orange, and the grape grew side by side with corn and hemp; their flocks of merino sheep were famous; the mulberry tree formed the basis of an extensive manufacture of silk. We may well deplore the fact that this policy was abandoned; and yet amid the fanaticism aroused by the crusade against the Protestants, the wonder perhaps is that it continued so long. Moreover, at this moment, a renewal of the struggle with the Moors of Africa and with the Turk in the Mediterranean naturally revived the national antipathy to the Moriscoes. | Expeditions against the Barbary Corsairs. 1560-1564. | The relief of Malta. Sept. 1565. | The Edicts of 1560-1567. | Revolt of the Moriscoes. Dec. 1568. The unceasing raids of the corsairs of the Barbary coast had not only rendered the sea unsafe, but devastated the shores of Italy and Spain. Accordingly, two expeditions were despatched against them from Naples, which did not meet with much success. The first, under the Duke of Medina Sidonia, Viceroy of Naples, was directed against Tripoli, then held by a Greek named Dragut, who had been taken prisoner by the corsairs in early life, and had turned Mahometan. The Duke was forced to put back by stress of weather; his ships were subsequently put to flight by a Turkish fleet under Piali, another renegade, who sailed to the assistance of Dragut, and the island of Jerbah (Gelves), which had been occupied, was retaken by the Turks (June 29, 1560). The second expedition, which started in 1562, was almost annihilated by a storm. In the following year (April 1563), the Dey of Algiers, encouraged by these disasters of the Spaniards, attempted to drive them from Oran and the neighbouring fortress of Mazarquivir (Mers-el-Kébir), two of the conquests of Cardinal Ximenes, which, with Goletta near Tunis and Melilla in Morocco, were the only remaining Spanish possessions on the African coast. Mazarquivir was nearly lost, when, at the last moment, it was relieved by a Spanish fleet on June 8, and in the two succeeding years (1564 and 1565), the efforts of the Spaniards were somewhat more successful. In September 1564, the island fortress of Peñon de Velez, which lay to the west of the Spanish possessions, was taken by Don Garcia de Toledo, who had succeeded Medina Sidonia as Viceroy of Naples; and in the following year the estuary of the Tetuan, another stronghold of the corsairs, was blocked up and rendered useless. Further enterprise on the coast of Africa was now stopped by the news that Malta was hard beset by the Turks. On the loss of Rhodes, in 1522, the Knights of St. John had received the grant of the island of Malta from Charles V. (1530); from that time forward they had formed a bulwark against the Turk from the east, and had joined in most of the late expeditions against the Barbary coast. Solyman I., often urged to reduce this important place, at last despatched a powerful fleet against it in May, 1565. Piali, the renegade, who