hand. The Saracens in the camp, hearing the noise in the city,
knew what it meant, and, marching up, Youkinna opened the gates and let
them in. Those that were in the city fled, some one way and some
another, and were pursued by the Saracens and put to the sword. Those
upon the wall cried, "Quarter!" but Yezid told them that since they had
not surrendered, but the city was taken by force, they were all slaves.
"However," said he, "we of our own accord set you free, upon condition
you pay tribute; and if any of you has a mind to change his religion, he
shall fare as well as we do." The greatest part of them turned
Mahometans. When Constantine heard of the loss of Tripoli and Tyre his
heart failed him, and taking shipping with his family and the greater
part of his wealth he departed for Constantinople. All this while Amrou
ben-el-Ass lay before Caesarea. In the morning when the people came to
inquire after Constantine, and could hear no tidings of him nor his
family, they consulted together, and with one consent surrendered the
city to Amrou, paying down for their security two thousand pieces of
silver, and delivering into his hands all that Constantine had been
obliged to leave behind him of his property. Thus was Caesarea lost in
the year of our Lord 638, being the seventeenth year of the Hegira and
the fifth of Omar's reign, which answers to the twenty-ninth year of the
emperor Heraclius. After the taking of Caesarea all the other places in
Syria which as yet held out, namely, Ramlah, Acre, Joppa, Ascalon, Gaza,
Sichem (or Nablos), and Tiberias, surrendered, and in a little time
after the people of Beiro Zidon, Jabalah, and Laodicea followed their
example; so that there remained nothing more for the Saracens to do in
Syria, who, in little more than six years from the time of their first
expedition in Abu-Beker's reign, had succeeded in subduing the whole of
that large, wealthy, and populous country.

Syria did not remain long in the possession of those persons who had the
chief hand in subduing it, for in the eighteenth year of the Hegira the
mortality in Syria, both among men and beasts, was so terrible,
particularly at Emaus and the adjacent territory, that the Arabs called
that year the year of destruction. By that pestilence the Saracens lost
five-and-twenty thousand men, among whom were Abu Obeidah, who was then
fifty-eight years old; Serjabil Ebn Hasanah, formerly Mahomet's
secretary; and Yezid Ebn Abu Sofian, wi