After Syria, Palestine; after Palestine, Egypt and the north African coast-line. The dying Heraclius heard nothing but the bitter news of disaster, and after his death the quarrels of his descendants increased the feebleness of Christian resistance. A spirit of unity might have carried the Moslem banners to the limits of the Eastern Empire, but in 656 the Caliph Othman was murdered, and the civil war that ensued enabled the Christian Emperor, Constans II, to negotiate peace. He had lost Tripoli, Syria, Egypt, and the greater part of Armenia to his foes, who had also succeeded in establishing a naval base in the Mediterranean that threatened the islands of Greece herself. In the north his borders were overrun by Bulgar and Slav tribes, while in Italy the Lombards maintained a perpetual struggle against his viceroy, the Exarch of Ravenna. Constans himself spent six years in Italy, the greater part in campaigns against the Lombards. He even visited Rome, but earned hatred there as elsewhere by his ruthless pillage of the West for the benefit of the East. Thus the Pantheon was stripped of its golden tiles to enrich Constantinople, and the churches of South Italy robbed of their plate to pay for his wars. At last a conspiracy was formed against him, and while enjoying the baths at Syracuse one of his servants struck him on the head with a marble soap-box and fractured his skull. Constans had been a brave and resolute Emperor of considerable military ability. His son, Constantine ‘Pogonatus’, or ‘the bearded’, inherited his gifts and drove back the Mahometans from Constantinople with so great a loss of men and prestige that the Caliph promised to pay a large sum of money as tribute every year in return for peace. Constantine ‘Pogonatus’ died when a comparatively young man and was succeeded by his son, Justinian II, a lad of seventeen, arrogant, cruel, and restless. Without any reason save ambition he picked a quarrel with the Moslem Caliph, marched a large army across his Eastern border, and, when he met with defeat, proceeded in his rage to execute his generals and soldiers, declaring that they had failed him. At home, in Constantinople, his ministers tortured the inhabitants in order to exact money for his treasury and filled the imperial dungeons with senators and men of rank suspected of disloyalty. Such a state of affairs could not last; and the Emperor, who treated his friends as badly as his foes, was captured by one of his own generals, and, after having his nose cruelly slit, was exiled to the Crimea. Mutilation was supposed to be a final bar to the right of wearing the imperial crown; but Justinian II was the type of man to be ignored only when dead. After some years of brooding over his wrongs he fled from the Crimea and took refuge with the King of the Bulgars.