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.
What that empire would have been, and what the fate of Christendom in the hands of such a conqueror, we can best imagine by a glance at his previous career — perhaps the most atrocious recorded in history. The world indeed scarcely knew what excesses human nature was capable of, or at what monstrous perversion it might arrive, until it saw the corrupt civilization of Mahometanism grafted on the innate ferocity of the race of Ham, and the artificial vices of an Eastern satrap united, in the person of this prince, to the savage blood-fury of a king of Ashantee. The Arab chroniclers, not easily moved to surprise or horror by the deeds they narrate, are driven in his case to psychological speculations more in harmony with modern taste, to account for his sanguinary eccentricities; ascribing them to a dark and dreadful melancholy incident to the atrabilious temperament. Born in the middle of the ninth 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 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 roused the slumbering tiger within him; rebellion was stamped out in blood, and Tunis and Kairewân saw wagon-loads of corpses paraded through their streets, and trophies of human remains suspended to their gates. His rage for carnage grew with indulgence, and the chroniclers remark that his humor became every year more terrible. One of his many crimes — the treacherous massacre of the Arabs of Belezma — prepared the way for the overthrow of his dynasty. The extermination of this tribe, whom he had lured into his power by promises of pardon, removed a barrier from the path of the Kotâma Berbers, their hereditary foes; and these fierce followers of the Shiita — the mountain chivalry of Barbary — the terrible "cavaliers of Allah" — marched unopposed to the coast and dethroned the house of Aghlab in the person of Ibrahim's grandson, the parricide Ziadet-Allah. 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. Mahometan sectaries fared even worse at the hands of the orthodox tyrant. A doctor of the conquered tribe of Nefusa 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
