Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire vol 5 (1897).djvu/489

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 467 modest title of the station of a caravan, he planted this colony in the fiftieth year of the Hegira. In its present decay, Cai- [ai-Kairawan] roan ^^^ still holds the second rank in the kingdom of Tunis, from which it is distant about fifty miles to the south : ^^'^ its inland situation, twelve miles westward of the sea, has protected the city from the Greek and Sicilian fleets. When the wild beasts and serpents were extirpated, when the forest, or rather wilder- ness, was cleared, the vestiges of a Roman town were discovered in a sandy plain ; the vegetable food of Cairoan is brought from afar ; and the scarcity of springs constrains the inhabitants to collect in cisterns and reservoirs a precarious supply of rain-water. These obstacles were subdued by the industry of Akbah : he traced a circumference of three thousand and six hundred paces, which he encompassed with a brick wall ; in the space of five years, the governor's palace was surrounded with a sufficient number of private habitations ; a spacious mosch was supported by five hundred columns of granite, porphyry, and Numidian marble ; and Cairoan became the seat of learning as well as of empii'e. But these were the glories of a later age ; the new colony was shaken by the successive defeats of Akbah and Zuheir, and the western expeditions were again interrupted by the civil discord of the Arabian monarchy. ^^^ The son of the valiant 181 The foundation of Cairoan is mentioned by Ockley (Hist, of the Saracens, vol. ii. p. i2g. 130) ; and the situation, mosch, &c. of the city are described by Leo Africanus (fol. 75), Marmol (torn. ii. p. 532), and Shaw (p. 115). [Kairawan means main body of an army, and hence the camp where it halted. Cp. Ibn Abd al Hakam in Journ. Asiat., Nov. 1844, p. 360 (or, ap. Slane's Ibn Khaldun, i. p. 305) ; also Ibn Khallikan, i. 35, trans. Slane.] 1*" A portentous, though frequent, mistake has been the confounding, from a slight similitude of name, the Cyrene of the Greeks, and the Cairoan of the Arabs, two cities which are separated by an interval of a thousand miles along the sea- coast. The great Thuanus has not escaped this fault, the less excusable as it is connected with a formal and elaborate description of Africa (Historiar. 1. vii. c. 2, in tom. i. p. 240, edit. Buckley). [The mistake has been reiterated recently in Butcher's Church of Egypt, 1897.] 183 [After the death of Okba, the chief power in North Africa fell into the hands of the Berber chief Kuseila, who obtained possession of Kairawan. Throughout the reign of Heraclius the indigenous tribes of Northern Africa had been growing more and more independent of the Imperial government, which owing to the struggles in the East was unable to attend to Africa. The shock of the Saracen invasion of 647 had the effect of increasing this independence. Against the subse- quent Saracen attacks, the natives joined hands with the Imperial troops, and Kuseila organized a confederation of native tribes. It was against this Berber chief that the military efforts of Zuhair were directed. A battle was fought in the plain of Mamma (in Byzacena) and Kuseila was slain. His death broke up the Berber confederation, and restored the leading position in Africa to the Patrician of Carthage. It also increased the importance of another Berber potentate, the Aurasian queen Kahina ; who joined forces with the Imperial army to oppose the invasion of Hasan. See below.]