“With a fleet of one hundred ships and an army of seven hundred horse, and ten thousand foot, the Arabs landed at Mazara, but after some partial victories, Syracuse was delivered by the Greeks, and the invaders reduced to the necessity of feeding on the flesh of their own horses; in their turn they were relieved by a powerful reinforcement of their brethren of Andalusia: the largest and western part of the island was gradually reduced, and the commodious harbour of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved about fifty years the faith which she had sworn to Christ and to Cæsar. In the last and fatal siege, her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days against the battering-rams and catapultæ, the mines and tortoises of the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners of the imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in building a church to the Virgin Mary. The deacon, Theodosius, with the bishop and clergy, was dragged in chains from the altar to Palermo, cast into a subterranean dungeon, and exposed to the hourly peril of death or apostasy; his pathetic, and not inelegant complaint, may be read as the epitaph of his country. From the Roman conquest to this final calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the primitive isle of Ortygia, had insensibly declined; yet the relics were still precious; the plate of the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil was computed at one million of pieces of gold (about four hundred thousand pounds sterling), and the captives must have out-numbered the seventeen thousand Christians who were transported from the sack of Tauromenium into African servitude. In Sicily, the religion and language of the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons issued from the harbours of Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and fifty towns of Calabria and Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor could the suburbs of Rome be defended by the name of the Cæsars and apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy and glorious accession to the empire of the prophet; but the caliphs of Bagdad had lost their authority in the west; the Aglabites and Fatimites usurped the provinces of Africa; their emirs of Sicily aspired to independence, and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a repetition of predatory inroads.”[9]