Of the three races which inhabit the empire the most numerous and important are the aboriginal Berbers, who were already in possession of the land when the Carthaginians and the Romans came, and whose blood to a greater or less extent permeates the whole population. It was the sturdy Berber soldiery of Carthage which enabled the queen city of the South to hold at bay for upward of five centuries her great northern rival; it was an army of Berbers which, led by Hannibal, conquered Spain, devastated southern Gaul, crossed the Alps, and swept the whole length of Italy. It was the Berbers who thrice conquered Spain—once from the Visigoths and twice from their less stalwart coreligionists, the Arabs. Again, it was the Berbers, not the Arabs, who built those two immortal monuments—the Alhambra in Granada and the Alcázar in Seville. The popular description of the Moslem rulers of Spain as Arabs or Saracens (“Easterners”), is quite erroneous. The people who made themselves masters of the peninsula were Berbers, although their leaders often adopted Arabic names along with the religion of the Arabs. That Morocco, alone among the Barbary nations, should have succeeded in maintaining its independence for upward of eleven hundred years, and that in spite of piracy, brigandage, ferocious cruelty, misrule, and a defiance of all international obligations, was due in part, it is true, to the immense strategic importance of its position at the entrance to the Middle Sea, and to the jealousies among the European powers which sought its possession; but far more to its reinforcement by the virile and rugged Berber stock. In spite of a history of foreign conquest, the Berber physical type and the Berber temperament and nationality have persisted since the Age of Stone. A common mistake is to regard them, or, indeed, any of the peoples of Morocco, as a black race, a very common misconception which owes its origin in part, perhaps, to the old English phrase, blackamoor; that is, black as a Moor. Racially they are not black, nor even brown. They are distinctively a white race, usually with brown and sometimes with blue eyes and not infrequently with tawny hair and beards, though their skins have been bronzed by generations of exposure to the fierce African sun. Their children and those who have lived in cities might, if clad in European costume, pass anywhere as Europeans.