prostrate, and his destiny was doubtful. Eleven years after, viz. in
633, the prophet was dead and gone; but his first successor was already
in Syria as a conqueror. Such had been the velocity of events. The
Persian war had then been finished by three years, but the exhaustion of
the empire had perhaps, at that moment, reached its maximum. We are
satisfied, that ten years' repose from this extreme state of collapse
would have shown us another result. Even as it was, and caught at this
enormous disadvantage, Heraclius taught the robbers to tremble, and
would have exterminated them, if not baffled by two irremediable
calamities, neither of them due to any act or neglect of his own. The
first lay in the treason of his lieutenants. The governors of Damascus,
of Aleppo, of Emesa, of Bostra, of Kinnisrin, all proved traitors. The
root of this evil lay, probably, in the disorders following the Persian
invasion, which had made it the perilous interest of the emperor to
appoint great officers from amongst those who had a local influence.
Such persons it might have been ruinous too suddenly to set aside, as,
in the event, it proved ruinous to employ them. A dilemma of this kind,
offering but a choice of evils, belonged to the nature of any Persian
war; and that particular war was bequeathed to Heraclius by the
mismanagement of his predecessors. But the second calamity was even more
fatal; it lay in the composition of the Syrian population, and its
original want of vital cohesion. For no purpose could this population be
united: they formed a rope of sand. There was the distraction of
religion, (Jacobites, Nestorians, &c.;) there was the distraction of
races--slaves and masters, conquered and conquerors, modern intruders
mixed, but not blended with, aboriginal mountaineers. Property became
the one principle of choice between the two governments. Where was
protection to be had for _that_? Barbarous as were the Arabs, they saw
their present advantage. Often it would happen from the position of the
armies, that they could, whilst the emperor could not, guarantee the
instant security of land or of personal treasures; the Arabs could also
promise, sometimes, a total immunity from taxes, very often a diminished
scale of taxation, always a remission of arrears; none of which demands
could be listened to by the emperor, partly on account of the public
necessities, partly from jealousy of establishing operative precedents.
For religion, again