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 38 THE DECLINE AND FALL but, when they descended with their plunder to the sea-shore, [AbuHifa] their vessels were in flames, and their chief, Abu Caab, confessed himself the author of the mischief. Their clamours accused his madness or treachery. " Of what do you complain?" replied the crafty emir. " I have brought you to a land flowing with milk and honey. Here is your true country ; repose from your toils, and forget the barren place of your nativity." "And our wives and children .^ " " Your beauteous captives will supply the place of your wives, and in their embraces you will soon become the fathers of a new progeny." The first habitation was their camp, with a ditch and rampart, in the bay of Suda ; but an apostate monk led them to a more desirable position in the eastern parts ; [Khmdak] and the name of Candax, their fortress and colony, had been ex- tended to the whole island, under the corrupt and modern ap- pellation of Candia. The hundred cities of the age of Minos were diminished to thirty ; and of these, only one, most probably Cydonia, had courage to retain the substance of freedom and the profession of Christianity. The Saracens of Crete soon re- paired the loss of their navy ; and the timbers of mount Ida were launched into the main. During an hostile period, of one hun- dred and thirty-eight years, the princes of Constantinople attacked these licentious corsairs with fruitless curses and ineffectual arms. and of sicuy, The loss of Sicilv ^^ was occasioned by an act of superstitious A D 827-878 *> i. rigour. An amorous youth, who had stolen a nun from her cloister, was sentenced by the emperor to the amputation of his [AD. 8S6] 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 ravra <TTta (cai ei? x"?"^ etoi<ra ijnuv. This [contemporary] history of the loss of Sicily is no longer e.xtant. Muratori (Annali d'ltalia, torn. yii. p. 7, 19, 21, &c. ) has added some circumstances from the Italian chronicles. [For the Saracens in Sicily the chief modern work is M. Amari's Storia dei Musulmani di Sicilia, in 3 vols. (1854-68). The same scholar published a collection of Arabic texts relating to the history of Sicily ^1857) and an Italian translation thereof (Bibloteca arabo-sicula, 2 vols., 1880, 1889). There had been several previous Saracen descents on Sicily : in a.d. 652 (the island was defended by the Exarch Olympius) ; in A. D. 669 Syracuse was plundered. Both these in- vasions were from Syria. Then in A. D. 704 the descents from Africa began under Miisa with the destruction of an unnamed town on the west coast, which Amari has identified with Lilybasum. The new town of Marsa-Ali (Marsala) took its place. In 705 Syracuse was plundered again ; and the island was repeatedly invaded in the eighth century. A. Holm has summarised these invasions in vol. 3 of his Geschichte Siciliens im Alterthuni (1898), p. 316 si/(/.] "'[Euphemius revolted and declared himself Emperor in a.d. 826. See Amari, Storia d. Mus., i. 239 i^y. He was soon thrust aside by the Saracens. His name survives in the name of the town Calatafimi.]
 * Ai)Aot (says the continuator of Theophanes, 1. ii. p. 51 [p. 32, ed. Bonn]) Si