Page:A History of Architecture in All Countries Vol 2.djvu/514

498 498 SARACENIC ARCHITECTURE. Part HI. combined, the success of the movement is without a parallel in history. It far surpassed the careers of the great Eastern conquerors in the importance of its effects, and the growth of the Roman Empire in bril- liance and rapidity. From Alexander to Napoleon, conquests have generally been the result of the genius of some gifted individual, and have left, after a short period, but slight traces of their transient splendor. Even Rome's conquest of the world was a slow and painful effort compared with that of the Arabians ; and though she imj^osed her laws on the conquered nations, and enforced them by her military organization, she had neither the desire nor the power to teach them a new faith ; nor could she bind the various nations together into one great ])eople, who should aid her with heart and hand in the mission she had undertaken. It was, indeed, hardly possible that a poor and simple, but warlike and independent, people like the Arabs, could long exist close to the ruins of so wealthy and so overgrown an eini)ire as that of Constanti- nople, without inaking an attempt to appropriate the spoil which the effeminate hands of its jjossessors were evidently unable to defend. It was equally impossible that so great a iierversion of Christianity as then prevailed in Egypt and Syria could exist in a country which from the earliest ages had been the seat of the most earnest Mono- theism, without provoking some attempt to return to the simpler faith which had never been a holly superseded. So that on the whole the extraordinary success of Mahomedanism at its first outset must be attributed to the utter corruption, religious and political, of the expiring empire of the East, as much as to any inherent greatness in the system itself or the ability of the leaders who achieved the great work. Had it been a mere conquest, it must have crumbled to pieces as soon as completed ; for Arabia Avas too thinly populated to send forth armies to fig-ht continual battles, and maintain so widelv extended an empire. Its permanence was owing to the fact that the converted nations joined the cause vitli almost the enthusiasm of its original promoters; Syria, Persia, and Africa, in turn, sent forth their swarms- to swell the tide of conquest and to spread the religion of Islam to the remotest corners of the globe. To understand either Mahomedan history or art it is essential to bear this constantly in mind, and not to assume that, because the hrst impulse was given frotn Aral)ia, everything afterwards must be traced back to that ])rimitive people ; on the contrary, there was no great depopulation, if any, of the conquered countries, no great trans- plantation of races. Each country retained its old inhabitants, who, under a new form, followed their old habits and clung to their old feelings with all the unchangeableness of the East, and perhaps with even less outward change than is usually supposed. Before the time