GOVERNMENT OF ARABIA. 129 



over a region containing 64,000,000 inhabitants. 

 His successors have in their turn vanished from the 

 scene ; and their richest kingdoms are now possess- 

 ed by a company of British merchants. 



Though the Turkish sultans could not, like the 

 Arabian caliphs, style themselves the descendants 

 and successors of the Apostle of God, they piously 

 espoused the cause of the Koran ; and, like the Sa- 

 racens, affected to wage war only for the interests 

 of Islam. Selim I., after reducing the whole penin- 

 sula of Mesopotamia, made himself master, in 1516, 

 of Syria and Egypt. The Arabs alone refused him 

 their obedience. Since the ruin of the caliphate, 

 they had in a great measure shaken off the foreign 

 authorities to which they had been partly subject. 

 The neighbouring powers, too much engrossed with 

 their own quarrels, had never attempted their sub- 

 jugation ; till the Portuguese, under Gama, made 

 their appearance in the Red Sea (A. D. 1504). 



Instigated by the fanatical ambition of founding 

 an Eastern empire, the King of Portugal had as- 

 sumed, among other magnificent titles, that of 

 " Lord of the Navigation, Conquest, and Com- 

 merce of Arabia;" and commenced the exercise of 

 his prerogative by capturing a Moorish vessel, the 

 crew of which were treated in the most savage 

 manner. From the beginning of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury different expeditions from Lisbon visited the 

 Arabian coast. Alphonso Albuquerque, in 1506, 

 reduced Curiat, Muscat, with other important cities 

 on both sides of the Persian Gulf. Gauri, the last 

 of the Mamlouk sultans of Egypt, before his over- 

 throw by Selim, desirous to rid his neighbourhood 

 of these troublesome adventurers, fitted out an ex- 



