of Chorasan, and accepted their free gift of four hundred
thousand pieces of gold. After the death of Mohammed, the oath of
allegiance was administered in the name of his son Ibrahim to a numerous
band of votaries, who expected only a signal and a leader; and the
governor of Chorasan continued to deplore his fruitless admonitions and
the deadly slumber of the caliphs of Damascus, till he himself, with
all his adherents, was driven from the city and palace of Meru, by the
rebellious arms of Abu Moslem. That maker of kings, the author, as he is
named, of the _call_ of the Abbassides, was at length rewarded for his
presumption of merit with the usual gratitude of courts. A mean, perhaps
a foreign, extraction could not repress the aspiring energy of Abu
Moslem. Jealous of his wives, liberal of his wealth, prodigal of his own
blood and of that of others, he could boast with pleasure, and possibly
with truth, that he had destroyed six hundred thousand of his enemies;
and such was the intrepid gravity of his mind and countenance, that
he was never seen to smile except on a day of battle. In the visible
separation of parties, the _green_ was consecrated to the Fatimites; the
Ommiades were distinguished by the _white_; and the _black_, as the
most adverse, was naturally adopted by the Abbassides. Their turbans and
garments were stained with that gloomy color: two black standards, on
pike staves nine cubits long, were borne aloft in the van of Abu Moslem;
and their allegorical names of the night and the shadow obscurely
represented the indissoluble union and perpetual succession of the line
of Hashem. From the Indus to the Euphrates, the East was convulsed by
the quarrel of the white and the black factions: the Abbassides were
most frequently victorious; but their public success was clouded by the
personal misfortune of their chief. The court of Damascus, awakening
from a long slumber, resolved to prevent the pilgrimage of Mecca, which
Ibrahim had undertaken with a splendid retinue, to recommend himself
at once to the favor of the prophet and of the people. A detachment of
cavalry intercepted his march and arrested his person; and the unhappy
Ibrahim, snatched away from the promise of untasted royalty, expired in
iron fetters in the dungeons of Haran. His two younger brothers, Saffah
* and Almansor, eluded the search of the tyrant, and lay concealed
at Cufa, till the zeal of the people and the approach of his Eastern
friends allowe