an, were bolder and more
fortunate: he reduced and pillaged the metropolis of Africa; and
the mention of scaling-ladders may justify the suspicion that he
anticipated, by a sudden assault, the more tedious operations of a
regular siege. But the joy of the conquerors was soon disturbed by the
appearance of the Christian succors. The praefect and patrician John, a
general of experience and renown, embarked at Constantinople the forces
of the Eastern empire; they were joined by the ships and soldiers of
Sicily, and a powerful reenforcement of Goths was obtained from the
fears and religion of the Spanish monarch. The weight of the confederate
navy broke the chain that guarded the entrance of the harbor; the Arabs
retired to Cairoan, or Tripoli; the Christians landed; the citizens
hailed the ensign of the cross, and the winter was idly wasted in the
dream of victory or deliverance. But Africa was irrecoverably lost; the
zeal and resentment of the commander of the faithful prepared in
the ensuing spring a more numerous armament by sea and land; and
the patrician in his turn was compelled to evacuate the post and
fortifications of Carthage. A second battle was fought in the
neighborhood of Utica: the Greeks and Goths were again defeated; and
their timely embarkation saved them from the sword of Hassan, who had
invested the slight and insufficient rampart of their camp. Whatever yet
remained of Carthage was delivered to the flames, and the colony of Dido
and Caesar lay desolate above two hundred years, till a part, perhaps a
twentieth, of the old circumference was repeopled by the first of the
Fatimite caliphs. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, the second
capital of the West was represented by a mosch, a college without
students, twenty-five or thirty shops, and the huts of five hundred
peasants, who, in their abject poverty, displayed the arrogance of the
Punic senators. Even that paltry village was swept away by the Spaniards
whom Charles the Fifth had stationed in the fortress of the Goletta. The
ruins of Carthage have perished; and the place might be unknown if
some broken arches of an aqueduct did not guide the footsteps of the
inquisitive traveller.

The Greeks were expelled, but the Arabians were not yet masters of the
country. In the interior provinces the Moors or _Berbers_, so feeble
under the first Caesars, so formidable to the Byzantine princes,
maintained a disorderly resistance to the religion and power o