The serious results of its occupation soon became apparent even to the inefficient and corrupt government of the Bosphorus. The depopulation of the city, where streets of palaces and rows of elegant suburban villas awaited the claim of the military adventurer, allured from every settlement of Northern Africa swarms of ferocious and intrepid soldiers of fortune. From a Christian community, Palermo was, as if by magic, metamorphosed into a colony of Islam. The cathedral became a Djalma; the churches were transformed into mosques. In accordance with Moorish custom, separate quarters were assigned to the votaries of different religions, and set apart for the maintenance of various branches of traffic. The entire city assumed an Oriental aspect. Flowing robes and lofty turbans took the place of the ungraceful Byzantine and Italian costumes. The veiled ladies of the harems, attended by gorgeously attired eunuchs, glided silently through the streets or peered coquettishly through projecting lattices at the passing stranger. The beasts of burden peculiar to the East, trooping along like the march of a caravan, became too common to excite the attention of the curious multitude. Everywhere appeared canals, aqueducts, fountains. The vegetation recalled to the traveller the date plantations and oleander groves of the Nile and the Euphrates. The villas of the military chieftain and the opulent merchant were counterparts of the exquisite palaces of Seville and Damascus. The genius of Arab civilization found nowhere a more favorable field for its exercise than at Palermo. Within a few months after its capture scarcely anything remained to suggest that the city had not always been Mohammedan. Every circumstance of time and locality was propitious to the foundation of a new and powerful Moslem state which, in subsequent times, was fated to influence the destiny and to form the civilization of some of the greatest monarchies of Christendom.