Saracen Sentence Examples

In neither department did any Saracen, strictly speaking, invent anything; but they learned much both from Constantinople and from Persia, and what they learned they largely developed and improved.

Under Byzantium it remained nominally until the 10th century, when we find the chief magistrate still bearing the title of apXow.3 In the 8th century 4 (720) the period of Saracen invasion began; but the Saracens never secured a firm footing in the island.

In one place the Christians were in utter bondage, in another they were simply tributary; still, everywhere the Mussulman Saracen formed the ruling class, the Christian Greek formed the subject class.

Besides these two main races, Greek and Saracen, others came in through the Norman invasion itself.

The Normans in Sicily, so far as they did not die out, were merged, not in a Sicilian nation, for that did not exist, but in the common mass of settlers of Latin speech and rite, as distinguished from the older inhabitants, Greek and Saracen.

The coming of the Norman ruled that these lands should be neither Saracen nor Greek, nor yet Italian in the same sense as northern Italy, but that they should politically belong to the same group of states as the kingdoms and principalities of feudal Europe.

The Greek had created the column; the Roman had developed it; the Roman Greek'or Greek Roman had taught the column to bear the cupola; the Saracen had taught it to bear arches of his own favourite pointed shape.

But, if the Saracen gave the lines of the building, the Greek gave the mosaic decorations of its walls.

They had simply to make Saracen and Greek work in partnership. In England, on the other hand, the Normans did really bring in a new style of their own, their own form of Romanesque, differing widely indeed from the Saracenic style of Sicily.

There were no Greeks or Saracens in England; there was no Greek or Saracen skill.

The great churches of those cities are wholly unlike those of Sicily; but, while some features show us that we are in Italy, while some features even savour of the Saracen, others distinctly carry us away to Caen and Peterborough.

The author designates the story of the later empire at Constantinople (after Heraclius) as " a uniform tale of weakness and misery," a judgment which is entirely false; and in accordance with this doctrine, he makes the empire, which is his proper subject, merely a string for connecting great movements which affected it, such as the Saracen conquests, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions, the Turkish conquests.

In the 12th century Musatto, a Saracen, established himself in Cagliari, but was driven out with the help of the Pisans and Genoese.

Into these divans where figures of this kind moved to the music of Saracen instruments, there entered an inevitable voluptuousness and corruption of manners.

William, count of Provence, son of Boso II., again delivered southern France from a Saracen invasion by his victory at Fraxinet in 973, and ended his life in a cloister.

Rainouart turns out to be the brother of Guillaume's wife Guibourc, who was before her marriage the Saracen princess and enchantress Orable.

Overwhelmed by the Saracen flood in A.D.

In 871 Paestum was sacked and partly destroyed by Saracen invaders; in the 11th century it was further dismantled by Robert Guiscard, and in the 16th century was finally deserted.

The iconoclast emperor Leo V., an Armenian, persecuted the sect afresh, and provoked a rising at Cynoschora, whence many fled into Saracen territory to Argaeum near Melitene.

His memory is stained by one act of needless cruelty, the massacre of over two thousand Saracen prisoners at Acre; and his fury, when thwarted or humbled, was ungovernable.

In 777 the king was visited at Paderborn by three Saracen chiefs who implored his aid against Abdar-Rahman, the caliph of Cordova, and promised some Spanish cities in return for help. Seizing this opportunity to extend his influence Charles marched into Spain in 778 and took Pampeluna, but meeting with some checks decided to return.

In 799 the Balearic Islands had been handed over to Charles, and a long warfare was carried on both by sea and land between Frank and Saracen until 810, when peace was made between the emperor and El-Hakem, the emir of Cordova.

Charlemagne then made an expedition to Italy (Enfances Ogier in the Venetian Charlemagne, and the first part of the Chevalerie Ogier de Dannemarche by Raimbert of Paris, 12th century) to raise the siege of Rome, which was besieged by the Saracen emir Corsuble.

Aspremont (12th century) describes a fictitious campaign against the Saracen King Agolant in Calabria, and is chiefly devoted to the enfances of Roland.

The traditions of Charlemagne's fights with the Norsemen (Norois, Noreins) are preserved in Aiquin (12th century), which describes the emperor's reconquest of Armorica from the " Saracen " king Aiquin, and a disaster at Cezembre as terrible in its way as those of Roncesvalles and Aliscans.

The first part represents an episode in Spain three years before Roncesvalles, in which Oliver defeats the Saracen giant Fierabras in single combat, and converts him.

It is said to have been a Saracen settlement.

The present name is a corruption of the Saracen Kalat-al-Girchc (the castle of Girche, the chieftain who fortified it).

Though this disaster was retrieved by the successful defence of Edessa by George Maniakes and by the defeat of a Saracen 'fleet in the Adriatic, Romanus never recovered his popularity.

The imitation of the Charlemagne romances is here evident; the Saxons bear names of Saracen origin, and camels and elephants appear on the scene.

On the approach of a Saracen force they retired, but a small plundering detachment was cut off.

It was up its valley that first Greek, then Latin civilization penetrated from the Mediterranean to Lyons, as well as in the 10th century the Saracen bandits from their settlement at La Garde Freinet, near the coast of Provence.

Bonifacio was founded about 828 by the Tuscan marquis whose name it bears, as a defence against the Saracen pirates.

From the necessity of leaguing together against the common Saracen foe, Genoa united with Pisa early in the 11th century in expelling the Moslems from the island of Sardinia, but the Sardinian territory thus acquired soon furnished occasions of jealousy to the conquering allies, and there commenced between the two republics the long naval wars destined to terminate so fatally for Pisa.

In later times Sicily was ruled by Spanish kings, both alone and in union with other kingdoms. The connexion with Africa has consisted simply in the settlement of conquerors from Africa at two periods, first Phoenician, then Saracen.

Thus the Norman occupation ended the struggle between Greek and Saracen.

Gregory and Mahomet were contemporaries, and, though Saracen occupation did not begin in Early Sicily till more than two centuries after Gregory's Y death, Saracen inroads began much sooner.

A few years after it expired Saracen settlement in the island began.

But the first cS aracen Saracen settlers in Sicily were the African neighbours of Sicily, and they were called to the work by a home treason.

Euphemius, a puppet emperor, was led about by his Saracen allies much as earlier puppet emperors had been led about by Alaric and Ataulf, till he was slain in one of the many sieges.

We hear dimly of treasonable dealings with them on the part of the strategos Alexius, son-in-law of the emperor Theophilus; but we see more clearly that Saracen advance was largely hindered by dissensions between the African and the Spanish settlers.

With the Saracen occupation begins a new division of the island, which becomes convenient in tracing the progress of Saracen conquest.

The civil war that followed his death, the endless revolutions of Agrigentum, where the weaker side did not scruple to call in Christian help, hindered any real Saracen occupation of eastern Sicily.

Strange to say, as Syracuse fell in the reign of Basil the Macedonian, the Saracen occupation was completed in the reign of Nikephoros Phokas (Nicephorus Phocas), the deliverer of Crete.

Yet the complete Saracen possession of Sicily may seem a thing of a moment.

In that time Mahommedan Sicily was threatened by a Western emperor; the Arabic writers claim the Saracen army by which Otho II.

He too was helped by Saracen dissensions.

One town was taken by storm; another submitted on terms harsher or Saracen more favourable.

As in the Saracen conquest of Sicily, as in the Byzantine recovt.y, so in the Norman conquest, the immediate occasion was given by a home traitor.

Roger soon began to fix his eye on the Saracen capital.

He retook Catania by the help of a Saracen to whom Roger had trusted the city, and whom he himself punished.

On the other hand, conversions from Islam to Christianity were not always encouraged; Saracen troops were employed from the beginning, and Count Roger seems to have thought them more trustworthy when unconverted.

On the other hand, at Messina there were few or none, and we hear of both Saracen and Greek villeins, the latter doubtless abiding as they were in Saracen times.

The Norman princes protected all the races, creeds and tongues of the island, Greek, Saracen and Jew.

And, if any element, Latin or akin to Latin, had lingered on through Byzantine and Saracen rule, it would of course be attracted to the new Latin element, and would help to strengthen it.

Greek, Saracen, Norman, Lombard and Jew could not be fused into one people; it was the boast of Sicily that each kept his laws and tongue undisturbed.

The elder races, Greek and Saracen, stand outside the relations between the Latin king and his Latin subjects.

Still, as long as Greek and Saracen were protected and favoured, so long was Sicily the most brilliant of European kingdoms. But its greatness had no groundwork of national life; for lack of it the most brilliant of kingdoms presently sank below the level of other lands.

He certainly encouraged Saracen art and literature in every shape.

A Saracen revolt in 1243 is said to have been followed by a removal of the whole remnant to Nocera.

The heretic alone was persecuted; he was the domestic rebel of the church; Saracen and Jew were entitled to the rights of foreigners.

Yet Frederick, patron of Arabic learning, suspected 'even of Moslem belief, failed to check the decline of the Saracen element in Sicily.

Greek and Saracen were both becoming survivals in an island which was but one of the many kingdoms of its king.

In Palermo, once city of threefold speech, a Greek, a Saracen, a Norman who spoke his own tongue must have died with the strangers.

Nevertheless, by July 1134 his terrific energy and the savagery of his Saracen troops forced Ranulf, Sergius, duke of Naples, and the rebels to submit, while Robert was expelled from Capua.

His father Sergius was a Christian, but notwithstanding held a high office under the Saracen caliph, in which he was succeeded by his son.

The name "Saracen" continued to be used in the West in later times, probably rather through the influence of literature than by oral tradition, and was applied to all Arabs, even to all Moslems.

But its greatest importance dates from the time when it became, in 852, a seat of the Saracen power, and in 885, the residence of the Byzantine governor.

The new synthesis reveals a universal decline from the 5th to the 10th centuries, while the Germanic races were learning the rudiments of culture, a decline that was deepened by each succeeding wave of migration, each tribal war of Franks or Saxons, and reached its climax in the disorders of the 9th and 10th centuries when the half-formed civilization of Christendom was forced to face the migration of the Northmen by sea, the raids of the Saracen upon the south and the onslaught of Hungarians and Sla y s upon the east.

But the Saracen army is purely mythical, the true enemy having been the Gascons.

Into this fight Guy's reserve, charged with holding back the Saracens in Acre, was also drawn, and, thus freed, 5000 men sallied out from the town to the northward; uniting with the Saracen right wing, they fell upon the Templars, who suffered severely in their retreat.

The overthrow of their kingdom undoubtedly rendered easier the spread of Saracen conquest along the northern shore of Africa in the following century.

Side by side with his indignation at the idea of cheating his Saracen enemies may be mentioned his answer to those who after Taillebourg complained that he had let off Henry III.

The right column of baggage and supplies, guarded by infantry, was nearest the sea, the various corps of heavy cavalry, one behind the other, formed the central column, and on the exposed left flank was the infantry, well closed up, and "level and firm as a wall," according to the testimony of Saracen authors.

Under the Carthaginian it was the head of the Semitic part of Sicily; when, under the Saracen all Sicily came under Semitic rule, it was the chief seat of that rule.

Another peninsula with one side to the open sea, meeting as it were the main city at right angles, formed in Polybius's time the Neapolis, or new town, in Saracen times Khalesa, a name which still survives in that of Calsa.

Of Saracen works actually belonging to the time of Saracen occupation there are no whole buildings remaining, but many inscriptions and a good many columns, often inscribed with passages from the Koran, which have been used up again in later buildings, specially in the porch of the metropolitan church.

In Saracen times there was a Slavonic quarter on the southern side of the city, and there is still a colony of United Greeks, or more strictly Albanians.

All these buildings are the genuine work of Sicilian art, the art which had grown up in the island through the presence of the two most civilized races of the age, the Greek and the Saracen.

But they lived on, suffering with their orthodox brethren in the Vandal invasions of the 5th century, and like them finally disappearing before the Saracen onslaught two centuries later.

Edinburgh, Saracen and Dawes all make well regarded touring bikes for around £ 470.

The town was a Saracen settlement, but a Lombard colony was introduced by Frederick II.

With the Saracen and the Greek as his subjects, the Norman had really no need to innovate; he had simply to bid the men of the land to go on working for him instead of for any other.

On the other hand, the vassal was not bound to render service, unless he were paid for his service; and it was only famine, or Saracen devastation, which freed the king from the obligation of paying his men.

At Palermo the capitulation secured to the Saracens the full enjoyment of their own laws; Girgenti was long mainly Saracen; in Val di Noto the Saracens kept towns and castles of their own.

Saladin retook it in 1187, and thenceforward, for six centuries and a half, whoever its nominal lords may have been, Saracen, Crusader, Mameluke or (from the 16th century) Turk, the Druse emirs of Lebanon dominated it (see DRUSES).

Frederick enlisted his Saracen troops at Nocera and Luceria, and appointed the terrible Ezzelino da Romano his vicar in.

We speak of the Saracen very much as we speak of the Norman; for of the Mussulman masters of Sicily very many must have been only artificial Arabs, Africans who had adopted the creed, language and manners of Arabia.