In 656, the discontents produced by Osman’s favour of his own family culminated in an insurrection at Medina, in which the dwelling of the chalif, after a siege of several weeks, was at last broken open, and the third Commander of the Faithful, also, like Ali, a son-in-law of Mohammed, was slain by the eldest son of Abu Bekr, the first chalif. A week after his death, the third chalif, Osman, was succeeded by Ali, the fourth, widower of Mohammed’s favourite daughter, Fatima. But the six and a-half years of Ali’s chalifate were occupied with a violent struggle between him and Muawiah, cousin of Osman, and governor of Syria.(75) There had ever been enmity between the family of Haschim, from which Mohammed descended, and the family of Abd Schems, from which Osman and Muawiah descended. In the course of the struggle Egypt fell away from Ali to Muawiah; and, in 660, Medina and Mecca paid him homage. Ali’s power, then, was seated only in Irak and Persia. Civil war pressed so heavily on Islam that three men resolved to rid it in one day of Ali, Muawiah, and Amrou, as the causers of all the trouble. Ali was to be assassinated in the mosque of Kufa; Muawiah in that of Damascus; Amrou in that of Fostat, to terminate a war carried on, not only in the field, but by mutual imprecations from the pulpit. But of the three, Ali alone was mortally wounded, Muawiah escaped with a light wound, and Amrou’s representative was killed instead of him. Ali died, three days after, on the 24th January, 661. He is said to have surpassed not only Muawiah, but Abu Bekr and Omar in abhorrence of all falsehood, in love of justice, in valour and eloquence. In simplicity of life and generosity, Ali resembled his two predecessors: but, like them also, the severity which he practised by no means included moral restraint. He died at sixty-three; after Fatima’s death, and, therefore, in the latter half of his life, he contracted six or eight marriages, besides maintaining nineteen slave women, with whom also, after the custom of that time, he lived. So the second, third, and fourth chalifs—Omar, Osman, and Ali—perished by assassination within seventeen years of each other, in 644, 656, and 661. Let us turn to see what has been doing at Constantinople in these seventeen years. We have already seen how Omar, in his ten years, had built up an empire from the spoils of Byzantium and Persia, which, during the civil wars of his two successors, was yet increased. The seat of its sovereign power was transferred from Medina to Damascus as soon as Muawiah was acknowledged as chalif, in the year 661. But during the four chalifs, from the death of Mohammed in 632 to 660, the immense Mohammedan realm was governed from Medina.