OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE 19 hammed, the son of AH, the son of Abdallah, the son of 7bbas, the uncle of the prophet, gave audience to the deputies of Chorasan, and accepted their free gift of four hundred thousand pieces of gold. After the death of Mohammed, the oath of allesfiance was administered in the name of his son Ibrahim to a numerous band of votaries, who expected only a signal and a leader ; and the governor of Chorasan continued to deplore his fruitless admonitions and the deadly slumber of the caliphs of Damascus, till he himself, with all his adherents, was driven from the city and palace of Meru, by the rebellious arms of Abu Moslem.^^ That maker of kings, the author, as he is named, of the call of the Abbassides, was at length rewarded for his pre- sumption of merit with the usual gratitude of coui'ts. A mean, perhaps a foreign, extraction could not repress the aspiring energy of Abu Moslem. Jealous of his wives, liberal of his wealth, prodigal of his own blood, and of that of others, he could boast with pleasure, and possibly with truth, that he had de- stroyed six hundred thousand of his enemies ; and such was the intrepid gravity of his mind and countenance that he was never seen to smile except on a day of battle. In the visible separa- tion of parties, the green was consecrated to the Fatimites ; the Ommiades were distinguished by the while ; and the black, as the most adverse, was naturally adopted by the Abbassides. Their turbans and garments were stained with that gloomy colour ; two black standards, on pike-staves nine cubits long, were borne aloft in the van of Abu Moslem ; and their allegorical names of the vighl and the shadow obscurely represented the in- dissoluble union and perpetual succession of the line of Hashem. From the Indus to the Euphrates, the East was convulsed by the quarrel of the white and the black factions ; the Abbassides were most frequentljr victorious ; but their public success was clouded by the personal misfortune of their chief. The court of Damascus, awakening from a long slumber, resolved to pre- vent the pilgrimage of Mecca, which Ibrahim had undertaken with a splendid retinue, to recommend himself at once to the favour of the prophet and of the people. A detachment of cavalry intercepted his march and arrested his person ; and the [a.d. 744] unhappy Ibrahim, snatched away from the promise of untasted
- i The steed and the saddle which had carried any of his wives were instantly
killed or burnt, lest they should be afterwards mounted by a male. Twelve hun- dred mules or camels were required for his kitchen furniture ; and the daily con- sumption amounted to three thousand cakes, an hundred sheep, besides oxen, poultry, &c. (Abulpharagius, Hist. Dynast, p. 140).
