Page:William Muir, Thomas Hunter Weir - The Caliphate; Its Rise, Decline, and Fall (1915).djvu/172

 638] The accounts vary as to who it was who actually took the town. ʿAmr had attempted to take it immediately after the fall of Jerusalem. Yezīd, as soon as he had succeeded Abu ʿObeida as governor of Syria, came to try his hand at it; but a malady from which he suffered required his departure to Damascus, where he died at the end of the year 18. Then Muʿāwiya, his brother, who succeeded him, made a grand effort and, aided by treason, took the town in the month of Shauwāl of the year 19 (October 640 ). ʿAmr passed to fresh conquests, and Muʿāwiya remained in Syria to lay the foundations of a dynasty and a throne.

The career of Khālid ibn al-Welīd had an unfortunate ending. He came back from the campaign in the north to his seat of government at Ḳinnasrīn greatly enriched with the spoils of war. In hopes of his bounty, many old friends flocked around him. Amongst them was Al-Ashʿath, the Kinda chieftain, to whom he gave the princely largess of one thousand pieces of gold. Again, at Āmid, Khālid had indulged in the luxury of a bath mingled with wine, the odour whereof, as he came forth, still clung about his person. On both charges he was arraigned. About the second, there could be no question; the use of wine even in a bath, was a forbidden thing, and Khālid now forswore the indulgence. The other offence was graver in the Caliph's eyes. Either the gift was booty of the army; or, if Khālid's own to give away, he was guilty of culpable extravagance. Whichever it was, he deserved to be deposed from his command. In such terms a rescript was addressed to Abu ʿObeida, and sent by the hands of a courier charged to see that the command was fully carried out. Khālid was to be accused publicly; his helmet taken off; his hands bound with his head-kerchief; and so arraigned he was to declare the truth.

Abu ʿObeida had an ungracious task, seeing that to the degraded warrior he was beholden for his victories in Syria. But ʿOmar's word was law. And so he summoned Khālid from Ḳinnasrīn, proclaimed an assembly in the Mosque of Ḥimṣ, and, standing in the pulpit, placed Khālid in their midst. Then the courier put the Caliph's question—From whence the money given to Al-Ashʿath came? Khālid, confounded at the unexpected charge, made no reply. Pressed by his friends, still he remained