As the pillage and sack of Bagdad had commenced four days before the khalif’s death, so it continued forty days afterwards; till the barbarians dropped their swords from fatigue, and fuel was wanting for the flames. If we abstract the usual horrors of insulted humanity, which have been repeated in every sacked city, and only in Bagdad were carried to the highest pitch of enormity, we shall not blame the Mongols so much in their conquest of that city, for the conflagration of the mosques, and the desecration of the mausolea, for the destruction of the immense treasures, and the melting of the gold and silver vessels, nor even for the demolition of the bulwarks of holiness, and the overthrow of the khalif throne, as for the annihilation of the libraries, and the loss of many hundred thousand volumes, which fell a prey to the flames. They consisted of the treasures of Arabic literature, the accumulation of nearly five hundred years; together with the relics of the Persian, which had probably been saved from the destruction of Medain. As the second khalif had commanded his general, in Egypt, to consume the Alexandrian library, so he also caused that of Medain, the residence of Khosroes, to be thrown into the Tigris; and Omar, whom some European historians have in vain endeavoured to exculpate from this high treason against literature, is loaded with the double guilt of the double _auto da fe_ of the Greek and the Persian library, by fire and water. As the Arabs destroyed these libraries, five centuries before, in two years; so did the Mongols, in the same space, annihilate the Arabian libraries of Alamut and Bagdad. To this double conflagration must be added, that of the great libraries of Tripoli, Nishabur, and Cairo, in the same century. Thus the conjunction of the seven planets in the same sign of the zodiac, which indicated, according to some astrologers, a universal deluge, and according to others, a universal conflagration, might be justly understood to signify the inundation of the Mongols, and the burning of the libraries.