. The outline of history : being a plain history of life and mankind. rose ; it was only whenmankind lost faith in the sincerity of itsrepresentatives that Islam too began todecay. The larger part of its energy spent itselfin conquering and assimilating Persia andTurkestan ; its most vigorous thrusts werenorthwardly from Persia and westwardlythrough Egypt. Had it concentrated itsfirst vigour upon the Byzantine Empire,there can be little doubt that by the eighth of Mecca dominated the new empire. AbuBekr, the first Caliph, was in an informalshouting way elected at Medina, and sowere Omar I and
. The outline of history : being a plain history of life and mankind. rose ; it was only whenmankind lost faith in the sincerity of itsrepresentatives that Islam too began todecay. The larger part of its energy spent itselfin conquering and assimilating Persia andTurkestan ; its most vigorous thrusts werenorthwardly from Persia and westwardlythrough Egypt. Had it concentrated itsfirst vigour upon the Byzantine Empire,there can be little doubt that by the eighth of Mecca dominated the new empire. AbuBekr, the first Caliph, was in an informalshouting way elected at Medina, and sowere Omar I and Othman, the third Caliph,but all three were Meccans of good were not men of Medina. And thoughAbu Bekr and Omar were men of starksimplicity and righteousness Othman wasof a baser quality, a man quite in the veinof those silk robes, to whom conquest wasnot conquest for Allah but for Arabia, andespecially for Mecca in Arabia, and moreparticularly^ for himself and for the Meccansand for liis family, the Oma3yads. He was a ^i^ l\iO$L£M :EMPIR-1£, 730 Moiictn. domxnians vnrushzded Eastern (^Buzaxttizic) Empire century it would have taken Constantinopleand come through into Europe as easily asit reached the Pamirs. The Caliph Moawiya,it is true, besieged the capital for sevenyears (672 to 678), and Suleiman in 717 and718 ; but the pressure was not sustained,and for three or four centuries longer theByzantine Empire remained the crazybulwark of Europe. In the newly Christian-ized or still pagan Avars, Bulgars, Serbs,Slavs, and Saxons, Islam would certainlyhave found as ready converts as it did in theTurks of Central Asia. And though, insteadof insisting upon Constantinople, it firstcame round into Europe by the circuitousroute of Africa and Spain, it was only inFrance, at the end of a vast line of com-munications from Arabia, that it encoun-tered a power sufficiently vigorous to arrestits advance. From the outset the Bedouin aristocrats worthy man, who stood out fo
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