The year 622 is remarkable for the flight of Mahomet from Mecca to Medina, from which time we may date the rise of the empire of the Saracens; a people who, for desolation and destruction, were perhaps never equalled except by the Hunns and Moguls. In 630 the impostor himself died, after having just united the Arabs or Saracens, and fitted them for the work in which they were to be employed. Their first exploit was, to fall upon the empire of Persia, now weakened by its endless wars with the Romans. This was conquered in two years; after which they broke into Palestine, and conquered the provinces bordering upon Syria. In 634 they reduced Syria itself and Egypt. In 636 they took and plundered Jerusalem. In 642 they conquered the African provinces, and reduced some of the islands in the Levant. With unabated fury they proceeded to the east and west; laying siege, in 668, to Constantinople itself, where they received their first check by the shipwreck of their fleet, and the defeat of their army. Thus, in the space of 38 years, the immense tract of country from the eastern part of Persia to the confines of the Mediterranean Sea, with the northern coasts of Africa, the whole including a space scarce inferior to the empire of Alexander the Great, was reduced under subjection to a race of savage barbarians, who knew only how to plunder, destroy, and reduce other nations to slavery. In this manner were the eastern parts of the world prepared for a new infection, supposing the old one to have been entirely gone off. The Saracens pursued their good fortune, ravaged and conquered from India to Spain, and from Spain were proceeding northward through France, to extend their conquests to the other countries of Europe. But here, in 728, their fury was stopped by Charles Martel, the father of Pepin, and grandfather of Charles the Great. After a most obstinate and bloody battle, which lasted seven days, and in which the barbarians lost three hundred and seventy-five thousand men,[40] they were driven beyond the Pyrennean mountains, and never after durst enter France. Thus was one fury stopped, only to give place to another. Charles, as ambitious and as cruel as the Saracens, having in vain attempted the conquest of Spain, reduced Italy and Germany; and, having dreadfully massacred the Saxons, and almost exterminated the Hunns, set up the German Empire, and was crowned emperor of the West in 800.