descendants are everywhere the “aristocracy” of Muhammadan North Africa. Morocco might have conquered and ruled all North Africa in the 16th century but for the arrival of the Turks. The Turks, who had replaced the Arabs of Mesopotamia, Syria, and Asia Minor as Muhammadan rulers, had captured Constantinople in 1453, had seized Egypt in 1517, and were becoming the backbone of the Muhammadan power. When the Algerians and Tunisians appealed to Turkish pirates for help against the attacks of the Christian Spaniards in the 16th century, the Sultan of Constantinople took advantage of their intervention to establish, through the Turkish Corsairs, Turkish regencies in Algeria (1519), Tunis (1573), and Tripoli (1551)[45]. Morocco, however, always remained independent; and indeed, after the extinction of the line of Abbasid Baghdad Khalifs at Cairo in 1538, the great Sharifian sovereign, Al-Mansur, after his victory over the Portuguese, declared himself Khalif over the Muhammadan world in right of his descent from Fatima and Ali, and refused to recognize the claim of the Ottoman Emperor of Constantinople to have acquired the transfer of the Caliphate from Motawakkiq the last of the Abbasids in 1517. Nevertheless, though Morocco remained a great independent Muhammadan power, her princes borrowed many customs from Turkey, such as the Turkish style of clothing, the Turkish method of arranging troops in battle, and the title of Pasha (Basha). Except in Morocco, Turkish control replaced Arab influence in northern Africa, and extended by degrees far into the old Garamantan kingdom of Fezzan, and across the Libyan Desert to the Red Sea. But no matter whether Turk, Circassian, Greek, Albanian, Slav, or Arabized Negro ruled in Berber North Africa, Muhammadan influence and Arab culture continued to spread over all the northern half of Africa. Somaliland, Sennār, Nubia, Kordofan, Darfur, Wadai, Bornu, Hausa-land and the Sahara, much of Senegambia, and most of the country within the bend of the Niger and along the banks of the upper Volta were converted to Muhammadanism, and became familiar with the Arab tongue as the religious language, and with some degree of Arab civilization.