882 REPORT—1890, 
made to proselytise, but Christians were allowed to preserve their religion on pay- 
ment of a tax, and even Popes were in the habit of entering into friendly relations 
with the invaders. The Church of St. Cyprian and St. Augustine, with its 500 
Sees, was indeed expunged, but five centuries after the passage of the Mohammedan 
army from Egypt to the Atlantic a remnant of it still existed. It was not till the 
12th century that the religion and language of Rome became utterly extinguished. 
The Arabs introduced a high state of civilisation into the countries where they 
settled; their architecture is the wonder and admiration of the world at the 
present day; their irrigational works in Spain have never been improved upon; 
they fostered literature and the arts of peace, and introduced a system of agricul- 
ture far superior to what existed before their arrival. 
Commerce, discouraged by the Romans, was highly honoured by the Arabs, 
and during their rule the Mediterranean recovered the trade which it possessed in 
the time of the Phcenicians and Carthaginians; it penetrated into the Indian 
Archipelago and China; it travelled westward to the Niger, and to the east as far 
as Madagascar, and the great trade route of the Mediterranean was once more 
developed. 
The power and prosperity of the Arabs culminated in the ninth century, when 
Sicily fell to their arms; it was not, however, very long before their empire began to 
be undermined by dissensions; the temporal and spiritual authority of the Ommiade 
Khalifs, which extended from Sind to Spain, and from the Oxus to Yemen, was 
overthrown by the Abbasides in the year 132 of the Hedjira, a.p. 750. Seven years 
later Spain detached itself from the Abbaside empire; a new Caliphate was 
established at Cordova, and hereditary monarchies began to spring up in other 
Mohammedan countries. 
The Carlovingian empire gave an impulse to the maritime power of the South 
of Europe, and in the Adriatic the fleets of Venice and Ragusa monopolised the 
traffic of the Levant. The merchants of the latter noble little republic penetrated 
even to our own shores, and Shakespeare has made the Argosy or Ragusie a house- 
hold word in our language. 
During the eleventh century the Christian Powers were no longer content to 
resist the Mohammedans; they began to turn their arms against them. If the 
latter ravaged some of the fairest parts of Europe, the Christians began to take 
brilliant revenge. 
The Mohammedans were driven out of Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, and the 
Balearic Islands, but it was not till 1492 that they had finally to abandon Europe, 
after the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella. 
About the middle of the eleventh century an event took place which profoundly 
modified the condition of the Mohammedan world. The Caliph Mostansir let 
loose a horde of nomad Arabs, who, starting from Egypt, spread over the whole 
of North Africa, carrying destruction and blood wherever they passed, thus laying 
the foundation for the subsequent state of anarchy which rendered possible the 
interference of the Turks. 
English commercial intercourse with the Mediterranean was not unknown even 
from the time of the Crusades, but it does not appear to have been carried on b 
means of our own vessels till the beginning of the sixteenth century. In 1522 it 
was so great that Henry VIII. appointed a Cretan merchant, Censio de Balthazari, 
to be ‘ Master, governor, protector, and consul of all and singular the merchants 
and others his leges and subjects within the port, island, and country of Crete or 
Candia.’ This is the very first English consul known to history, but the first of 
English birth was my own predecessor in office, Master John Tipton, who, after 
having acted at Algiers during several years in an unofficial character, probably 
elected by the merchants themselves to protect their interests, was duly appointed 
consul by Sir William Harebone, ambassador at Constantinople in 1585, and re- 
ceived just such an exequatur from the Porte as has been issued to every consul 
since by the government of the country in which he resides. 
Piracy has always been the scourge of the Mediterranean, but we are too apt to 
associate its horrors entirely with the Moors and Turks. The evil had existed 
from the earliest ages; even before the Roman conquest of Dalmatia the Illyrians 
