260 Professor Traill on the Cultivation of 
of our era ;* that it was first introduced into Sicily between 
1060 and 1090, and had become in that island a considerable 
agricultural object in 1166, when a sugar-mill is mentioned 
in a charter of Guglielmo II. of Sicily.t 
It is even said that the sugar-cane was brought from Malta 
to Sicily, and had been previously known in the Morea. 
' There is considerable reason to believe that the cane was 
introduced by Arabian or Moorish conquerors into Spain soon 
after their settlement in the peninsula in the year 714. It 
seems to have been well known in Andalusia as early as 1150, 
but the Spanish historians are totally silent on this subject. 
Certain it is, that the cultivation of sugar was greatly fos- 
tered by the Moors of Spain, and most successfully pursued 
by that active and enterprising race, who long held the foremost 
place in the career of European arts and learning. These 
sugar-plantations extended over a great part of the eastern 
shores of Valencia and Granada; and where the soil or climate 
were less fitted for this species of industry, the rearing of silk- 
worms, the cultivation of the fig, the orange, the lemon, and 
the olive, with wheat and barley of the finest quality, gave 
full employment to Moorish agricultural industry. 
I do not find any certain data in the Spanish historians from 
which to collect the extent of the sugar cultivation in their 
country ; but for some time after the final subjugation of the 
Moors of Spain, large tracts of land in Valencia and Eastern 
Andalusia were still under sugar-cane. The first severe check 
it received was from the extension of sugar cultivation in the 
West Indian islands, and its second from the barbarous and 
most impolitic expulsion of the Moriscoes from Spain in 1609. 
The arts and industry of Valencia, in particular, sustained a 
shock, from which they never recovered ; and the cultivation 
of the sugar-cane was soon extinguished in that kingdom, ex- 
cept a feeble remnant that lingered, even to this century, in 
the duchy of Gandia, a small territory about thirty miles south 
of the city of Valencia. As I did not visit that part of Spain, 
I am unable to state whether it has there survived the French 
* Edrisi. 
+ Father Lafitau, Histoire des Découvertes et Conquétes des Portugais. 
Paris, 1733. 
