The Carthaginians first came into armed collision with their historic enemies, the Romans, 264 years before the Crucifixion. For nearly two centuries Carthage had been undisputed Mistress of the Mediterranean, dominant in the East and so supreme in the West that her ambassadors told the Romans that they might not even wash their hands in the sea without her permission. Her empire stretched from end to end of the Middle Sea: North Africa was fringed with her outposts and trading-stations; the south of Spain owed her fealty; her rule was accepted in Sardinia, the west of Sicily, Malta, the Balearic Islands. But she was as an idol of brass with feet of clay; the foundations of her supremacy were rotten, for they rested upon her sea-power only. And history has shown, over and over again, that no nation can endure unless it can make its might felt upon the land. The Carthaginians, as has been said, were not a fighting race, so that when Carthage needed troops she had to recruit them from the warlike and barbarous Berber tribes which surrounded her. It is said that when Hamilcar Barca landed in Spain at the beginning of the Second Punic War he had not a single Carthaginian soldier in the ranks of his army, the officers of his general staff alone being Carthaginians. And, as Carthage discovered to her cost, it is not safe for a nation to trust to the very uncertain loyalty of a mercenary army. In 264 B.C. began the series of tragic events known to history as the three Punic wars, which lasted 120 years, cost millions of lives, and terminated with the capture and destruction of Carthage by the younger Scipio, who left not one stone of the famous city resting on another.