development: especially at Kairwan, Tlemsan, and Fas (Fez). In 1270 that truly good but erratic monarch, St Louis of France, deflected a crusade intended for the Levant to Tunis as being a Muhammadan country much nearer at hand and more accessible. Moreover his brother, Charles of Anjou, claimed the sovereignty of Sicily and Naples, and thought the possession of Tunis would better establish his precarious kingdom. Louis IX landed at Carthage, but owing to failing health his imposing invasion was followed by military inaction. He died at Carthage, and a capitulation subsequently took place by which the Crusaders retired from Tunisia. After their departure the Muhammadans entirely destroyed all that remained of Roman Carthage, as the buildings had afforded to the invaders the protection of fortresses. Up till that time a good deal of Roman civilization had lingered in Tunisia, but now the country became more and more Arabized. Christian bishops probably ceased to exist in the 13th century, but Christians were not persecuted for another two or three hundred years, until the attacks of the Spaniards and the intervention of the Turks roused Muhammadan fanaticism to a high degree which is only beginning to abate with the opening of the 20th century and the spread of education. In the 13th century the Spanish and Portuguese kings reduced the area of Muhammadan rule in the Iberian Peninsula to the kingdom of Granada in S.E. Spain; and early in the 15th century the kingdom of Portugal felt itself sufficiently strong to carry the war into the enemy’s country. In 1415 the Portuguese army, to which was attached Prince Henry, afterwards known as the Navigator, captured the Moorish citadel of Ceuta on the Moroccan coast; and from this episode started the magnificent Portuguese discoveries initiated by Prince Henry which will be described in the next chapter. The Portuguese subsequently acquired Tangier, Tetwan, and most of the ports along the Atlantic coast of Morocco. Castile-Aragon, bursting out a little later, when her monarchs had conquered the last Moorish kingdom on Spanish soil (Granada), seized Melilla in 1490, and, on one pretext or another, port after port along the coasts of Algeria and Tunis, until by 1540 the Spanish empire had established garrisons at Oran, Bugia, Bona, Hunein, and Goletta[39]. They also instigated the Knights of Malta—an outcome of the crusades—to hold for a time the town of Tripoli in Barbary, and the Tunisian island of Jerba. The Portuguese kings by the middle of the 16th century were practically suzerains of Morocco. The penultimate ruler of the brilliant House of Avis—young Dom Sebastião—determined in 1578, soon after his accession to the throne of Portugal at the age of 23, thoroughly to conquer Morocco. He landed with 100,000 men at