I have been led to the consideration of the topic discussed in the preceding pages by reason of the prominent part assumed by the African tribes during the closing years of the Moslem domination in Spain. While an apparent digression, it is in fact inseparable from a complete account of the events transpiring in the dominions once embraced by the khalifate of Cordova. The relations of Africa and Mussulman Europe had long been intimate. The jealousies of ambition and sovereignty had, except in infrequent and isolated cases, been subordinated to the offices of mutual kindness and friendship. No serious acts of hostility had as yet been permitted to interrupt the cordial intercourse which--facilitated by the short distance separating the two continents--existed between nations acknowledging, at least in form, the same religion and governed by similar laws. Wealthy traders maintained commercial establishments at the same time in Almeria and Kairoan. The sons of sheiks of the Desert rose to high commands under the famous princes of the House of Ommeyah. The negro slaves of the Soudan were repeatedly chosen to guard the sacred person of the monarch. The erudition of the philosophers of Cordova had been exhibited to the astonishment, if not to the approbation, of the fanatical sectaries of Fez. Powerful princes of Mauritania had more than once rendered homage and paid tribute to the rulers of the mighty Khalifate of the West. They had submitted with a feeling of pride to the supremacy of one of the most renowned of those rulers, for they remembered that he was popularly reputed to be of the same origin and of kindred blood. During the administration of Al-Mansur, no African prince would have cherished the apparently chimerical hope that his dynasty was destined to influence, in a decisive way, the future of the Peninsula. The death of that great commander, who left no worthy successor, encouraged the aspirations of every ambitious chieftain to plunge the country into anarchy, a condition from which he might possibly emerge with the lion’s share of power and plunder. In less than forty years the Berbers obtained control of the most valuable portion of the rich inheritance of the Moslems of Spain; in less than a century and a half the magnificent empire of the Ommeyades, whose civilization had been the marvel of the age, its cities sacked and demolished, its fertile fields laid waste, its commerce annihilated, its industrious and thriving population massacred or condemned to painful servitude, had descended, from the exalted rank of a monarchy whose name was mentioned with respect and fear by the most distant and inaccessible nations, to the humiliating position of a dependency of the barbarous and illiterate sultans of Africa.