g characteristics of those stark
fighters who had borne the banner of the Prophet from Mecca even to Cadiz.
Tom by faction, by strife among themselves, they had succumbed to the arms
of the Northern chivalry; by its warriors they had been driven out, never
to return.

When this was accomplished, when the curtain fell on the final scene of the
tragedy, and the Moors, after the fall of Granada, were driven across the
sea into Africa, there came to pass a most remarkable change in those who
had been expropriated. The learning, the culture, the civilisation, by
which they had been so long distinguished, seemed to drop away from them,
cast away like a worn-out garment for which men have no further use. In
place of all these things there came a complete and desperate valour, a
bitter and headstrong fanaticism.

It was one of the attributes of the Moslem civilisation in Spain, and one
of the most enlightened thereof, that religious toleration flourished in
its midst. Jew and Christian were allowed to worship at the altars of their
fathers, no man hindering or saying them nay; one rule, and one alone, had
to be preserved: none must blaspheme against Mahomet, the Prophet of God,
as he was considered to be by the Moslems. The penalty for infraction of
this rule was death; otherwise, complete liberty of conscience was
accorded.

We have spoken of the two weapons held by the leaders of the Sea-wolves.
The first, as we have, said, was cupidity; the second was fanaticism, the
deadly religious hatred engendered, not only by the wholesale expropriation
of the Moslem population, but also by the persecution to which the
Moriscoes--as those Moslems were known who remained in Spain--were
subjected by their Christian masters. It requires little imagination to see
how these two weapons of avarice and intolerance could be made to serve the
purpose of those dominant spirits who rose to the summit of the piratical
hierarchy. Not only did they dazzle the imaginations of those who followed
in their train by promises of wealth uncounted, but they added to this the
specious argument that, in slaying and robbing the Christian wheresoever he
was to be found, the faithful Moslem was performing the service of God and
the act most grateful to his holy Prophet.

Could any rule of life be at the same time more simple and more attractive
to the beggared Mohammedan cast on the sterile shores of Northern Africa to
starve?

With the main stream of histor