he conquest of Crete.]

The loss of Sicily [82] was occasioned by an act of superstitious rigor.
An amorous youth, who had stolen a nun from her cloister, was sentenced
by the emperor to the amputation of his tongue. Euphemius appealed to
the reason and policy of the Saracens of Africa; and soon returned with
the Imperial purple, a fleet of one hundred ships, and an army of seven
hundred horse and ten thousand foot. They landed at Mazara near the
ruins of the ancient Selinus; but after some partial victories, Syracuse
[83] was delivered by the Greeks, the apostate was slain before her
walls, and his African friends were reduced to the necessity of feeding
on the flesh of their own horses. In their turn they were relieved by 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 catapultoe, 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. [84] 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 cali