previous hosts of Mussulman invaders, his followers too lost their momentum as the first glow of fanaticism subsided, and their power died away, as it had blazed out, with the rapidity of a shooting star. Islam, however, never brought this liv

fused them into fresh incandescence, and living Mahometan princes, but like all sped them on a fresh career of destruction. Such an impulse was found in the mystic doctrines of the Shiita, or Shia, supporters of the succession of Ali, a sect of Persian origin, organized with rights of initiation like a secret society, by a sort of Eastern Cagliostro known as the Kad-ing fire of earlier zeal to the shores of dah, and headed by a mysterious grand master or hidden pontiff, whose name was never revealed to the vulgar. Its apostle in the West, Abu-Abd-allah, selected the highlands of Barbary as his theatre of operations, and labored there for years with such secrecy and success that he burst upon Africa like a thunderbolt, when issuing from the mountains in 801, at the head of the warlike tribe of Kotâma, an armed and organized nation three hundred thousand strong; he took the field with strange emblems and ensigns never seen before, and overthrew the reigning Aghlabite dynasty to the rallying cry, "To horse, cavaliers of God!"

And such another revival restored to reformed Islam its first conquering fury, when the tenets of a solitary dervish on an island of the Senegal, after smouldering for years in the bosoms of a few sectaries, suddenly blazed into life among the rude shepherds of the Sahara, and borne by them in their migrations in search of food to the slopes of Atlas and the Pillars of Hercules, soon spread from the desert to the Mediterranean, and from the shores of the Atlantic to the Bay of Algiers. The morabit, as they called themselves in honor of their founder, from the Arabic ribát, a recluse (whence marabut) founded in 1062 the present city of Morocco, and crossing the Straits of Gibraltar, as the allies of their co-religionists, made the Spanish form of their name, Almoravids, formidable throughout the peninsula. Having defeated the Christian army under Alphonso of Castile at Talavera, in 1086, they quickly absorbed all Arab sovereignty in the provinces they had come to defend, and establishing a branch of their dynasty in the Balearic Islands, became a terrible scourge to the commerce of the Mediterranean. Before their leader's death he was panegyrized in nineteen hundred cathedral mosques as the most powerful of

Italy, where there was no force to meet it of vitality comparable to its own. There its incessant but desultory attacks resembled rather predatory raids than onsets of invasion, and had no abiding effect on the history of the country, though they probably had in modifying the character of part of its population. In the southern half of the peninsula there was scarcely a place of importance that was not in their hands during some part of the ninth and tenth centuries. The green flag waved over the Ionian sea from the walls of Táranto; on both sides of the blue straits, from the mosques of Messina and Reggio, the muezzin called the faithful to prayer in the name of the prophet; the emir of Sicily exacted tribute from Byzantium as the ransom of Calabria, burning Brindisi and desolating the province if it remained unpaid; the sultan of Bari lay in wait for the commerce of the Adriatic, and ravaged its shores to within sight of the bell tower of St. Mark's; the savage armies entrenched on the Garigliano, and encamped in the amphitheatre of Capua, had the country between them at their mercy, and wasted the Campagna to the very gates of Rome. Nay, Rome itself was not safe from their assaults, and saw the victorious infidels, in 846, defy the capital of Christendom from amid the blazing ruins of the Basilicas of the Apostles, then outside the walls. Salerno, beseiged for a year, from 871 to 872, was only saved, when reduced to the last extremity of hunger, by the united arms of the empire and the papacy. The great monastery of San Vincenzo in Volturno, was pillaged and burned after a stout resistance in 882; the still more famous one of Monte Cassino in the following year; the castle of Cape Misenum, near Naples, and the entrenched camp of Agropoli, in the mountains behind Pæstum, were Saracen strongholds; the settlement on the

Garigliano resembled an African town; | gangs of captive Christians to sell in the and from it plundering parties went out in ports of Africa, than extension of national all directions, while an auxiliary colony, territory or increase of national imporestablished at Narni, held the passes of tance. the Apennines, to rob or put to ransom pilgrims on their way to Rome.

Nor did the swarthy adventurers always come as enemies; the republics of Naples and Gaeta favored and harbored them, while they were constantly called in as auxiliaries on one side or the other by the Longobard princes of south Italy in their incessant petty wars, generally to be betrayed by their allies, and fall a victim to the united arms of both parties on the conclusion of peace. Thus, Athanasius, Bishop of Naples, sent to Sicily in 881 for a strong body of Saracen soldiers, and encamped them on the western slopes of Vesuvius, under a leader named Sichaimo or Soheim. Their contract seems to have included full license of rapine in all the neighboring country, for they carried off to their camp all they could lay hands on, particularly arms, horses, and women. Their memory was long perpetuated in the popular distich,

Only once in the history of Arab conquest did it seem possible that it might permanently extend its dominions beyond the Faro, when for the first and last time an African prince landed in Italy with the definite plan of subduing it to Islam, and bore the standard of the prophet across the Straits of Messina with the declared purpose of fighting his way to Mecca by way of Rome and Constantinople. There was no insuperable obstacle in his path, nor any force below the Alps capable of withstanding the fierce soldiers of the prophet, fired with a fresh inspiration of fanatic zeal, and led to victory by an able and ardent chief. The native population, debased by the crushing tyranny of the Roman empire, and ground into further disorganization by successive shocks of foreign invasion, was without national spirit as without social cohesion; their rulers, the 'Longobard counts and dukes, though perpetually at war amongst themselves, seemed incapable of facing an inQuattro sono i luoghi della Saracina, vading army; the nerveless grasp of the Portici, Cremano, la Torre, e Resina. Empire of the East was fast slipping from When, however, the pope, John the Eighth, its Italian provinces, and Byzantium itself fearing the incursions of such formidable was at that very moment seriously threatneighbors into his own territory, remon- ened by another Mussulman leader, as strated with the bishop, he treacherously Leo, the renegade of Tripoli, had already consented to abandon them to their ene- collected in the ports of Egypt and Syria, mies; and attacked by the combined forces the naval force with which, two years later, of Capua, Salerno, and other cities, they in 904, he took and burned Thessalonica. were driven, after a vigorous defence, into The moral force wielded by the papacy the mountains of Pæstum, where they re- was powerless against an infidel tyrant, mained unmolested. From those days who would ask no investiture from the sucuntil the present the followers of the proph-cessor of St. Peter for the dominions won et have had little cause to admire the superior good faith of Christians.

for him by the sword of Islam; the Western Empire, without naval forces, could ill Fortunately for Italy, the scattered bands contend with a power in command of the of freebooters to whom she was an easy Mediterranean; and to complete the anarprey, were as disunited as her own inbab-chy and prostration which prevailed from itants. Acting under independent leaders, the Alps to the Gulf of Táranto, the Hunand acknowledging no central authority, garians were at that moment descending their utmost aim in capturing a city was to like a smarm of locusts upon Lombardy. have a convenient haven of refuge for their The event which to all outward seeming pirate squadrons, or base of operations for could alone save Christendom, was the one their predatory hordes the highest ob- which actually occurred, the death ject of their ambition rather store of rich miraculous according to Italian tradition, booty to barter in the marts of Sicily, or and which even a less believing generation

may call providential—of the man who was at the moment the incarnation of the power of Islam, and the impending scourge of Europe.

Ibrahim-ibu-Ahmed, the terrible Brachimo Affricano of the Italians, stricken down like Alaric, in the prime of his vigor and the zenith of his power before the walls of the same Calabrian stronghold, left no successor to his schemes of conquest; and the projected empire whose sceptre slipped from his dying grasp at Cosenza, was lost forever to the future of

his race.

quelled by extermination - a standing army of from three to five thousand negro and Serb or Croat slaves-savages of the torrid zone and northern barbarians, eager, like half-tamed bloodhounds, to avenge on humanity at large their enforced subjection to a master's will.

These undertakings drained the treasury, and to replenish it he debased the currency, and imposed additional taxes measures of oppression which led to seditious risings on the part of his people. His sanguinary propensities seem to have hitherto lain dormant, but opposition now What that empire would have been, and roused the slumbering tiger within him; what the fate of Christendom in the hands rebellion was stamped out in blood, and of such a conqueror, we can best imagine Tunis and Kairewân saw wagon-loads of by a glance at his previous career-per- corpses paraded through their streets, and haps the most atrocious recorded in history. trophies of human remains suspended to The world indeed scarcely knew what ex- their gates. His rage for carnage grew cesses human nature was capable of, or at with indulgence, and the chroniclers rewhat monstrous perversion it might arrive, mark that his humor became every year until it saw the corrupt civilization of Ma- more terrible. One of his many crimes hometanism grafted on the innate ferocity the treacherous massacre of the Arabs of of the race of Ham, and the artificial vices Belezma-prepared the way for the overof an Eastern satrap united, in the person throw of his dynasty. The extermination of this prince, to the savage blood-fury of of this tribe, whom he had lured into his a king of Ashantee. The Arab chroni-power by promises of pardon, removed a clers, not easily moved to surprise or hor- barrier from the path of the Kotâma Berror by the deeds they narrate, are driven bers, their hereditary foes; and these in his case to psychological speculations fierce followers of the Shiita -the mounmore in harmony with modern taste, to tain chivalry of Barbary - the terrible account for his sanguinary eccentricities; "cavaliers of Allah" marched unopascribing them to a dark and dreadful mel-posed to the coast and dethroned the house ancholy incident to the atrabilious temper- of Aghlab in the person of Ibrahim's ament. Born in the middle of the ninth grandson, the parricide Ziadet-Allah. century, he was twenty-five years of age, when, on the death of his brother in 875, he treacherously supplanted the boy nephew, whose rights he had sworn to maintain. The throne gained by crime, he nevertheless filled in the beginning with honor and decorum, nor did the first six years of his reign give any indication save in one perfidious massacre, of the horrors that were to follow. They were marked rather by works of public utility; the erection of a great mosque at Tunis, the addition to that of Kairewân of a cupola supported by thirty-two marble columns; the enclosure of Susa within walls of defence, and the establishment of a system of beacons, which, by a varying number of lights repeated from point to point, flashed intelligence along the coast of Africa, from Ceuta to the delta of the Nile. The tyrant, meantime, took measures to strengthen himself against rebellion, erecting outside the walls of his capital a strong citadel, which he called Abu-'l-Feth, Father of Victory, and substituting for the free body-guard-whose mutiny he had

Jews and Christians were compelled by his orders to have the figure of an ape and hog respectively painted on their doors, and to wear on their shoulders a white cloth with the same distinguishing badges of their creeds.

A

Mahometan sectaries fared even worse at the hands of the orthodox tyrant. doctor of the conquered tribe of Nefûsa having boldly declared that his countrymen held the Kharegite doctrines denying the sanctity of Ali, he butchered the three hundred prisoners surviving with his own hands, piously returning thanks for having already extirpated the rest of their stock. Their hearts, which he had scientifically transfixed with his spear, were torn from their bodies and suspended to the gates of Tunis.

His domestic massacres were not less numerous or frequent than those which had religion or public order as their pretext. Chamberlains, courtiers, and guards were put to death for a suspicion or a caprice; his palace was a human slaughterhouse, and no life within its precincts was

for a moment safe from his rage, save that | scrutinize the very sources of life, was of Sida, his mother. His unfailing regard part of the sanguinary frenzy of this human for her was the one trace of natural feel-tiger-indeed all deliberate cruelty, anaing in his breast, but with this exception lyzed as an independent passion, will be nothing in humanity was sacred to him. found to spring from an evil physiological Sex and kindred, age and infancy, were curiosity, lurking in the secret depths of alike to his indiscriminate ferocity, or our nature. Thus, as he himself declared, rather it raged more furiously where the the desire to discover the spirit that had ordinary dictates of nature would have defied him, drove him to tear out and stayed its frenzy, seeming to seek in those anatomize the yet quivering hearts of his nearest to him in blood its more especial victims, pursuing the hated principle of objects, and in women its choicest victims. life to its inmost stronghold, and slaking One of his sons and eight brothers, be- his rabid thirst for human blood at the headed in his presence, paid the penalty fountain-head. Such excesses of ferocity of standing too near the throne, and its seem rather to belong to some African heir, Abdallah-brave, loyal, and blame- Moloch - some dreadful imaginary demon less never felt his neck a moment safe of carnage - than to a being with the atfrom the scimitar of the executioner. No tributes of ordinary humanity; but they daughter born to him was allowed to live; are recorded by too many independent and though Sida contrived to save and authorities, and affirmed by too much rear fourteen of the condemned infants weight of corroborative evidence to be refrom the unnatural decree, she only de-jected as fables or discredited as exaggerferred its execution. With the mistaken ations. They lasted for twenty-seven idea that the sight of his offspring would years of triumphant tyranny, but the comsoften his implacable determination, she plaints of Ibrahim's subjects at last presented them to him when nearly grown reached the ears of his nominal suzerain, up, but though he dissembled his grim the caliph of Bagdad, who sent him a deresolve under an appearance of amiable spatch, requiring his immediate abdication satisfaction, he only waited for her depart-in favor of his son Abdallah. And now ure to order the executioner to bring him, comes the strangest part of this strange without delay, the heads of her protégées. drama, for the haughty tyrant yielded unSuperstition added its contingent to the qualified obedience to the mandate of his long roll of Ibrahim's victims, for the pre- distant superior, although his chagrin on diction of his astrologers that he should its receipt brought on a severe attack of be slain by a little one-fulfilled in a cer- jaundice. The most probable conjecture tain ambiguous sense by his death in the of historians to account for his submission infancy of the century, in the year 902 is that it was due to the critical position of bore for him a more obvious significance, his own dominions, then menaced by the and directed his cruel suspicion to seek rapidly advancing followers of the Shiita, the predestined assassin among the boy-inflamed with zeal for their newly adopted pages of his court. Those who showed particular promise of youthful daring were first made away with, the survivors then despatched, lest they should avenge them, and their places supplied by negro youths who quickly shared the same fate. A rumored plot in the palace, caused on one occasion the massacre of three hundred guards; on another, all the attendants were butchered en masse, lest one, unfortunate enough to have picked up a handkerchief with which the tyrant had wiped his lips after secretly drinking wine, should survive to tell the tale, and convict him of a breach of the Mahometan law. So each fresh murder brought several others in its train, tyranny engendered suspicion, suspicion was acted out in massacre, and the terrible cycle of crime went on repeating and renewing itself in an ever-widening orbit of destruction.

A dark and morbid desire to profane and

creed, and marching from the mountains with the irresistible momentum of its first fanaticism. In any case the fierce African potentate offers the spectacle of a conversion as strange as any narrated in history, whether we ascribe it to policy, hypocrisy, or a genuine, though perverted, impulse of repentance.

Summoning Abdallah from Sicily to as sume the reins of government in his stead, he exercised his last acts of sovereignty in reversing his previous abuses of power. He abolished the taxes, threw open the jails, reformed the laws, and gave large sums in charity from his private coffers. Calling the date of his abdication - 902 of our era, 289 of the gira- the Year of Justice, he whose crimes had procured for him, even among African tyrants, the distinctive appellation of the Impious, clad himself in haircloth, girt his loins with a rope, proclaimed the holy war in the

guise of a humble penitent, and vowed a pilgrimage to Mecca through seas of infidel blood.

to the City of the Golden Shell.* Such was the motley population among which Ibrahim came to recruit volunteers for the holy war, and raise the standard of the prophet to the cry of “ Death to the unbelievers!"

66

His first enterprise was directed to the extirpation of the Christians of Sicily. They still retained possession of the Val Demona, and the country round Messina He moved thence against Taormina, the and Syracuse, in a state of quasi-indepen- central stronghold of Christianity in the dence, though tributary to, and liable to island, held by its choicest champions, incursions from, the Mussulman conquer-reinforced by a Byzantine garrison, and ors; who on their side of the island, were divided by diversity of origin into two hostile camps, the tribes of Arab and Persian lineage settled in and about Palermo, being perpetually at war with the native African colonists of the district of Girgenti. The Palermitans under a Persian leader named Rakamarûweih, had for four years been in arms against the mother country, and Abdallah, when unexpectedly summoned to change places with his father, was engaged in a successful campaign against them, in alliance with their hereditary foes, the Berbers of Girgenti. He had not only taken Palermo after three pitched battles, in which the flower of its population perished, but had defeated the Byzantine army on the mainland, and sacked Reggio, where his clemency to the vanquished had excited his father's indignation. No such gentle treatment had the Christians of Calabria and Syracuse to expect from the fierce penitent, who now came to his island dominions in the full exercise there of the sovereignty abdicated on the continent of Africa.

Palermo, girt with suburbs so extensive as to number two hundred mosques without the walls, and dominated in the centre by the oval citadel known as the Cassaro, was in those days as great a cosmopolitan centre as Constantinople in our own; and its population, in the emphatic words of the monk Theodosius, included representatives of the Saracenic brood, gathered from the four cardinal points of the compass. There Greeks and Lombards chaffered over their wares with Jews and Persians; Arabs and Berbers jostled Tartars and negroes on the crowded quays; beards and hair of every cut and color, every cast of features and tone of complexion contrasted sharply in the liquid shadow of the narrow streets; the flowing robe and majestic turban of the Oriental, the scanty garments of the tropical savage, the rude furs of the northern barbarian, mingled in picturesque confusion under the amber Sicilian sunlight; in short, all varieties of race and costume included in the vast dominions of the Mussulman empire seemed to have sent typical specimens

excited to resistance by the preaching of Sant' Elia, the aged saint and prophet of Castrogiovanni, who, like a Sicilian Savonarola, exhorted the inhabitants to penance and prayer, foretelling the destruction impending over the city, and the approaching triumph of the terrible Brachimo. His sinister predictions were but too quickly and fatally realized. Ibrahim's fury of bravery and fanaticism secured the victory to his followers in a great battle outside the walls, and his infernal genius contrived to surprise his enemies even within the impregnable fortifications where they thought themselves secure. Urging his negro guards up the precipitous rock on a side deemed impracticable, he launched them among the bewildered garrison to the terrible cry of "Akbar Allah," the knell of the hapless Christians. Mercy to the vanquished was no part of the sanctity aimed at by the warrior penitent of Islam, and a terrible scene of indiscriminate carnage followed; the city was burned, and all the inhabitants who failed to make their escape were ruthlessly put to the sword without regard to age, sex, or condition. Amongst the prisoners taken was the aged bishop, Procopius, and his venerable aspect seems to have inspired some pity in the inhuman breast of the victor, who offered not only to spare his grey hairs if he consented to abjure his faith, but to raise him to such a position that he should be second only to himself in Sicily. Procopius only replied with a smile.

66 Why do you smile?" exclaimed the fierce Mussulman; "do you not know who speaks to you?". "The demon, by your lips," was the undaunted answer of the captive, "wherefore I smile at his suggestions." The infuriated tyrant not only ordered his instant execution, but had his heart torn out "that he might seek in it the secret of the proud soul that had defied him;" and, according to the chronicler, he went so far as actually to devour it in his unnatural frenzy. The fellow

Amari. Storia dei Musulmani in Sicilia, vol. ii., p. 32.