The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Edward Gibbon [1799]
[Footnote 79: The authors from whom I have learned the most of the ancient and modern state of Crete, are Belon, (Observations, &c., c. 3 - 20, Paris, 1555,) Tournefort, (Voyage du Levant, tom. i. lettre ii. et iii.,) and Meursius, (Creta, in his works, tom. iii. p. 343 - 544.) Although Crete is styled by Homer, by Dionysius, I cannot conceive that mountainous island to surpass, or even to equal, in fertility the greater part of Spain.]
[Footnote 80: The most authentic and circumstantial intelligence is obtained from the four books of the Continuation of Theophanes, compiled by the pen or the command of Constantine Porphyrogenitus, with the Life of his father Basil, the Macedonian, (Scriptores post Theophanem, p. 1 - 162, a Francisc. Combefis, Paris, 1685.) The loss of Crete and Sicily is related, l. ii. p. 46 - 52. To these we may add the secondary evidence of Joseph Genesius, (l. ii. p. 21, Venet. 1733,) George Cedrenus, (Compend. p. 506 - 508,) and John Scylitzes Curopalata, (apud Baron. Annal. Eccles. A.D. 827, No. 24, &c.) But the modern Greeks are such notorious plagiaries, that I should only quote a plurality of names.]
[Footnote 81: Renaudot (Hist. Patriarch. Alex. p. 251 - 256, 268 - 270) had described the ravages of the Andalusian Arabs in Egypt, but has forgot to connect them with the 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