cities, its vines and olives, its fruit and grain, its noble rivers and
wide-spreading _vegas_--the Spanish Moslem of the day of the Sea-wolves was
an outcast and a beggar, ripe for adventure and burning for revenge on
those by whom he had been expropriated.

Great historians like William Hickling Prescott tell us that, in the course
of the seven centuries of the Moslem domination in Spain, the Moors had
become soft and effeminate, that "the canker of peace" had sapped, if it
had not destroyed, the virile qualities of the race, that luxury and
learning had dried up at their source those primitive virtues of courage
and hardihood which had been the leading 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,