"For knots of cord to every town they send, The captived English that they caught to bind; _For to perpetual slavery they intend Those that alive they on the field should find_."[24] [24] Battle of Agincourt, st. 144. And Othello, in recounting his perils, exposes this custom, when he speaks "Of being taken by the insolent foe _And sold to slavery_; of my redemption thence." It was also held lawful to enslave an infidel, or person who did not receive the Christian faith. The early Common Law of England doomed heretics to the stake; the Catholic Inquisition did the same; and the laws of Oléron, the maritime code of the Middle Ages, treated them "as dogs," to be attacked and despoiled by all true believers. Philip le Bel of France, grandson of St. Louis, in 1296 presented his brother Charles, Count of Valois, with a Jew, and paid three hundred livres for another Jew,--as if Jews were at the time chattels, to be given away or bought.[25] The statutes of Florence, boastful of freedom, as late as 1415 allowed republican citizens to hold slaves not of the Catholic Christian faith,--_Qui non sunt Catholicæ fidei et Christianæ_.[26] Besides captive Moors, there were African slaves in Spain, before Christopher Columbus; and at Venice Marco Polo for some time held a slave he had brought from the Orient in the age of Dante. The comedies of Molière, _L'Étourdi_ and _Le Sicilien_, depicting Italian usages not remote from his day, show that at Messina even Christian women continued to be sold as slaves. [25] Encyclopédie Méthodique (Jurisprudence), Art. _Esclavage_. [26] Biot, De l'Abolition de l'Esclavage Ancien en Occident, p. 440,--a work crowned with a gold medal by the Institute of France, which will be read with some disappointment. This rapid sketch, which brings us down to the period when Algiers became a terror to the Christian nations, renders it no longer astonishing that the barbarous States of Barbary--a part of Africa, the great womb of slavery, professing Mahometanism, which not only recognizes slavery, but expressly ordains "chains and collars" to infidels[27]--should maintain the traffic in slaves, particularly in Christians, denying the faith of the Prophet. In the duty of constant war upon unbelievers, and in the assertion of right to the service or ransom of their captives, they followed the lessons of Christians themselves. [27] Koran, Chap. LXXVI. It is not difficult, then, to account for the origin of this cruel custom. Its _history_ forms our next topic. II. HISTORY OF WHITE SLAVERY.