390 CONQUKST OF AFRICA AND SPAIN. 



carried by the treachery of the count himself, who 

 abandoned his rig-htful sovereign and made a tender 

 of his person and his sword to the Arabian leader. 



A desultory war of forty years had thus sufficed 

 to drive the Greeks from their African possessions. 

 The natives were solemnly invited to renounce the 

 faith of the Cross, and accept that of Mohammed. 

 For a time they preferred to purchase freedom of 

 coiiscience and religious worship by the payment of 

 an annual tax. By degrees their reluctance was 

 overcome ; their minds were tempted by the invisible 

 as well as the temporal blessings of the Arabian 

 prophet. They had but to repeat a sentence and 

 submit to the rite of excision, and the subject or the 

 slave, the captive or the criminal, were from that 

 moment free, honoured as companions, and invested 

 with the prerogatives of citizens. Motives of in- 

 terest or convenience might yield to serious con- 

 victions, and a race of sincere proselytes would 

 spring up with the rising generation. So rapid was 

 the progress of the Koran, that in less than fifty 

 years after the conquest eff"ected by Musa, the lieu- 

 tenant of the first Abbassidan caliph could inform 

 his master that the tribute imposed on the Mogrebin 

 or western infidels, then under his government, had 

 totally ceased through their unanimous adoption of 

 the true faith. 



In tlieir climate and government, as well as in 

 their diet and manners, the inhabitants of Africa 

 resembled the wandering Bedouins of the Desert ; 

 it was therefore no difficult enterprise to accustom 

 them to believe in the apostle of God, and obey 

 the commander of the faithful. With the religion 

 they were proud to adopt the name and the language 

 of Arabs. The blood of the strangers gradually 

 mingled with that of the vanquished natives. Thirty 

 thousand of the barbarian vouth were enlisted in 

 the battalions of Walid ; while colonies of Arabian 

 epiigrants, abandonitig their own country, croesed 



