-^ The Normans and the Genoese 



basin, and something like friendly intercourse arose between the 

 polished Berber kingdoms of North Africa and the Italians and 

 Catalans. The Crusades were over ; the bitter persecutions 

 of the Moors by the fanatical Flemish kings of Spain had not 

 begun. Constantinople was still a Christian city, and the awful 

 infliction of the OsmanU Turks had not as yet paralysed 

 the Arab world and sharpened its hatred of European 

 civilisation. 



Islam, which had destroyed the Roman Empire in North 

 Africa, Nearer Asia, and Eastern Europe, had nevertheless 

 delivered a counter-stroke for the Caucasian's civilisation in 

 Africa. The deserts which had baulked the Roman, the Greek, 

 and the Persian in their attempts to reach the Sudan were no 

 obstacle to the natives of Arabia. The invasion of Egypt in 

 640 A.D. was soon followed by the conquest of Tripoli and 

 Mauritania. By 711 a.d. the Arabs had not only overrun and 

 Islamised Morocco, but had begun to penetrate southwards the 

 Atlantic coast of the Sahara. By 950 (approximately) their 

 influence had reached the mouth of the Senegal, and they had 

 commenced travelling eastwards up the course of that river, thus 

 reaching the Niger. Simultaneously,^ through Egypt, they had 

 invaded Nubia and Darfur, and thence attained Lake Chad and 

 the Upper Niger ; and before actual Arabs made this journey 

 they sent in front of them a great religious movement of 

 Islamised Nubians, Songhais, and Libyan Tawareq (the Berber- 

 speaking indigenes of the Sahara). 



These same Tawareq," or desert Moors, had also been 



' The movement began in the tenth century, but v\as most marked at the 

 beginning of the eleventh. 



^ Tawareq is the plural of Tarqi, an Arab name given to the Tamasheq or 

 Imoshagh, the Berber tribes of the Sahara. These people are absolutely the 

 same in race and language as the Berber inhabitants that form the bulk of the 

 indigenous population in Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco. 



VOL. I 33 3 



