of innumerable pilgrims, until the year 614, when that city was besieged
and taken by the Persians. Their barbarous fanaticism reduced to ruins
or burnt to the ground nearly all the sacred buildings, and made a
great slaughter of the Christians, in which they are said to have been
actively assisted by the resident Jews.[6] The bishop and the relic
in question were removed into Persia, and continued in that country
fourteen years, until the victories of the Emperor Heraclius led to
an honourable peace, in which the restoration of this most precious
treasure was expressly stipulated. During its captivity it had happily
escaped the pollution of infidel hands; the case which contained it was
brought back, unopened, to Jerusalem, and Heraclius himself undertook a
journey in order to replace it in its former station on Mount Calvary.
The prelude to this religious ceremony was a general massacre of the
Jews, which the emperor had long withstood, but at length granted to the
earnest and renewed entreaties of the monks of Alsik. The fact itself,
and all its details, are so disgraceful to the parties concerned, that
I would gladly reject it as false or overcharged, did it not rest on
the authority of a patriarch of Alexandria.[7] Heraclius then, attended
by a solemn procession, but laying aside his diadem and purple, bore
the Cross on his own shoulders towards the holy sepulchre. An officer
was appointed to its peculiar care, with the title of STAUROPHULAX;[8]
and the anniversary of this event, the 14th September, is still
celebrated in the Greek Church as a festival, under the name of the
Exaltation of the Cross.

The relic did not long continue in the place to which the valour
and piety of Heraclius had restored it, but was doomed to undergo
still further vicissitudes of fortune. Only eight years afterwards
(A.D. 636,) an army of Arabs, the new and fervent proselytes of Mahomet,
invaded Palestine. At the battle of Yermuck, the imperial forces were