Thus was Caesarea lost in
the year of our Lord 638, being the seventeenth year of the Hegira and
the fifth of Omar's reign, which answers to the twenty-ninth year of the
emperor Heraclius. After the taking of Caesarea all the other places in
Syria which as yet held out, namely, Ramlah, Acre, Joppa, Ascalon, Gaza,
Sichem (or Nablos), and Tiberias, surrendered, and in a little time
after the people of Beiro Zidon, Jabalah, and Laodicea followed their
example; so that there remained nothing more for the Saracens to do in
Syria, who, in little more than six years from the time of their first
expedition in Abu-Beker's reign, had succeeded in subduing the whole of
that large, wealthy, and populous country.
Syria did not remain long in the possession of those persons who had the
chief hand in subduing it, for in the eighteenth year of the Hegira the
mortality in Syria, both among men and beasts, was so terrible,
particularly at Emaus and the adjacent territory, that the Arabs called
that year the year of destruction. By that pestilence the Saracens lost
five-and-twenty thousand men, among whom were Abu Obeidah, who was then
fifty-eight years old; Serjabil Ebn Hasanah, formerly Mahomet's
secretary; and Yezid Ebn Abu Sofian, with several other officers of
note.
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