Wonderful besides the suddenness of the stroke was the inadequacy of the instrument to the effect produced, the blindness of the time before the coming revolution. Neither St. Gregory among the saints one generation only before it came, nor Heraclius returning a conqueror over the Great King within ten years of the Saracenic catastrophe, anticipated that there were southern hordes extreme in ignorance, devoid of art, and without political sense or experience, but lying in the hand of Providence to take possession of lands with ancient culture and a thousand years of civilised history. St. Gregory indeed had witnessed himself such ruin, and followed two centuries of such disasters, which had stripped Italy of her crown of cities, that he thought the world itself was coming to an end. But the establishment of a great southern empire, founded by vagrant tribes till then known only as robbers, never presented itself to his mind. That they would go forth and conquer with a new war-cry, directed especially against the Cross of Christ, was as little in his thoughts. By the year of Omar’s death there was a new empire ruled by a man from an unknown Arabian town, in the name of a man who had died twelve years before, and claimed to be a prophet, the special herald of one God. In the belief thus set up, it was no other than this God who had invested not the prophet only, but the chalifs who came after him with supreme power, not civil only, but religious, and supreme simply because it was religious, and exercised in the name of this new God. And the empire so set up included already the vast dominions of the Great King, and fully one half of the empire which Justinian had left.