Kitabı oku: «Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III», sayfa 8

By the year of Omar's death there was a new empire ruled by a man from an unknown Arabian town, in the name of a man who had died twelve years before, and claimed to be a prophet, the special herald of one God. In the belief thus set up, it was no other than this God who had invested not the prophet only, but the chalifs who came after him with supreme power, not civil only, but religious, and supreme simply because it was religious, and exercised in the name of this new God. And the empire so set up included already the vast dominions of the Great King, and fully one half of the empire which Justinian had left.

But greater yet was the difference which separated this empire from all that had preceded it. Omar ruled with absolute power as chalif of Mohammed, whose right to power of any kind, civil or religious, lay only in his office of prophet. The Roman emperor ruled because he was lord of a subject-confederacy of nations, which the Roman arm and the Roman mind had, bit by bit, subdued and wrought together, and which, when so constituted, had been deposited entire by secular warranty in his single hand. But Mohammed ruled, and after him the chalifs, because he was “the Apostle of God,” by a divine commission, whole and entire, from which civil and religious authority equally emanated, but in which the religious was the root of the civil. Such was the power which the companions of Mohammed in the first election of Abu Bekr, launched upon the world, and which, as second chalif, Omar received. And in the spirit of this, he ruled the huge empire of conquest, which stretched from the African Tripolis to the end of Persia, and from the southernmost point of Egypt to the Cilician Taurus, engulphing Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. No portion of this power did Omar wield without assuming to represent the person who made himself, or was made by others, his followers, the last and highest of the prophets; who was willing indeed to acknowledge Jesus, the Son of Mary, in the number of prophets, but only on the condition that the prophetical list was closed in himself, that it pointed to himself, and was crowned in himself. The Mohammedan war-cry, to die for which was to be a martyr, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,” was at once the denial of the Christian Trinity, and of Christ's Redeemership. All those who bore it, fought for it, died for it, proclaimed an absolute hostility to the Christian faith, and a definite substitution of another faith for it, and another person on whom that faith rested. This was the empire personified in Omar; and this, in the ten years from 634 to 644, seized upon the southern half of what had been the inheritance bequeathed by Constantine to his successors. The new realm was ruled by Omar with singleness of purpose and unbending resolution to make the Mohammedan standard victorious over the cross, to dethrone Christ for Mohammed.

Was the blow to the empire equally a blow to the Church? The severance of provinces so vast, so populous, so rich in natural productions, from Heraclius, was in itself depriving the lord of the world of legs and arms; but more dangerous than any material privation was the setting up an empire with a definite creed, in which religious conquest was by far the most powerful ingredient. The war-cry, “There is no God but God, and Mohammed is his prophet,” meant the earth and all that is in it, its fruits, and above all, its women, belong entirely to the followers of Mohammed. They who do not either become his, or pay tribute to him, have no rights. Their children become slaves, their wives and daughters captive. These begin to be the absolute possession of the Mohammedan conqueror; if he dies in battle, rewards of martyrdom, so won, for his successors: if he lives, adornments of his life, which he pleases God by accepting.

As to the treatment of Christian countries, Omar, in the capture of Jerusalem, had supplied a rule and standard which for the present was followed at least in profession. Christians were not treated as idolaters: they were taken into covenant. We are told that the tribute was so moderate that the first Egyptians and Syrians who accepted it, thought that they had made a favourable transfer of themselves from Byzantine to Mohammedan lordship. The Byzantine had perpetually interfered with their religious convictions, and domineered over their ecclesiastical appointments. Mohammedans, in the disdain of superior power resting on their exclusive possession of truth, kept entirely aloof. Once their own lordship established and acknowledged, they allowed their subjects a certain freedom of action within the lines of Omar's covenant. It is probable that they began by so doing, nor is it easy to account for the rapid and continued submission of provinces, such as Syria and Egypt, without the willingness of their inhabitants to accept the change be taken into account. But it is certain that the Christian religion drooped more and more under the shadow of Mohammedan domination.

Antioch fell under it in 637. From that time forth, the so-called patriarch began often to live at Byzantium. The patriarchate, which, down to the heresies of the third and fourth centuries, had probably, in Christian population, in learning, in the distinction which its bishops enjoyed each in their own city, been the most flourishing portion of the Church, began to decline. The deposition of St. Eustathius, in 330, cost its capital a schism of nearly a hundred years. The partisanship of its patriarch with its countryman, Nestorius, prejudiced both its rank and its unity. What proportion of its once eleven provinces and 161 bishops belonged to it at the time of the Mohammedan invasion might be difficult to ascertain. But how great and wide its circuit was is shown by the instance of Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, which, though an undistinguished see, contained in it no less than eight hundred parishes, and was under Hierapolis, as seat of the Metropolitan.

After 638, the Antiochene patriarch never more lifted his diminished head as the holder of one of the three great Petrine Sees, whom St. Innocent I. and St. Gregory I. had acknowledged with themselves as representatives of St. Peter.

In all this, we behold the consummation of a fearful history, and I will take the words of one who witnessed the northern wandering of the nations to illustrate, rather perhaps, to account for, the much more terrible wandering of the nations in the south. It was more than two hundred and forty years before this new kingdom arose that St. Jerome, from his solitude at Bethlehem, addressed a friend. It was in the year immediately succeeding the death of the great Theodosius. His rapid view of the generation which had just passed will inspire many thoughts. He is consoling the bishop, Heliodorus, for the loss of his nephew, the priest, Nepotian, a dear friend of his own: “and why,” he says, “am I trying to heal a wound which time and thought, as I believe, have already soothed? Why do I not rather bring before you the miseries of royalty so near to us? Our time has such calamities that it were well not so much to mourn one on whom this light has ceased to shine as to congratulate the escape from such misfortunes. Constantius, the patron of the Arian heresy, in the midst of preparing for the enemy's onset, and rushing to the fight, dies in the village of Mopsis, and, in great sorrow, left his empire a prey to his foe. Julian, betrayer of his own life, and slaughterer of an army that was Christian, acknowledged in Media the power of that Christ whom he had first denied in Gaul. Striving to extend the Roman frontiers, he lost what they had already gained. Jovian had but a taste of imperial power, and died suffocated by charcoal fumes: an instance to all men of what human dominion is. Valentinian laid waste his own native land, and, leaving it unavenged, broke a blood-vessel and died. His brother, Valens, in the war with the Goths, was defeated in Thrace, and found a tomb on the spot of his death. Gratian, betrayed by his own army, and not received by the cities which he approached, suffered the mockery of enemies: and thy walls, O Lyons, bear the impression of the blood-stained hand. The young Valentinian, scarcely beyond boyhood, after flight, after banishment, after recovering the empire with great blood-shedding, was slain near the city, guilty of his brother's death: and his lifeless body suffered the ignominy of the halter. Then there was Procopius, and Maximus, and Eugenius, who, when they were in power, struck their opponents with terror. All stood captives before their conquerors: and suffered that utmost misery of those once powerful: to be reduced to slavery, and then slaughtered.

“Some one may say, this is the lot of kings, and lightnings strike high summits. Pass to private ranks, and only within the last two years. Let us take but the different ends of three lately Consuls. Abundantius is in poverty and exile at Pityuns. The head of Ruffinus was carried on a pike to Constantinople; his right hand was cut off, and, to mark his insatiable greed, taken begging from door to door. Timavius, hurled suddenly from the loftiest ranks, thinks it an escape to live nameless at Assa. It is not the calamities of the miserable which I relate, but the frailty of man's condition. It strikes with horror to follow out the ruins of our times. It is more than twenty years since Roman blood is shed daily between Constantinople and the Julian Alps. In Scythia, Thrace, Macedonia, Dardania, Dacia, Thessaly, Achaia, Epirus, Dalmatia, and all the Pannonias, Goth and Sarmatian, Quade, Alan, and Hun, Vandals and Marcomans, waste, drag away, and plunder. How many matrons, how many consecrated virgins, how many free and noble persons, have fallen a prey to these brutes! Bishops captured; priests and the various ranks of clergy slain; churches ruined; horses stabled at Christ's altars; relics of martyrs dug up. Mourning and death in every shape on all sides. The Roman world falls in pieces, but our stiff neck is not bent. What spirit, think you, have Corinthians, Athenians, Lacedæmonians, Arcadians, and all Greece, in the gripe of barbarians? I have named few cities which were not formerly strong powers. The East seemed free from these scourges: bad tidings only terrified it. When lo! last year, from the farthest heights of Caucasus, wolves, not of Arabia, but of the North, were let loose upon us. They overran at once great provinces. How many monasteries were captured! How many rivers changed into human blood! Antioch was besieged, and the cities which the Halys, Cydnus, Orontes, Euphrates traverse. Crowds of captives carried away. Arabia, Phœnicia, Palestine, Egypt, trembling with fright. Had I a hundred tongues and mouths, and a voice of iron, I could not enumerate all the tortures suffered. I did not propose to write a history; but in few words to lament our miseries; otherwise, adequately to set forth these things. Thucydides and Sallust would both be mute.” The whole period of two hundred and forty years, between the time when St. Jerome, as a spectator, wrote thus, and the time of the Mohammedan inroad, is expressed in the words which follow. “It is long since we felt that we are offending God, but we do not appease Him. It is by our own sins that the barbarians prevail. It is by our own vices that the Roman army is conquered. And, as if this was not enough for our losses, our civil wars have consumed almost more than the edge of the enemy's sword. Unhappy we who are so displeasing to God that His wrath breaks forth on us through the fury of savages. The greatness of the reality surpasses language: all words are less than the truth.”

For, indeed, the time was come, through the extraordinary wickedness of two hundred years, when the very sanctuaries from which St. Jerome was writing, the sanctuaries of the birth and death of Christ, Bethlehem and Calvary, were to fall, not by a sudden inroad, but a permanent occupation into the hands of His chief enemies. The time was also come when the see of the great confessor whose name we identify with the battle of faith against the world, the see of Athanasius himself, the Pope of the East, the next in hierarchical order to the Universal Pope, was to fall, and to fall for ever, from its high estate. “Almost from the death of Athanasius began the spiritual declension of his see and Church.” – “Pride is not made for man; not for an individual bishop, however great, nor for an episcopal dynasty. Sins against the law of love are punished by the loss of faith. The line of Athanasius was fierce and tyrannical, and it fell into the Monophysite heresy. There it remains to this day. A prerogative of infallibility in doctrine, which it had not, could alone have saved the see of Alexandria from the operation of this law.”

During the ten years of Omar's chalifate the great patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch, and the smaller patriarchate of Jerusalem, which contained the places of pilgrimage dear to every Christian heart, visited by the faithful from all lands, not only the birth-place in Bethlehem, not only Nazareth consecrated by the angel's announcing of that birth, and by the secret life of the divine Boyhood and Manhood, but —

The sepulchre in stubborn Jewry

Of the world's ransom, Blessed Mary's Son.

fell together into bondage under the special enemy of the Cross. In this bondage the hierarchies of the three patriarchates, as distinct wholes, almost disappear from history. It is well to consider here the condition in which they had been even from the time of the Arian heresy. The declension of Antioch had been of as long standing as the declension of Alexandria. At the end of the fourth century St. Chrysostom bore witness to its hundred thousand Christians. But in the course of the fifth the great third see of the Church lost much of its reputation and power. Partly it fell into weak hands, as John I., from 428 to 441, who held but a poor position in the Nestorian conflict, while Domnus II. took part in the robber council of 447. Then, at Chalcedon, the elevation of Jerusalem to a patriarchate took from its jurisdiction the three Palestines. But especially the encroachments of the see of Byzantium told upon it. The bishops of the royal city claimed to consecrate the already-named patriarchs. Anatolius ordained Maximus, who was substituted for Domnus II. when deposed in spite of his subservience to Dioscorus. In this he disregarded the rights of the bishops of the Antiochene patriarchate, and the Byzantine bishops forthwith turned that precedent into a right. Maximus was followed by Basilius, Acacius, and Martyrius. The Monophysite Peter Fullo formed such a party against the last that he resigned in despair. This usurper resisted the Emperor Zeno's condemnation to banishment, and put himself, first secretly, then openly, as patriarch against Julian. He so persecuted the Catholics, that Julian died of sorrow. The Emperor Zeno banished the heretical Peter Fullo to Pityuns. He was succeeded by the equally heretical John II., Kodonatus. But this patriarch was deposed in three months by the exertion of the bishops. The Monophysites already prevailed. They murdered in the sacred place itself the new Catholic patriarch, Stephen II., and threw his mangled body into the Orontes. The emperor punished the crime, and Acacius, Bishop of Constantinople, put in his place Stephen III. Pope Simplicius censured this violation of the canons, and prohibited it for the future, which did not prevent Acacius renewing his encroachments when, after the death of Stephen in 482, he consecrated Colendion. Colendion was afterwards banished by the Emperor Zeno, and had to yield to the old heresiarch, Peter Fullo, who kept his patriarchate to his death in 488, and was succeeded by the equally heretical Palladius. Almost all Syria rose against the Catholic patriarch Flavian; the monk Severus got hold of the patriarchate, and kept it for six years. He fled in 519, under the Emperor Justin I., to Egypt. His successors, Paul II., who resigned in 521 through fear of an accusation, and Euphrasius of Jerusalem, could no longer secure superiority to the Catholics. Patriarch Ephrem followed from 526 to 545. He held a Synod against Origenism. Patriarch Domnus III. took part in the Fifth Council in 553. He was followed by the distinguished Anastasius I., and after St. Gregory I. by Anastasius II. The See remained a long time vacant. Those who then followed, Athanasius, Macedonius, and Macarius, were Monothelites. The two latter from the time the Saracens took Antioch, in 637, resided in Constantinople for safety. After George, who is said to have subscribed the Trullan Council in 692, the See was vacant forty years, and the patriarchs had often to endure extortions, ill-treatment, and banishment.

How well Alexandria had prepared itself for the Mohammedan captivity may be seen by the following facts. Under the violent Dioscorus the see of St. Mark not only declined from its distinction when ruled by St. Cyril, but threw the whole of Egypt into wild confusion by espousing the Monophysite error. The Catholic patriarch, Proterius, was murdered in 457: and the heretical Timotheus Ailouros set up by his party instead. He, though condemned by the emperor, Leo I., to banishment, maintained himself stubbornly against the Catholic patriarch, Solophakialos. After his death, Peter Mongus was able to expel the Catholic, John Talaia: and then, from 490 to 538, Alexandria had a succession of five Monophysite patriarchs. Under Justinian, from 538, during forty years, we find four Catholic patriarchs. So, again, in Eulogius, the friend of St. Gregory, and John the alms-giver. But during this time the Monophysites also had their patriarchal succession, and that even from different sects of the heresy. The end of it was that the bitterest enmity arose between the Melchite or Royalist, and the Monophysite party. The former, being a small minority, held by favour of the Byzantine emperor and his troops in Egypt the possession of authority. The Copts, being a great majority, considered themselves oppressed, and welcomed as deliverers, in 638, the conquering Arabs. The Melchite party sunk so low that their patriarchal place was vacant during eighty years, and the number of their bishops greatly sank. After 750, the Christian inhabitants of Egypt were more and more exposed to Mohammedan brutality. Sharp laws against them were issued: distinguishing marks and clothes prescribed.

And here not only is the fall of the three patriarchates under conquerors who strive to destroy the Christian faith to be noted as following upon two centuries of incessant heresy, but another divine judgment also. No sooner have the three patriarchs lost their original position, the two elder as second and third bishops of the whole Church in virtue of their descent from Peter, and taken definitively a position subordinate to the upstart at Byzantium, who in the last decade of the fifth century, in the time of Pope Gelasius, was proclaimed in his Council at Rome no patriarch at all, than they fall under a domination which is not merely infidel but antichristian. The aim of the chalifate is to supplant Christ by Mohammed. The patriarchs, who accepted as superior one who rose above them simply because he was bishop of the imperial residence, had from that time forward to live under a despot who reigned in the name of the false prophet. From being subjects of the Greek Basileus, who, by means of the bishop exalted by him in successive generations, strove to hamper in the exercise of his office the successor of St. Peter, even to the point of making him subject to the guidance of the Byzantine crown in spiritual matters, which was the meaning of the Ecthesis of Heraclius, they passed to be subjects of the Mohammedan chalif, who claimed the supremacy of both powers in the name of the falsehood just invented.

In the diminished territory of Byzantium, which during the rest of the century after Heraclius could but just keep the Mohammedan conqueror outside its walls, the bishop of the royal residence became in fact the sole patriarch. Sergius and Pyrrhus, Paul and Peter, the first four of those so exalted, were branded as heretics by the Sixth Council. Those who still bore the names of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem appeared at times, or were deemed to appear, at a Byzantine Council, but the hundred bishops of the Alexandrine, and the hundred and sixty bishops of the Antiochene waned and wasted more and more with every generation miserably spent under the absolute rule of the Prophet's chalif, who had for Christians only two modes of treatment, the one a noxious patronage of their heresy, if such prevailed; the other, persecution of their faith, if they were faithful and zealous.

From the accession of St. Athanasius to the See of Alexandria in 328 to the placing Cyrus in that See by Heraclius in 628, exactly three centuries elapse. In this time the great revolution begun by Constantine, when he took for his counsellor the court-bishop Eusebius, has full space to work itself out. His own son, Constantius, “patron of the Arian heresy,” in St. Jerome's words, inaugurates in full force the attempt of the Byzantine monarchs to extend their temporal power over the spiritual. Valens so persecutes the eastern Church that when Theodosius is called in to save the empire, he finds the eastern episcopate in the state of ruin described by St. Basil. Unfortunately, he saw no better means of restoring it, when, in 381, he invited the bishops of his empire to anxious deliberation, than by laying the first stone of the Byzantine bishop's exaltation. An eastern Council, at his prompting, strives to make that bishop the second bishop of the whole Church on a false foundation, because Constantinople is Nova Roma. Every Byzantine monarch adds his stone to the Byzantine bishop's pillar of pride. St. Leo exposes and censures the assumption. Pope Gelasius does not reckon him among the patriarchs. Justinian enacts him to be ecumenical patriarch, which St. Gregory pronounces to be a title of diabolical pride: being, in fact, the building of spiritual power on temporal lordship. In thirty years after St. Gregory, the act of pride denounced by him receives its full interpretation. The patriarch Sergius attempts to mould the doctrine of the Church under the authority of Constantine's successor: and Constantine's empire is cut in half by the chalif of the man who claims all temporal power on the pretence that he has been invested by God with spiritual power. And two conflicting heresies, the Nestorian and Eutychean, the latter making its last development in the Monothelite, have severed the eastern empire into rivalities so bitter, that the Christians of the several parties hate each other more than they hate the new Mohammedan pretender. The episcopate, seen in all its glory and grandeur when first assembled by Constantine in 325, sinks ingloriously under the successors, in Alexandria and Antioch, of the very prelates who maintained the faith at Nicæa: sinks before Mohammed, who is seen to complete the work of Arius. The successor of St. Peter has done his utmost during two hundred years to preserve the eastern sees of Peter: and in them the whole ecclesiastical constitution formed for herself by the Church in the ten generations preceding Constantine: but Alexandria and Antioch have no prerogative of infallibility: they perish by their own folly: heresy pollutes their sees for generations, and at last the false prophet's chalif alternately blights them with the favour which he shows to their heresy, or wastes them with the oppression which he has always ready for the faith. As to the great eastern patriarchate, from its capture by the Saracens in 638, its host of bishops, at the head of Hellenic cities descending from Alexander's empire, becomes, sooner or later, the prey of the Moslem. From the capture of Alexandria, Egypt becomes Monophysite under what the Copts fancy to be protection from the chalif, with the ultimate result that the country of the desert Fathers becomes the heart of the religion denying Christ: and, with Omar's entry into Jerusalem, upon his rough camel, with his wooden platter and his bag of barley, begin the 1260 years of the Holy City's treading down by the Gentiles.

Thus the southern wandering of the nations came upon the northern. When it came, three hundred years of such times as St. Jerome saw and described had already spread over the earth, sufferings too great for words, changes, as he says, such as neither Thucydides nor Sallust could express. But the southern wandering was much more rapid in time, and in effect far more complete. The ten years of Omar's chalifate had changed the whole aspect of the world, had shifted the centre of political power. It had been at Constantinople: it was shifted to Medina. From Constantine to Heraclius the empire had taken and enrolled in its armies unnumbered men of Teuton race. Alaric had been a Roman general: Stilicho and Aetius, saviours of Rome. This race had also fed the Church with converts of more stalwart nature than the enfeebled races who needed the infusion of northern blood even to till their fields, as well as to guard their frontiers, or to guide their polity. But the southern wandering gave no soldiers to the empire, and no converts to the Church. There would be no greater contrast than the two races from which these two great movements came. The northern barbarian, with all his wildness, could take the impress of the Church. He had in his woods and marshes, in his transmigrations and encampments, kept, in no small degree, the original tradition of the human race. Already Tacitus had noted his regard for woman as the companion of his life, for the sanctity of marriage, for monogamy, in the practical guarding of which he put to shame the degenerate Roman, and still more corrupted Greek. The heroic courage, natural to him, was an omen of the point which, as Christian martyr, he might reach. The self-government shown in the original habits of the tribe was a soil whereon princes and bishops might sit in council to form governments in which “liberty and empire,” unknown to Byzantine, might dwell together. These qualities were elements of the social, the political, even the ecclesiastical life. Far otherwise was the Saracen type. Savage, rude and ignorant, with no tincture of art or learning: with habits of unlimited polygamy: with leanings to unmitigated despotism: with no regard to human life. In courage only was the southern a match for the northern barbarian. The outcome of his whole character as to the rest was different: and the religion invented for him was but the barest development of his natural temperament.

At the death of Chalif Omar, this new antichristian power had taken from the empire of Heraclius every yard of land formerly under its dominion from Tarsus to Tripoli: and stood in most threatening attitude over against all which remained to it: indeed, to the whole Christian name. Mohammed was its watchword against Christ. The northern wandering had no such counter watchword. It respected Roman laws and customs when it seized on Roman lands. It had understanding enough, not only as shown in its princes, Ataulph and Theodorich, but in a race of officers surpassing not only Roman courage, but Roman fidelity in the civil and military administration, to venerate as unapproachable by any wisdom of its own, the political fabric of which, in so many lands, it confiscated the resources.

But Omar's treatment of Greek learning in the library of Alexandria was the expression of his whole mind towards Christian civilisation. And Omar's powerful hand had not only maimed Byzantium, but absorbed Persia. All this had been done since Heraclius carried back the Cross in triumph to Jerusalem. The Persian had kept it in its shrine during its captivity with the seals untouched. The Saracen scorned all which it represented. The contest of those whom Heraclius would leave in his place was to be with the Saracens, Omar, Osman, and Ali.

After the Chalif Omar was mortally wounded in the mosque at Medina, he at first named Abd Errahman for his successor, who declined the chalifate. Whereupon Omar named six of Mohammed's companions, together with the same Abd Errahman to choose a new chalif. They were engaged during three days in heated contest, since each of the six wished to become the chalif, and were at last induced with great difficulty by Abd Errahman to accept one of their number named by him. Thus Osman, at the age of seventy, was chosen as successor of Omar. His chalifate lasted from November, 644, to June, 656: during the whole of which, eleven years and a-half, the Saracen realm was disturbed by internal struggles. Yet external wars continued. Governors, appointed by Osman, were decried, but they did many successful deeds of arms. In North Africa, the boundaries of the realm were extended on from Tripolis as far as Kairawan. In Persia, a governor, afterwards removed, gained a province. The whole of Persia, which had been overrun rather than subdued under Omar, was finally conquered under Osman. An attempt of the Greeks to recover Alexandria and Egypt succeeded for a moment, but was frustrated by the aid given to the Moslim by the Monophysite Copts. Parts of Armenia and Asia Minor were taken, and the island of Cyprus. The Moslim carried their conquering arms to the Oxus, and slew, in his retreat from a lost battle, the last heir of the kings of Persia.

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. 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.