acens from the African coast
presumed to enter the mouth of the Tyber, and to approach a city which
even yet, in her fallen state, was revered as the metropolis of the
Christian world. The gates and ramparts were guarded by a trembling
people; but the tombs and temples of St. Peter and St. Paul were left
exposed in the suburbs of the Vatican and of the Ostian way. Their
invisible sanctity had protected them against the Goths, the Vandals,
and the Lombards; but the Arabs disdained both the gospel and the
legend; and their rapacious spirit was approved and animated by the
precepts of the Koran. The Christian _idols_ were stripped of their
costly offerings; a silver altar was torn away from the shrine of
St. Peter; and if the bodies or the buildings were left entire, their
deliverance must be imputed to the haste, rather than the scruples, of
the Saracens. In their course along the Appian way, they pillaged Fundi
and besieged Gayeta; but they had turned aside from the walls of Rome,
and by their divisions, the Capitol was saved from the yoke of the
prophet of Mecca. The same danger still impended on the heads of the
Roman people; and their domestic force was unequal to the assault of an
African emir. They claimed the protection of their Latin sovereign;
but the Carlovingian standard was overthrown by a detachment of the
Barbarians: they meditated the restoration of the Greek emperors; but
the attempt was treasonable, and the succor remote and precarious. Their
distress appeared to receive some aggravation from the death of their
spiritual and temporal chief; but the pressing emergency superseded the
forms and intrigues of an election; and the unanimous choice of Pope Leo
the Fourth was the safety of the church and city. This pontiff was born
a Roman; the courage of the first ages of the republic glowed in his
breast; and, amidst the ruins of his country, he stood erect, like one
of the firm and lofty columns that rear their heads above the fragments
of the Roman forum. The first days of his reign were consecrated to the
purification and removal of relics, to prayers and processions, and to
all the solemn offices of religion, which served at least to heal the
imagination, and restore the hopes, of the multitude. The public defence
had been long neglected, not from the presumption of peace, but from the
distress and poverty of the times. As far as the scantiness of his means
and the shortness of his leisure would allow, the an