e to the
deputies 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. [35] 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 [3511] and Almansor, eluded the search of
the tyrant, and lay concealed at Cufa, till the zeal of the people and
the approach of his E