In the 11th century began the real revival of the Roman Empire from the onslaught of Arabia and the prior Teutonic invasions. The Normans recovered Sicily and Malta from the Berbers; earlier still, the Pisans drove the Berbers out of Sardinia and crushed them in Majorca. The cities of Italy, forming themselves into republics, were tempted by their extending commerce to interfere with North Africa. The Venetians, in spite of the hare-brained crusades and the damage that they did by reviving Muhammadan fanaticism, began to open up those commercial relations with Egypt, which for four and a half centuries gave them the monopoly of the Levant and Indian trade. The Normans, after founding the kingdom of Naples and Sicily, commenced a series of bold attacks on the coasts of Algeria, Tunis and Tripoli, which did not however lead to an occupation of more than forty years (about 1123 to 1163). The Pisan and Genoese natives in the 11th and 12th centuries carried out a series of such sharp reprisals against the Moorish pirates, that they inspired some respect for Italy in the minds of Tunisians and Algerians. Afterwards they were enabled to open up commercial relations, especially with the north coast of Tunis; and these, to the advantage of both Italy and Barbary, continued, with fitful interruptions, until the 16th century. In the 11th century another great Berber movement took place—the rise of the “Almoravides.” The name of this sect of Muhammadan reformers is a Spanish corruption of _Al-Murabitin_, which is the plural of _Marabut_; and _Marabut_ is derived from the place-name _Ribat_ (a monastery or school), meaning “the people living at the Ribat,” though the word has since come to mean in North Africa and elsewhere a Muhammadan saint. The Almoravides owed their origin to one of the early African Mahdis or Messiahs, of whom the tale has subsequently been repeated and repeated with such servile imitation of detail that one can only imagine the mass of African Muhammadans to have been without any philosophical reflections on history or any sense of humour; since Mahdi after Mahdi arises as an ascetic saint, and dies a licentious monarch, whose power passes into the hands of a lieutenant, who is the first in the line of a slowly crumbling dynasty. Far away across the Sahara Desert, and near the Upper Niger, was a tribe of Tawareq Berbers known as the Lamta or Lemtuna, who had been in the 10th century converted to Muhammadanism. The chief of this tribe, returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca, met a Berber of South Morocco known as Ibn Yaṣin, who on his Meccan pilgrimage had acquired a great reputation for austere holiness. The chief of the Lemtuna invited Ibn Yaṣin to his court; and the latter, after arriving in the Niger countries, established himself on an