Page:Constantinople by Brodribb.djvu/120

 Constantinople was threatened by the Bulgarians, who ravaged and plundered under its very walls, while the Saracens invested the city on the opposite shore of the Bosporus. The Saracens, indeed, had now reached their broadest limits. They held Spain in the west, Cashgar and Scinde in the east. To the Caliph Suleiman it seemed a small thing to order his brother, Moslemah, to complete the conquest of this decayed empire, which consisted of little more than a single city ruled by one pretender after another, each after a year or two making way by murder, mutilation, or deposition, for the next.

Moslemah ordered his officers to sit down before the town of Amorium. Leo was the Byzantine general to whom as governor of the Anatolian Province it fell to raise the siege if possible. He wanted time. He gained that time by one of the most singular and most daring feats on record. He visited the Saracen general who commanded the siege of Amorium with an escort of 500 horse only. He invited him to suspend further operations until the decision of Moslemah on certain points could be ascertained, and he contrived a secret meeting with the bishop of Amorium, in which he exhorted him to continue the defence. Then he proposed that they should take him to Moslemah, with whom he would treat in person. The Saracen, willing to present himself with so valuable a prisoner as the governor of the Anatolian Province, acceded. They reached a narrow defile from which a cross road led to the advanced posts of his own army. Arrived there, this wonderful Greek, as daring as