AND now we have discussed, I think, all the prophetic details, and seen their truth and their fulfillment; more especially as characterizing the Saracen woe during its term of chief intensity, the above mentioned 150 years. A discussion this somewhat discursive; and which has forced as, like the historian of the Decline and Fall, though all in relevancy to his and our great topic, into inquiries respecting "the genius of the Arabian prophet, the manners of his nation, and spirit of his religion."1 It is to be remembered, however, that this period did not define the whole duration of the Saracen power or woe.2
It was but, I conceive, a marked primary period, within the whole period of the vision; just like another noted (I beg the reader's attention to the parallel) as a primary marked period of the second woe, under the Sixth Trumpet.3 And thus it seems fitting that we glance, ere we quit the subject, at what remained of the history of these apocalyptic locusts, after the ending of their first 150 years, and memorable flight beyond Euphrates: their later history being one of a period during much of which the woe on Christendom might seem to have been almost bound; and bound, as I have already hinted at as foreshown in the prophecy, and shall in my next Chapter have more fully to notice, by that selfsame Euphratean locality.
There then, far East, in Baghdad and the country round it,-after a brief temporary splendor, and temporary revival too into military enterprise and success, (though not the enterprise of aggressive warfare, from 781 to 805, under the reigns of Mohadi and Haroun al Rashid, wherein the Greek Emperors who had provoked it suffered painfully,4 we must think of the once terrible power of the Saracens as declined and declining luxury and licentiousness working their usual sure process of decay with both prince and people, and the fervor of religious fanaticism past away. At length, in the year 841, the reigning Caliph, distrusting the martial spirit of his Arabs, hired a band of 50,000 Turks from beyond the Oxus, to be the support of the Caliphate at Baghdad: and these, acting precisely the same part as the Roman Praetorian guards before them, revolted against, insulted, humiliated, and deposed the Caliphs; and so, in this case too, became a further and powerful accelerating cause of their sovereigns' downfall. Meanwhile among the Moslems both in Africa and in Asia, the example of the Spanish schism had had its imitators. At Fez and Tunis, in Egypt and in Syria, in Chorasan to the North, and Persia to the East, new and independent dynasties were set up in the course of the ninth century: until at length, as the tenth century opened, the Fatimites, descendants of that Ali, Muhammad's first Vizier, of whom we have before spoken, and of his wife Fatima, Muhammad's favorite daughter, asserted their rightful claim, not to independent political sovereignty only, but even to the Caliphate itself: in the prosecution of this claim reduced Africa, Egypt, and Syria; and, from Cairo as their capital, became known as the third Caliphate of Islamism, excommunicating and excommunicated by its rivals, both at Cordova and at Baghdad.
Thus more and more dismembered, the Abbassidean Caliphate at Baghdad more and more languished: until the Persian independent Moslem dynasty of the Bowides, interposing on occasion of the factions there prevalent, advanced in the year 934 to Baghdad; stripped the Caliph of his secular office and supremacy; and reduced him to his spiritual functions as chief Pontiff of Islamism, the mere phantom thenceforward of departed power.
Such was the progressive decline of the eastern Saracens; and in that decline their brethren in the west in a measure participated. Throughout the ninth century the Christians of Spain were ever gaining ground on their Moorish oppressors. In 904 the capital of Asturias was advanced from Oviedo in the Gallician mountains to Leon; and that of Aragon from Jaca, in the Pyrenean vallies, to Pampeluna. The spirit of bravery and enterprise indeed had not yet left the western Arabs. It appeared in the Spanish battlefields. It appeared in the exploits of the marauding bands that issued both from Spain and Africa: of whom some, ere the middle of the ninth century, conquered the islands of Crete and Sicily; attacked, though vainly, Rome itself; nor were expelled from their conquests, till after a tenure of above a century in Crete, and two centuries in Sicily.5 But these were but like the marauding enterprises of the Normans of the eleventh century; indeed not so remarkable. The strength of the lions' teeth, and the venom too of the early religious fanaticism, was greatly wanting.6 The intensity of the woe to Christendom had evidently passed away. The Saracen conquests and incursions in Crete, Sicily, and Italy, were but a memento of what had been.
There remains just one other point to which I would wish to call attention, ere concluding this present Chapter; I mean the fact of two remarkable coincidences between certain notable epochs in the history of the Saracen woe already noticed, and others equally notable in the ecclesiastical and religious history of Eastern Christendom. Its apostasy, its open apostasy from Christ,7 has been mentioned as the predicted cause of the infliction; and further how Muhammad and the early Saracen Moslems, understanding their special commission to be against idolaters, avowed that it was as regarding its people in that character they carried the war into Roman Christendom.
Now throughout the seventh century this charge was made against them by their conquerors and tormentors altogether ineffectually. At length, some twenty years, or less, from the commencement of the eighth century, the celebrated Isaurian family was raised to the imperial throne of Constantinople. And its princes, otherwise doubtless illustrious, became chiefly so on this account, because for sixty years almost uninterruptedly-supported. by not a few really religious, as even Gibbon admits,8 but with opposition bitter and abiding from the great majority within the empire, and the Roman Popes without it,9 they set themselves strenuously to wipe away the reproach of image worship, at least from Eastern Christendom.10
And what followed ? It was in A. D. 717, very soon after the emperor Leo's accession, and first decided attempt at this reform of the church, that the grand armament of the Saracens attacked Constantinople. It attacked it, but was completely defeated and repulsed. Again, in A. D. 754, Constantine Copronymus, the successor of Leo in determination of spirit on this point, as well as in the throne and kingdom, (it is of his public acts simply that I now speak,) convened a grand synod at Constantinople, the seventh general Council, as, he most properly called it, though it was afterwards stigmatized and disowned, for the express purpose of condemning image-worship. It passed that pubic sentence of condemnation on it: and behold the very next year, as, historians record, the Caliphate was divided; the Islamic colossus broken; the scorpion locusts carried away, as; by a strong west wind, to the Euphrates; the intensity of the Saracen woe brought to an end.
Alas! the efforts of these emperors and of the more enlightened of their subjects, always resisted by the majority, proved abortive. In the year 781 Irene succeeded to the imperial throne: and, having murdered her iconoclastic husband, who stood in the way of her object, she gathered in 787 another synod, the famous seventh General Council;11 in the which the decrees of the former Council were reprobated and disavowed, and the worship of images, by a solemn act of the Catholic Church, declared lawful. It was just about this time that the Saracen woe, though already broken, seemed as if it had received a temporary revivification. Guided by Haroun Al Rashid, (as already before intimated,) the Arab forces from Baghdad swept across the lesser Asia, on provocation from the Greek Emperor, not once only, but eight times, bearing down all opposition before them. Was there not a memento of warning from heaven in it?
But the Eastern Church persisted. Under the influence of the empress Theodora the struggle ended finally, in the year 842, in the undisputed ascendancy and establishment of image worship. And what then the consequence? With characteristic forbearance, as we have seen, the Lord continued to this guilty people the interval of mitigation and of respite through the ninth and much of the tenth century. But, would He endure the provocation much longer? How long would be the respite before another woe
I " The genius of the Arabian prophet, the manners of his nation, and the spirit A his religion, involve the causes of the decline and fall of the Eastern empire: and our eyes are curiously intent on one of the most memorable revolutions, which have impressed a new and lasting character on the nations of the globe." ix.218.
2 In proof that the woe had not wholly terminated. yet that its character, in respect of aggressiveness, strength, and bitter religious venom against Christians, was very different from what it had been before, I may refer the Reader to the history of the Abbassidean Caliphs, in the English Modem Univ. Hist. Vol 2.
And hence, in fact, the opinion propounded by some expositors, Mr. Birks the latest) as to two periods, of 150 years each, being indicated as the full duration of he woe, by the twice exprest mention of the period of five months: the first that of tormenting, as in verse 5; the second that of injuring merely, as in verse 10. But since verse 4 ascribes the injuring, to the five months' period, on its first mention, and verse 10 the tormenting scorpion's sting to the period on its second mention, I cannot think we are warranted in thus interpreting. Rather it seems to me to be only emphatic; like the twice exprest mention of the 1000 years n Rev. 20: 3,5, which does not imply two millenniums.
3 Rev.9:15 An hour and day and month and year."
4 That these were not aggressive acts on the part of the Abbassidean Caliphs, but retributive, is expressly stated by Gibbon, x. 52, 54, 55. He says: " In the bloody conflict of the Ommiades and Abbassides, the Greeks had stolen the opportunity of avenging their wrongs, and enlarging their limits. But a severe retribution was exacted by Mohadi, the third Caliph of the new dynasty." An army of 95,000 men, under his son Haroun AI Rashid, after desolating Asia Minor, appeared A. D. 782 to the terror of the empress Irene, opposite Constantinople, who bought favor by the promise of a tribute. "As often as they [the Greeks] declined the payment of tribute, they were taught to feel that a month of depredation was more costly than a year of submission." On Nicephorus' accession, and refusal to pay, it was Haroun's message, " Irene submitted to pay a tribute: restore therefore the fruits of your injustice, or abide the determination of the sword."
So again afterwards, when Nicephorus felt "encouraged to violate the peace." In every case, during these wars of Haroun al Rashid against the Romans, which Gibbon (10. 52) dates as from 781 to 805, the aggression, was on the part of the Greeks. And so too on the only other occasion recorded by Gibbon of the Saracens of Baghdad invading Greek Christendom; viz. in 838, when Amorium was destroyed by the Caliph Motassem. Moreover in every case these were but desolating inroads, not territorial conquests.
From what has been said the unfitness of Mr. Birks' terminating epoch (A.D. 782) of the first 150 years of the Saracen woe will be, I think, apparent. It includes the 20 years before 782, when the Greeks were successfully aggressing on the Saracens, not the Saracens on the Greeks. It makes the war of 781, 782 one of Saracen aggression when it was one of retribution. Once more, it draws the line of division at 782, in the middle of Haroun's wars against the Greeks; which wars Gibbon classes together, as continued from 781 to 805.
5 Crete was seized by Saracens from Spain A.D. 823; regained by the Greek emperor Nicephorus Phocas, A.D. 960 Sicily was attacked by Saracens from Africa A.D. 827 ; subdued 878; conquered again by the Normans, for the Greek empire, A.D. 1060-1090. Rome was attacked by the Saracens from Sicily A.D. 846; repulsed by Pope Leo the 4th, A.D. 849.
6 In proof of the former point we may illustrate from the facts of both the Sicilian and Roman campaigns. To effect the conquest of Sicily, it cost the Saracens above 50 years; viz. from A.D. 827 to 878; notwithstanding the weakness of the Greek occupants of the island to resist them. Again the attack on Rome was but a marauding attack; which even the weak Papal government, aided by some Greek ships from Gaeta, Naples, and Amalphi, was able to repulse.
In proof of the latter point, let it be observed that the marauding band that attacked and conquered Crete, did, in their marauding voyage from Alexandria, pillage alike the settlements of Islam and of Christians, and destroy mosques as well as churches. Says Gibbon, x. 57, "The conquest of Crete is disdained by their own writers." Again in Western Spain, where Christians were held in subjection. we read that from soon after 757 Abduirmhman, the Moorish king, changed the former mode of treating his Christian subjects to one of greater mildness. In the ninth and tenth centuries the Saracens even courted alliances with Christian powers. Hallam, ii. 4.
7 It was against "the men that had not God's mark on their foreheads."
8 ix. 122 ; "They (the monks) were now opposed by the murmurs of many simple or rational Christians; who appealed to the evidence of texts, of facts, and of primitive times, and secretly desired the reformation of the church."
9 They were branded with the reproachful name of iconoclasts: a name of reproach which, by a curious coincidence, was the very selfsame applied by the heathen Sopist Eunapius, in the latter half of the 4th century, to the Christians of that time, as the destroyers of heathen idols.
10 Gibb. ix. 129, 130, describes both the determination of the then reigning Emperor Constantine, and the reluctance of most of his subjects to it.
11 Called also the second Council of Nicaea.
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