But Salonika was no longer a virgin fortress. An enemy even more formidable than the Bulgarians had captured it, the Saracens, who from 823 to 961 were masters of Crete. Of this, the first of the three conquests of Salonika, we have a description by a priest who was a native of the city and an eye-witness of its capture, John Kameniates, as well as a sermon by the patriarch Nicholas[432]. The “first city of the Macedonians” was indeed a goodly prize for the Saracen corsairs, whose base was “the great Greek island.” Civic patriotism inspired the Thessalonian priest with a charming picture of his home at the moment of this piratical raid, in 904. He praises the natural outer harbour, formed by the projecting elbow of the Ἔμβολον (the “Black Cape,” or Karaburun, of the Turks)[433]; the security of the inner port, protected by an artificial mole; the great city climbing up the hill behind it; the vineyards and hospitable monasteries, whose inmates (unlike their modern successors) take no thought of politics; the two lakes (now St Basil and Beshik), with their ample supply of fish, which stretch almost across the neck of the Chalkidic peninsula; and to the west the great Macedonian plain (treeless then, as now), but watered by the Axios (the modern Vardar) and lesser streams. In times of peace Salonika was the _débouché_ of the Slavonic hinterland; the mart and stopping-place of the cosmopolitan crowd of merchants who travelled along the great highway from West to East that still intersected it; in short, both land and sea conspired to enrich it. Unfortunately, it was almost undefended on the sea side, for no one had ever contemplated any other danger than that from the Slavs of the country, and the population was untrained for war, but more versed in the learning of the schools and in the beautifully melodious hymns of the splendid Thessalonian ritual.