The new Commander of the Faithful had never approved of the high-handed, daring measures of Khaled, and his first official act was to recall him as head of the army and to substitute the milder Abu Obeidah. It is to the great credit of Khaled that, with an army at his back by which he was adored, he surrendered his office without a word, proclaiming himself to be one equally willing to serve as to command. The clemency of Abu Obeidah too wrought for the good of Islam, for, with the stopping of the river of blood, conquered peoples welcomed the new faith as less oppressive than the old.
World history does not record any such marvelous over-powering of other nations as that accomplished by the followers of Mahomet. Six years after the death of the prophet, Asia Minor was subject and the Euphrato-Tigris valley had fallen under Moslem rule. In 641 A. D. Persia was dominated by the Caliph, and India was completely conquered later.
Westward, the Delta of Egypt was first attacked, then Cairo was taken, and, after a siege of fourteen months, Alexandria fell. What Alexandria was, we can but guess. Certainly the letter of Amru, the commander, to the Caliph, shows it to have been, in the eyes of the frugal Arabs at least, a place of great magnificence. Amru's letter lists as being in the city, four thousand palaces, five thousand baths, four hundred theatres and twelve thousand gardeners to keep the inhabitants supplied with vegetables. Gibbon regards the tale of the destruction of the Alexandrian library as resting on unsafe foundation, but the historian
