The Arabian conquest of Persia followed that of Syria. The turn of Egypt soon came, the city of Alexandria being taken in 640, seven years after the prophets' death. Since the loss of Greek freedom, and the decay of intellectual life at Athens, that renowned place had become, notably under the Ptolemies, the chief home of science and philosophy. Through the propagandism of Christianity among the Hellenized Jews, of whom, as of Greeks, large numbers had settled there, it was also the birthplace of dogmatic theology, and, therefore, the fountain whence welled the controversies whose logomachies were the gossip of the streets of Constantinople and the cause of bloody persecution. After a few years' pause, the Saracens (Ar., _sharkiin_, orientals) resumed their conquering march. They captured and burnt Carthage, another famous centre of Christianity, and then crossed over to Spain. In "the fair and fertile isle of Andalusia" the Gothic king Roderick was aroused from his luxurious life in Toledo to lead his army in gallant, but vain, attempt to repel the infidel invaders. So rapid was their advance that in six years they had subdued the whole of Spain, the north and northwestern portions excepted, for the hardy Basque mountaineers maintained their independence against the Arabs, as they had maintained it against Celt, Roman, and Goth. Only before the walls of Tours did the invaders meet with a rebuff from Charles Martel and his Franks, which arrested their advance in Western Europe; as, in a more momentous defeat before Constantinople by Leo III. in 718, fourteen years earlier, the torrent of Mohammedan conquest was first checked. Enough, however, of Saracenic wars and their destructive work, which, if tradition lies not, included the burning of the remnants of the vast Alexandrian library. "A revealed dogma is always opposed to the free research that may contradict it," and Islam has ever been a worse foe to science than Christianity. Its association, as a religion, with the renaissance of knowledge, was as wholly accidental as the story of it is interesting.