fused them into fresh incandescence, and 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 Kaddâh, 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 Kotama, 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 morâbit, as they called themselves in honor of their founder, from the Arabic ribât, 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 living Mahometan princes, but like all 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 living fire of earlier zeal to the shores 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 Paestum, were Saracen strongholds; the settlement on the
