The maritime Christian States of the Mediterranean at this epoch were at the height of their power and prosperity, but were faced by the might of the Ottoman Empire, against which they waged perpetual warfare.  Bitter and unceasing was the strife prosecuted by the Cross against the Crescent, and by the Crescent against the Cross; and riding, like eagles on the storm came the corsairs in their swift galleys ready to strike down the luckless argosy of the merchantman wheresoever she was to be met.  But this was not all, as the shore as well as the sea yielded up to them its tribute in the shape of slaves and booty, and Christian mothers trembling in the insecurity of their homes would hush their wailing children with the terror of the names of Barbarossa, of Dragut, or of Ali Basha.

Popes and emperors, kings and princes, found themselves compelled to form leagues against these Sea-wolves who devoured the substance of their subjects, and great expeditions were fitted out to fight with and destroy the corsairs.  Had Christendom been united no doubt the object would have been attained; but, as will be seen at 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.