re all killed. All his ancient rights
and prerogatives were abolished, and the church was reduced to the
position which it had held in Rome before the days of Constantine.

The eastern church however fared very differently, as we shall see
in the next chapter when the whole Christian world is going to be
threatened with destruction by the rival creed of an Arab camel-driver.

MOHAMMED

AHMED, THE CAMEL-DRIVER, WHO BECAME THE PROPHET OF THE ARABIAN DESERT
AND WHOSE FOLLOWERS ALMOST CONQUERED THE ENTIRE KNOWN WORLD FOR THE
GREATER GLORY OF ALLAH, THE ONLY TRUE GOD

SINCE the days of Carthage and Hannibal we have said nothing of the
Semitic people. You will remember how they filled all the chapters
devoted to the story of the Ancient World. The Babylonians, the
Assyrians, the Phoenicians, the Jews, the Arameans, the Chaldeans, all
of them Semites, had been the rulers of western Asia for thirty or forty
centuries. They had been conquered by the Indo-European Persians who had
come from the east and by the Indo-European Greeks who had come from the
west. A hundred years after the death of Alexander the Great, Carthage,
a colony of Semitic Phoenicians, had fought the Indo-European Romans
for the mastery of the Mediterranean. Carthage had been defeated and
destroyed and for eight hundred years the Romans had been masters of the
world. In the seventh century, however, another Semitic tribe appeared
upon the scene and challenged the power of the west. They were the
Arabs, peaceful shepherds who had roamed through the desert since the
beginning of time without showing any signs of imperial ambitions.

Then they listened to Mohammed, mounted their horses and in less than
a century they had pushed to the heart of Europe and proclaimed the
glories of Allah, "the only God," and Mohammed, "the prophet of the only
God," to the frightened peasants of France.

The story of Ahmed, the son of Abdallah and Aminah (usually known as
Mohammed, or "he who will be praised,"); reads like a chapter in the
"Thousand and One Nights." He was a camel-driver, born in Mecca.
He seems to have been an epileptic and he suffered from spells of
unconsciousness when he dreamed strange dreams and heard the voice of
the angel Gabriel, whose words were afterwards written down in a book
called the Koran. His work as a caravan leader carried him all over
Arabia and he was constantly falling in with Jewish merchants and with
Christian traders, and he c