With the excellent base of operations afforded by the capture of Palermo, the affairs of the Moslems assumed a more promising aspect. No longer were they confined to the insufficient and precarious shelter of isolated castles and insignificant hamlets. The naval advantages of the city, whose harbor had been improved and enlarged by the labor of many successive nations, were incalculable. Easy and rapid communication was now possible with the ports of Africa. Supplies and reinforcements could be introduced into any part of the island in defiance of the utmost exertions of the naval power of Constantinople. The fertile territory included in this new conquest was capable, even under an imperfect and negligent system of cultivation, of furnishing support to a numerous army. Nor was the prestige attaching to the name of Palermo the least of the manifold benefits resulting from its possession. No city was better known throughout the countries bordering on the Mediterranean. It was founded by the Phœnicians. It had been one of the most frequented marts of antiquity. Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, had in turn been enriched by its commerce, and had contaminated it with their vices. In natural advantages, in facility of intercourse with distant countries, in the possession of a trade established long before any mentioned in the earliest historical records, in the boundless agricultural possibilities of its adjacent territory, in the convenience and excellence of its port as a naval station, Palermo could vie with even the greatest commercial centres of the ancient or the medieval world. For the power which could take and hold such a city, the subjugation of Sicily was but a question of time.