In the Italian Peninsula, the Moslems long held the balance of power. Its most productive territory was for fourteen years a prey to the violence and rapacity of a few hundred Arab freebooters. The ministers of the Church were naturally the principal objects of their hostility and contempt. The priests were put to death after having been subjected to every indignity. The monks were tortured, enslaved, emasculated. The consecrated vessels of divine worship--whose hiding place was revealed by serfs exasperated by generations of oppression--were profaned with every refinement of blasphemy and sacrilege. Dogs and horses were enveloped in sacred vestments. The smoke of censers perfumed the air amidst the orgies of licentious banquets. From jewelled chalices were drunk toasts to the success of the Moslem armies. Upon the very altar was sacrificed the chastity of the spouses of Christ. During the ninth century, every ship bound for Italian ports was laid under contribution by the Arab corsairs. The dukes of Spoleto and Tuscany joined the Saracens of Tarentum in an impious league to deprive the Pontiff of his possessions and his power. The republics of Gaeta, Naples, Amalfi, and Salerno formed a confederacy to the same end with the Emir of Sicily. Pope John VIII., abandoned by his vassals, for two years regularly paid tribute to the infidel, and the Holy See thus became virtually a dependency of the Moslem empire. In the cosmopolitan cities of Palermo and Messina were grouped types of every race of Europe, Africa, and Asia, the most turbulent elements of medieval society, the most vicious products of the evils of servitude and the tyranny of caste; native Sicilians, degenerate Greeks, Lombard exiles; Negroes, Persians, and Jews; outlawed criminals, pariahs, refugees, apostates, and banditti. Here personal feuds and tribal hatred were prosecuted with every circumstance of perfidiousness and ferocity. Here Arab and Berber renewed the quarrel begun a century before in Mauritania, which in the end involved in ruin both the Ommeyade dynasty and the Sicilian Emirate. Here was nourished the spirit of discord which proved fatal to Moslem supremacy and called in the Normans, as in former times the dissensions of the Lombard principalities had invited the Saracen invasion of Italy. The rule of the Byzantine had been feeble, inert, and quiescent; moulded by the incompetency of a cowardly government and the fears of a degraded people. That of the Arab, on the other hand, was restless, energetic, ambitious, aggressive. His versatility and his enterprise were unfortunately largely neutralized by the character of the elements with which he had to deal. As proved by the event, a formidable state may be founded, but cannot be perpetuated, by a coalition of outcasts. It is not from such sources that are derived the greatness, the glory, the security of empires.