a
powerful reenforcement of their brethren of Andalusia; the largest and
western part of the island was gradually reduced, and the commodious
harbor of Palermo was chosen for the seat of the naval and military
power of the Saracens. Syracuse preserved about fifty years the faith
which she had sworn to Christ and to Caesar. In the last and fatal siege,
her citizens displayed some remnant of the spirit which had formerly
resisted the powers of Athens and Carthage. They stood above twenty days
against the battering-rams and _catapult_, the mines and tortoises of
the besiegers; and the place might have been relieved, if the mariners
of the Imperial fleet had not been detained at Constantinople in
building a church to the Virgin Mary. The deacon Theodosius, with the
bishop and clergy, was dragged in chains from the altar to Palermo, cast
into a subterraneous dungeon, and exposed to the hourly peril of death
or apostasy. His pathetic, and not inelegant, complaint may be read
as the epitaph of his country. From the Roman conquest to this final
calamity, Syracuse, now dwindled to the primitive Isle of Ortygea, had
insensibly declined. Yet the relics were still precious; the plate of
the cathedral weighed five thousand pounds of silver; the entire spoil
was computed at one million of pieces of gold, (about four hundred
thousand pounds sterling,) and the captives must outnumber the seventeen
thousand Christians, who were transported from the sack of Tauromenium
into African servitude. In Sicily, the religion and language of
the Greeks were eradicated; and such was the docility of the rising
generation, that fifteen thousand boys were circumcised and clothed on
the same day with the son of the Fatimite caliph. The Arabian squadrons
issued from the harbors of Palermo, Biserta, and Tunis; a hundred and
fifty towns of Calabria and Campania were attacked and pillaged; nor
could the suburbs of Rome be defended by the name of the Caesars and
apostles. Had the Mahometans been united, Italy must have fallen an easy
and glorious accession to the empire of the prophet. But the caliphs of
Bagdad had lost their authority in the West; the Aglabites and Fatimites
usurped the provinces of Africa, their emirs of Sicily aspired to
independence; and the design of conquest and dominion was degraded to a
repetition of predatory inroads.

In the sufferings of prostrate Italy, the name of Rome awakens a solemn
and mournful recollection. A fleet of Sar