Chalif Omar had pressed his captive provinces with heavy tributes. A Christian artisan, who was made to pay four drachmas a day for taxes in Kufa, journeyed to Medina to plead for remission before Omar in person. It was refused. He followed the chalif to the Mosque, and dealt him, as he prayed, a deadly blow. Omar died, having named, when mortally wounded, the six eldest companions of the prophet to choose his successor. Heraclius died at Constantinople in 641. The chalif Omar reigned from the death of Abu Bekr, in August, 634, to November, 644. Before him had died the most cruel of Arabian commanders, Khaled.(66) He who buried alive captive enemies murmured on his sick-bed, “I have been in so many battles, and received so many wounds, that there is scarcely a whole place in my body; and now I must die on a bed as an ass dies on his straw”. Jezdeberg, the last of the Sassanide princes, was hopelessly beaten, and in 651 closed, under Mussulman extinction, the dynasty which since 226 had renewed the battle of Persia for empire with its old rival Rome. The great city of Madain or Ctesiphon was destroyed, and Mohammed, the chalif’s governor in Persia planted Kufa as a military city on the right bank of the Euphrates, three days journey from Bagdad. Omar learnt that his governor Mohammed had built himself a stately palace over against the chief mosque at Kufa. This he had adorned with a magnificent gateway taken from the palace of Chosroes at Ctesiphon. In wrath Omar wrote: “the kings of Persia have gone down from their palaces to hell: the Prophet rose from the dust of the earth to heaven. I have ordered the bearer of these lines to burn down thy palace at once, lest thou miss the way of the Prophet for that of the corrupt Persian.” The palace was burnt. Omar knew how to destroy, and they record of his ten years that thirty-six thousand cities, villages, or castles were taken and wasted, and fourteen thousand Christian churches burnt or changed into mosques. History, I believe, has not recorded how many thousand Christian women were delivered over as a prey to the Arabian savages, to whom he promised paradise as a reward for dying in battle against the unbelievers. This was the Mohammedan martyrdom. Omar sought to impress a holy character upon the savage deeds which the hordes marshalled by him to victory or martyrdom practised without scruple. In setting up the colossal kingdom which he founded during the ten years of his chalifate he covered the earth with heaps of slain in the name of the most merciful God. He is said to have established judges in the chief cities of his empire, who should administer justice according to the written or traditional precepts of Mohammed. He had great care for the security of all the lands subject to him. “If,” he said, “a shepherd on the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris have one of his sheep stolen, I fear that I shall one day have to give an account for it.”(67)