the end of this chapter, an
"Alliance of Christian Princes against the Turks"--which generic term
included the corsairs--was not always used in the manner best calculated to
injure those common enemies.

When in 1492 Granada was yielded up to "Los Reyes Catolicos," Ferdinand of
Aragon, and Isabella of Castile, by that luckless monarch known as Boabdil
el Chico (or "the little"), the last remnant of the power of the Moors in
Spain had gone never to return. On that small hill on the way to the coast
still known as "el ultimo suspiro del Moro" (the last sigh of the Moor),
Boabdil, as he looked for the last time on his lost capital of Granada, is
said to have burst into tears. His fierce mother Ayesha had, however, no
sympathy for her fallen son: "Thou doest well to weep like a woman for that
which thou daredst not defend as a man," was her biting--and totally
unjust--comment, and the cavalcade pursued its miserable journey to the
coast, from whence it embarked for the kingdom of Fez.

Great was the jubilation in Christendom; for more than seven centuries the
followers of the Prophet had dwelt in the land from which Tarik had
expelled Roderick the Goth in the eighth century. There they had dwelt and
held up a lamp of learning and comparative civilisation which shone
brightly through the miasmatic mists of cruelty and bloodshed in the Middle
Ages, and none can question that, under Moorish rule in Spain in those
centuries, the arts of peace had flourished, and that science, agriculture,
art, and learning had found generous and discriminating patronage in the
courts of Cordoba and Granada.

And now all was over the iron chivalry of the North had broken in pieces
the Paynim hosts. They were expelled for ever from Christian soil, or else
were forced to live in a state of degrading servitude, sore oppressed by an
alien rule, in the land which their forbears had won and kept by the sword.

There was jubilation, as has been said, in Christendom, but the knights and
nobles who flocked from all parts of Europe to join the standard of the
Catholic monarchs had no prevision of the consequences, no idea of the
legacy that they were leaving to their descendants.

It is of this legacy that we have to speak, and there has been none more
terrible, none fraught with more awful suffering for the human race. The
broken hosts of the Moslem chivalry became the corsairs of the
Mediterranean: ruthless pirates freed from all restraint of human