catches fire as soon as it comes in contact with the air. The naptha was mingled, I know not by what methods or in what proportions, with sulphur and with the pitch that is extracted from evergreen firs.22 From this mixture, which produced a thick smoke and a loud explosion, proceeded a fierce and obstin-ate flame, which not only rose in perpendicular ascent, but likewise burnt with equal vehemence in descent or lateral progress; instead of being extinguished, it was nourished and quickened, by the element of water; and sand, urine, or vinegar were the only remedies that could damp the fury of this powerful agent, which was justly denominated by the Greeks the liquid or the maritime fire. For the annoyance of the enemy it was employed with equal effect, by sea and land, in battles or in sieges. It was either poured from the rampart in large boilers, or launched in red-hot balls of stone and iron, or darted in arrows and javelins, twisted round with flax and tow, which had deeply imbibed the inflammable oil: sometimes it was deposited in fire-ships, the victims and instruments of a more ample revenge, and was most commonly blown through long tubes of copper, which were planted on the prow of a galley, and fancifully shaped into the mouths of savage monsters, that seemed to vomit a stream of liquid and consuming fire. This important art was preserved at Constantinople, as the palladium of the state; the galleys and artillery might occasionally be lent to the allies of Rome; but the composition of the Greek fire was concealed with the most jealous scruple, and the terror of the enemies was increased and prolonged by their ignorance and surprise. In the treatise of the Administration of the Empire the ancients may be found in Strabo (Geograph. 1. xvi. p. 1078 [1315]), and Pliny (Hist. Natur. ii. 108, 109): Huic (Napthae) magna cognatio est ignium, transiliuntque protinus in eam undecunque visam. Of our travellers I am best pleased with Otter (tom. i. p. 153, 158).

Anna Comnena has partly drawn aside the curtain. 'And tŷs neúkns kal ἄλλων τινῶν τοιούτων δένδρων ἀειθαλῶν συνάγεται δάκρυον εὔκαυστον. Τοῦτο μετὰ θείου τριβόμενον ἐμβαλλεται εἰς αὐλίσκους καλάμων καὶ ἐμφυσᾶται παρὰ τοῦ παίζοντος λάβρῳ mni ovvExeî «VEÚμarı (Alexiad. 1. xiii. p. 383 [c. 3]). Elsewhere (1. xi. p. 336 [c. 4]) she mentions the property of burning, Kaтà тò πрavès kal ep' ékáтepa. Leo, in the nineteenth chapter [§ 51, p. 1008, ed. Migne] of his Tactics (Opera Meursii, tom. vi. p. 143, edit. Lami, Florent. 1745), speaks of the new invention of rûp μetà ßpovtîs kal OÙ. These are genuine and Imperial testimonies. [It is certain that one kind of "Greek" or "marine" fire was gunpowder. The receipt is preserved in a treatise of the ninth century, entitled Liber ignium ad comburendos hostes, by Marcus Graecus, preserved only in a Latin translation (edited by F. Höfer in Histoire de is chimie, vol. 1, 1842). But other inflammable compounds, containing pitch, naphtha, &c., must be distinguished. See further, Appendix 5.]

the royal author 23 suggests the answers and excuses that might best elude the indiscreet curiosity and importunate demands of the barbarians. They should be told that the mystery of the Greek fire had been revealed by an angel to the first and greatest of the Constantines, with a sacred injunction that this gift of heaven, this peculiar blessing of the Romans, should never be communicated to any foreign nation; that the prince and subject were alike bound to religious silence under the temporal and spiritual penalties of treason and sacrilege; and that the impious attempt would provoke the sudden and supernatural vengeance of the God of the Christians. By these precautions, the secret was confined, above four hundred years, to the Romans of the East; and, at the end of the eleventh century, the Pisans, to whom every sea and every art were familiar, suffered the effects, without understanding the composition, of the Greek fire. was at length either discovered or stolen by the Mahometans; and, in the holy wars of Syria and Egypt, they retorted an invention, contrived against themselves, on the heads of the Christians. A knight, who despised the swords and lances of the Saracens, relates, with heartfelt sincerity, his own fears, and those of his companions, at the sight and sound of the mischievous engine that discharged a torrent of the Greek fire, the feu Gregeois, as it is styled by the more early of the French writers. It came flying through the air, says Joinville,24 like a winged long-tailed dragon, about the thickness of an hogshead, with the report of thunder and the velocity of lightning; and the darkness of the night was dispelled by this deadly illumination. The use of the Greek or, as it might now be called, of the Saracen fire was continued to the middle of the fourteenth century,25 when the scientific or casual compound of nitre, sul

It

23 Constantin. Porphyrogenit. de Administrat. Imperii, c. xiii. p. 64, 65 [vol. iii. p. 84-5, ed. Bonn].

24 Histoire de St. Louis, p. 39, Paris, 1668; p. 44, Paris, de l'imprimerie Royale, 1761 [xliii., § 203 sqq. in the text of N. de Wailly]. The former of these editions is precious for the observations of Ducange; the latter, for the pure and original text of Joinville. We must have recourse to the text to discover that the feu Gregeois was shot with a pile or javelin, from an engine that acted like a sling.

25 The vanity, or envy, of shaking the established property of Fame has tempted some moderns to carry gunpowder above the fourteenth (see Sir William Temple, Dutens, &c.), and the Greek fire above the seventh, century (see the Saluste du Président des Brosses, tom. ii. p. 381); but their evidence, which precedes the vulgar æra of the invention, is seldom clear or satisfactory, and subsequent writers may be suspected of fraud or credulity. In the earliest sieges some combustibles of oil and sulphur have been used, and the Greek fire has some affinities with gun

phur, and charcoal effected a new revolution in the art of war and the history of mankind.26

of France

Arabs.

&c.

Constantinople and the Greek fire might exclude the Arabs Invasion from the Eastern entrance of Europe; but in the West, on the by the side of the Pyrenees, the provinces of Gaul were threatened A.D. 721, and invaded by the conquerors of Spain. The decline of the French monarchy invited the attack of these insatiate fanatics. The descendants of Clovis had lost the inheritance of his martial and ferocious spirit; and their misfortune or demerit has affixed the epithet of lazy to the last kings of the Merovingian race.28 They ascended the throne without power, and sunk into the grave without a name. A country palace, in the neighbourhood of Compiègne,29 was allotted for their residence or prison; but each year, in the month of March or May, they were conducted in a waggon drawn by oxen to the assembly of the Franks, to give audience to foreign ambassadors, and to ratify the acts of the mayor of the palace. That domestic officer was become the minister of the nation, and the master of the prince. A public employment was converted into the

powder both in nature and effects: for the antiquity of the first, a passage of Procopius (de Bell. Goth. 1. iv. c. 11), for that of the second, some facts in the Arabic history of Spain (A.D. 1249, 1312, 1332, Bibliot. Arab. Hisp. tom. ii. p. 6, 7, 8), are the most difficult to elude.

25 That extraordinary man, Friar Bacon, reveals two of the ingredients, saltpetre and sulphur, and conceals the third in a sentence of mysterious gibberish, as if he dreaded the consequences of his own discovery (Biographia Britannica, vol. i. p. 430, new edition).

For the invasion of France, and the defeat of the Arabs by Charles Martel, see the Historia Arabum (c. 11, 12, 13, 14) of Roderic Ximenes, archbishop of Toledo, who had before him the Christian chronicle of Isidore Pacensis, and the Mahometan history of Novairi. [And Chron. Moissiac. ad ann. 732 (in Pertz, Mon. Germ. Hist. vol. i.).] The Moslems are silent or concise in the account of their losses; but M. Cardonne (tom. i. p. 129, 130, 131) has given a pure and simple account of all that he could collect from Ibn Halikan, Hidjasi, and an anonymous writer. The texts of the chronicles of France, and lives of saints, are inserted in the Collection of Bouquet (tom. iii.) and the Annals of Pagi, who (tom. ui. under the proper years) has restored the chronology, which is anticipated six years in the Annals of Baronius. The Dictionary of Bayle (Abderame and Munza) has more merit for lively reflection than original research.

Eginhart. de Vitâ Caroli Magni, c. ii. p. 13-18, edit. Schmink, Utrecht, 1711. Some modern critics accuse the minister of Charlemagne of exaggerating the weakness of the Merovingians; but the general outline is just, and the French reader will for ever repeat the beautiful lines of Boileau's Lutrin.

Mamaccae on the Oise, between Compiègne and Noyon, which Eginhart calls perparvi reditus villam (see the notes, and the map of ancient France for Dom. Bouquet's Collection). Compendium, or Compiègne, was a palace of more dignity (Hadrian. Valesii Notitia Galliarum, p. 152), and that laughing philosopher, the Abbé Galliani (Dialogues sur le Commerce des Bleds), may truly affirm that it was the residence of the rois très Chrétiens et très chevelus.

patrimony of a private family; the elder Pepin left a king of mature years under the guardianship of his own widow and her child; and these feeble regents were forcibly dispossessed by the most active of his bastards. A government, half savage and half corrupt, was almost dissolved; and the tributary dukes, the provincial counts, and the territorial lords were tempted to despise the weakness of the monarch and to imitate the ambition of the mayor. Among these independent chiefs, one of the boldest and most successful was Eudes, duke of Aquitain, who, in the southern provinces of Gaul, usurped the authority and even the title of king. The Goths, the Gascons, and the Franks assembled under the standard of this Christian hero; he [A.D. 721, repelled the first invasion of the Saracens; and Zama, lieutenant of the caliph, lost his army and his life under the walls of Toulouse.30 The ambition of his successors was stimulated by revenge; they repassed the Pyrenees with the means and the resolution of conquest. The advantageous situation which had recommended Narbonne 31 as the first Roman colony was again chosen by the Moslems: they claimed the province of Septimania, or Languedoc, as a just dependence of the Spanish monarchy: the vineyards of Gascony and the city of Bordeaux were possessed by the sovereign of Damascus and Samarcand; and the south of France, from the mouth of the Garonne to that of the Rhone, assumed the manners and religion of Arabia.

June 9]

Expedition and victories of Abderame.

A.D. 731

But these narrow limits were scorned by the spirit of Abdalrahman, or Abderame, who had been restored by the caliph Hashem 32 to the wishes of the soldiers and people of Spain. That veteran and daring commander adjudged to the obedience of the prophet whatever yet remained of France or of Europe; and prepared to execute the sentence, at the head

30 [The first invasion of Gaul was probably that of Al-Hurr in A.D. 718, but it is not quite clear whether the invasion had any abiding results. It is a question whether the capture of Narbonne was the work of Al-Hurr (as Arabic authors state), or of Al-Sama (as Weil inclines to think: Geschichte der Chalifen, i. p. 610, note). The governor Anbasa crossed the Pyrenees in 725 to avenge the defeat of Toulouse, and captured Carcassonne and reduced Nemausus. Gibbon's "successors" refers to him and Abd ar-Rahman.]

31 Even before that colony, a.u.c. 630 (Velleius Patercul. i. 15), in the time of Polybius (Hist. 1. iii. p. 265, edit. Gronov. [B. 34, c. 6, § 3]), Narbonne was a Celtic town of the first eminence, and one of the most northern places of the known world (d'Anville, Notice de l'Ancienne Gaule, p. 473).

32 [Hisham, A.D. 724, Jan.-743, Feb.]