Ruined in the wars which during the fourth century rent the Roman Empire, Cirta was rebuilt by Constantine, who gave it his own name. The religious struggles between the orthodox Christians and the Donatist schismatics did no material harm to Constantine, though they tore Roman Africa to shreds. The city escaped capture by the Vandals, but upon the Mohammedan conquest it was looted of its ancient treasures by successive Arab dynasties, such monuments of antiquity as escaped destruction at their hands being finally swept away by “municipal improvements” under the French régime. Through the long centuries when Arab rule lay like a blight upon the land, the history of Constantine is enveloped in darkness, rent, however, by occasional lightning-flashes of siege, assault, capture, and recapture, for it is said to have been besieged eighty times. Yet, despite its reputation for turbulence, it retained sufficient prosperity to attract merchants from Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, who were always willing to take a chance where there was a prospect of gain. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Spain and Turkey, then at the height of their power, drove out the decaying Arab dynasties which had ruled in North Africa for five hundred years and divided between themselves the empire of the Mediterranean. The Spaniards occupied the African coast as far eastward as Oran, while Tunisia and virtually the whole of Algeria were seized by three enterprising Turkish sea-rovers, Arouj, Isaak, and Khizr (or Khair-ed-Din), better known as the Barbarossa brothers, the nickname being given to the family because of their red beards. Khair-ed-Din took Algiers and so firmly established himself in middle and eastern Barbary that he was made beylerbey of Africa by the Sultan Selim. Recognizing that he who would rule Algeria must hold the rock-girt Constantine, Khair-ed-Din captured it and lost it and captured it again. For upward of three hundred years the star-and-crescent standard of the Turks flaunted above the heights of Constantine, which became under their rule the seat of a bey, subordinate to the dey of Algiers. The job of ruling Constantine was not a healthy one, however, for during the first three decades of the nineteenth century twenty of its beys died with their slippers on, by the sword, poison, or the bowstring. [Illustration: THE CITY OF THE PRECIPICES Constantine is said to have withstood eighty sieges, and no wonder, for it stands on a rocky plateau, cut off from the surrounding country on all sides save one by the tremendous ravine in places a thousand feet in depth, cut by the Rummel in the limestone rock]