In the year 1510 the Spaniard, Count Pedro Navarre, had seized upon Algiers, which town was at this time one of the principal refuges of the Moorish fugitives, who had been driven from Granada, from Cordoba, and from Southern Spain generally by Ferdinand and Isabella eighteen years previously.  To say that the condition of these people was desperate is to speak but the bare truth, for what could exceed the misery of the situation in which they were left after the successful incursion of their Christian foes?  What we are apt to lose sight of in the light of present-day circumstances is the fact that these Spanish Moors were a most highly civilised people, far more so indeed than their Christian contemporaries; that they had been driven with fire and sword from the land in which they and their forefathers had dwelt for over seven centuries, and that they now had been cast out literally to starve on the inhospitable shores of Northern Africa.  So it came about that the common people exchanged the life of the peaceful and prosperous artisan or husbandman for that of the hand-to-mouth pirate, and the case of knight and noble among them was no better—­perhaps rather worse—­than the meanest among those who had been expropriated.

Those who know the region in which these unhappy folk lived are aware of the material monuments which still exist and testify to the glorious past; and, seeing what they have seen, it is no great stretch of the imagination to picture to themselves the comfort, the elegance, and the luxury with which the inhabitants of Granada and Cordoba lived surrounded.  Over there, away across some few leagues of shining blue water, were the ruined homes of which many of the banished people still possessed the keys, awaiting the day when Allah and the Prophet should vouchsafe to them that return which they so naturally and ardently desired.  To this day the key of the great Mosque at Cordoba is preserved at Rabat as a sacred relic of former dignity and power—­a symbol to the Moslem of his perpetual banishment.  If Cordoba with its mosque—­still one of the wonders of the world, with its eleven hundred marble columns—­were the principal shrine and holy of holies to these people, there were in addition hundreds of other temples of their faith now for ever desecrated in their eyes by the misfortune which had placed them in Christian hands.  In Andalusia were the dishonoured graves of their kinsfolk, and, last and worst of all, in this land still dwelt thousands upon thousands of their co-religionists held in a degrading bondage by their implacable enemies.

The capture of Algiers by Count Pedro Navarro was a crowning misfortune for the exiles, and when this commander seized upon the place he extracted from the inhabitants an oath of fidelity to the Spanish crown; he further erected a strong tower to overawe the town, and to keep its turbulent inhabitants in order.  But such an oath as this, extracted at the point of the sword, was writ in water; it meant,