mother, and the saints; they armed a fleet of boats and galleys,
displayed their consecrated banners, and boldly steered for the
harbor of Constantinople, to place on the throne a new favorite
of God and the people. They depended on the succor of a miracle:
but their miracles were inefficient against the Greek fire; and,
after the defeat and conflagration of the fleet, the naked
islands were abandoned to the clemency or justice of the
conqueror. The son of Leo, in the first year of his reign, had
undertaken an expedition against the Saracens: during his
absence, the capital, the palace, and the purple, were occupied
by his kinsman Artavasdes, the ambitious champion of the orthodox
faith. The worship of images was triumphantly restored: the
patriarch renounced his dissimulation, or dissembled his
sentiments and the righteous claims of the usurper was
acknowledged, both in the new, and in ancient, Rome. Constantine
flew for refuge to his paternal mountains; but he descended at
the head of the bold and affectionate Isaurians; and his final
victory confounded the arms and predictions of the fanatics. His
long reign was distracted with clamor, sedition, conspiracy, and
mutual hatred, and sanguinary revenge; the persecution of images
was the motive or pretence, of his adversaries; and, if they
missed a temporal diadem, they were rewarded by the Greeks with
the crown of martyrdom. In every act of open and clandestine
treason, the emperor felt the unforgiving enmity of the monks,
the faithful slaves of the superstition to which they owed their
riches and influence. They prayed, they preached, they absolved,
they inflamed, they conspired; the solitude of Palestine poured
forth a torrent of invective; and the pen of St. John Damascenus,
^22 the last of the Greek fathers, devoted the tyrant's head,
both in this world and the next. ^23 ^* I am not at leisure to