of the Romans were vanquished, in defiance of all the power of the Caesars. But that power was greatly broken, and had very recently been weakened anew, at the time when thousands of armed fanatics issued from the desert to extend at once their empire and their faith. On the one hand they entered into the already vanquished and dismembered kingdom of Persia, and, on the other, into the exhausted provinces of the Roman empire. The conquests and the fåll of Chosroes alike opened a way for-sword-propagated Mahometanism into the west and the east. "Each year, during the month of Ramadan, Mahomet withdrew from the world; in the cave of Hera, three miles from Mecca, he consulted the spirit of fraud and enthusiasm, whose abode is not in the heavens, but in the mind of the prophet." In the reign of Phocas, A. D. 609, at the very time when, surrounded "by a blaze of glory and magnificence," like a star, Chosroes was invading the Roman empire, Mahomet, "an obscure citizen," was preaching at Mecca, and "observed with secret joy the prog * Gibbon's Hist. ib. pp. 260, 261. ress of mutual destruction." "The distress of Heraclius" is dated from the year six hundred and ten to the year six hundred and twenty-two, during which time Mahomet was so feebly propagating his faith, that "three years were silently employed in the conversion of fourteen proselytes, the first fruits of his mission;" and "the first expedition of Heraclius against the Persians, (A. D. 622,)" is coeval with the commencement of the Hegira, or Mahometan era. Constantinople was besieged by Chosroes; and a Persian army was defeated by the emperor Heraclius on .Mount Taurus, and a Roman camp was established on the plains of Cappadocia,* in the midst of the territories of Persia, in the same year that Mahomet fled from Mecca. An Arab lance, as Gibbon has remarked, might then have "changed the fate of the world." Had it pierced the impostor, the first three chapters of the Koran, which alone were then written, might never have been heard of beyond the walls of Mecca, and the dark smoke which then began to arise, and which has deluded the minds of millions of millions, would have passed as a vapour, and have been extinguished in a moment. Thus it may be determined in human speculations, as if the fancy of man could change the past, and put back the world from its course. It was otherwise written in the word of God; and we must now read history as it is. "The spirit of fraud and enthusiasm, whose abode is not in the heavens," was let loose on earth. The bottomless pit needed but a key to open it; and that key was the fall of Chosroes. He had contemptuously torn the letter of an obscure citizen of Mecca. But when from his "blaze of glory" he sunk into "the tower of darkness" which no eye could penetrate, the name of Chosroes was suddenly to pass into oblivion be * Gibbon's Hist. vol. viii. p. 239. chap. 46. fore that of Mahomet, and the crescent seemed but to wait its rising till the falling of the star. Chosroes, after his entire discomfiture and loss of empire, was murdered in the year six hundred and twenty-eight;* and the year six hundred and twenty-ninet is marked by "the conquest of Arabia," "and the first war of the Mahometans against the Roman empire."And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit. He fell unto the earth. When the strength of the Roman empire was exhausted, and the great king of the east lay dead in his tower of darkness, the pillage of an obscure town on the borders of Syria was "the prelude of a mighty revolution." "The robbers were the apostles of Mahomet, and their FANATIC valour EMERGED from the desert." A more succinct, yet ample, commentary may be given in the words of another historian. "While Chosroes of Persia was pursuing his dreams of recovering and enlarging the empire of Cyrus, and Heraclius was gallantly defending the empire of the Caesars against him; while IDOLATRY and metaphysics were diffusing their baleful influence through the church of Christ, and the simplicity and purity of the gospel were nearly lost beneath the mythology which occupied the place of that of ancient Greece and Rome, the seeds of a new empire, and of a new religion, were sown in the inaccessible deserts of Arabia." The first woe arose at its time, when transgressors had come to the full, when men had changed the ordinances and broken the everlasting covenant, when idolatry prevailed, or when tutelary saints were honoured-and when the "mutual destruction" of the Roman and Persian empires prepared the way of the fanatic robbers,-or opened the bottom * Gibbon's Hist. vol. viii. pp. 256. c. 46. † Ibid. vol. ix. pp. 309, 312. c. 50. Outlines of History, p. 168. |