open courtyard, the ambassador standing bareheaded before the
mounted Sultan under his Imperial parasol. As late as 1790 the brutal
Sultan El Yazeed, who emulated Ismail the Bloodthirsty, did not
hesitate to declare war on all Christendom except England, agreeing to
terms of peace on the basis of tribute. Cooperation between the Powers
was not then thought of, and one by one they struck their bargains as
they are doing again to-day.

Yet even at the most violent period of Moorish misrule it is a
remarkable fact that Europeans were allowed to settle and trade in the
Empire, in all probability as little molested there as they would
have been had they remained at home, by varying religious tests and
changing governments. It is almost impossible to conceive, without
a perusal of the literature of the period, the incongruity of the
position. Foreign slaves would be employed in gangs outside the
dwellings of free fellow-countrymen with whom they were forbidden to
communicate, while every returning pirate captain added to the number
of the captives, sometimes bringing friends and relatives of those
who lived in freedom as the Sultan's "guests," though he considered
himself "at war" with their Governments. So little did the Moors
understand the position of things abroad, that at one time they made
war upon Gibraltar, while expressing the warmest friendship for
England, who then possessed it. This was done by Mulai Abd Allah V.,
in 1756, because, he said, the Governor had helped his rebel uncle at
Arzila, so that the English, his so-called friends, did more harm than
his enemies--the Portuguese and Spaniards. "My father and I believe,"
wrote his son, Sidi Mohammed, to Admiral Pawkers, "that the king your
master has no knowledge of the behaviour towards us of the Governor of
Gibraltar, ... so Gibraltar shall be excluded from the peace to which
I am willing to consent between England and us, and with the aid of
the Almighty God, I will know how to avenge myself as I may on the
English of Gibraltar."

Previously Spain and Portugal had held the principal Moroccan
seaports, the twin towns of Rabat and Salli alone remaining always
Moorish, but these two in their turn set up a sort of independent
republic, nourished from the Berber tribes in the mountains to the
south of them. No Europeans live in Salli yet, for here the old
fanaticism slumbers still. So long as a port remained in foreign hands
it was completely cut off from the surr