not taken from them, and public Christian worship was permitted. Heraclius now retreated to Constantinople, admitting sadly that the valuable province of Syria was lost to the empire.
Palestine was next invaded by armies under Amr' and Shorahbil. At Jerusalem the patriarch Sophronius, as the representative of the people, sued for peace. Omar attached 80 much importance to the possession of the sacred city that he travelled to Jabia—the first journey of a caliph out of Arabia—and there met a deputation from the patriarch, with whom he arranged terms of capitulation (a.d. 636). Then he went up to Jerusalem and received Sophronius and the citizens in a kindly manner, imposing a light tribute and permitting the continued possession and use of all the churches and shrines by the Christians. This event is of great importance in view of subsequent history. When we come to the time of the Crusaders and observe the fanatical fury they exhibited while rescuing the holy sites from the hands of the infidel, it will be well to recollect that the city had been transferred to the Mohammedans without any resistance by the action of the Christian patriarch. Thus Sophronius carried out under new circumstances the same policy that Jeremiah had urged in vain upon his infatuated contemporaries when an earlier invasion from the East was coming up with a force that made resistance hopeless. Much happened between the peaceful surrender of the city in the seventh century to the courteous and reasonable Omar and the wrongs and sufferings that provoked the Crusades five hundred years later. The so-called Ordinance of Omar attributes to the great caliph a number of humiliating exactions for which he was not responsible and which represent the accretions of succeeding years of despotism. When the caliphate was established at Damascus and Bagdad, the simple requirement of tribute was not deemed enough to stamp the inferiority of the Christians. They were to become marked men and women by wearing yellow stripes in their dress; they were forbidden to ride on horseback; if riding an ass or a mule it must be with
