life were assigned to the bleak and sterile plains of La Mancha, Aragon, and Galicia, while the Arabs of Syria and the Hedjaz divided among themselves the glorious regions of the South, which tradition had designated as the Elysian Fields of the ancients. The arrogant disposition of these lords heaped upon their Berber vassals every outrage which malice could devise or tyranny execute. The accident of African extraction was sufficient to exclude the most accomplished and capable soldier from an office of responsibility under the Khalifate of Damascus. In Spain, as in Al-Maghreb, the fairest virgins of the Berber camps were torn from the arms of their parents to replenish the harems of the Orient. Under such circumstances, it is not strange that the acute sensibilities of a proud and independent people should have been deeply wounded by the infliction of every fresh indignity, and their disaffection endanger the stability of the new government and imperil the institutions of religion itself by fostering the violent spirit of tribal animosity, that ominous spectre which constantly haunted with its fearful presence the society of city and hamlet, and stalked grimly and in menacing silence in the very shadow of the throne. The moral and political aspect of the Western world coincided in many particulars with that of Spain during the age of transition which preceded the establishment of the Khalifate of Cordova. Of all the states which had composed the vast fabric of the Roman Empire scarcely one was at peace with its neighbors or exempt from the calamities incident to religious discord and civil war. The scanty remains of art and learning which had escaped the fury of the barbarians had taken refuge in Constantinople, now the intellectual centre of Europe. The noble productions of the ancients had, however, been cast aside with contempt for the homilies of the Fathers, and arguments concerning the miraculous virtues of images, together with daily riots and chariot-races, engaged the attention and amused the leisure of the weak and pusillanimous Byzantine, whose character, deformed by abject vices, had long since forfeited all right to the honored name of Roman. The turbulent populace of that great city, which virtually dictated the edicts of its rulers, protected by its impregnable walls, had seen, with craven indifference, its environs plundered and its sovereignty defied by the powers of Persian, Goth, and Saracen. The genius and energy of its founder had been supplanted by the superstitions and cruelties of a succession of feeble tyrants, whose manifold crimes were now, for a short interval, redeemed by the martial talents and political virtues of Leo the Isaurian.