others charters for pensions and for marriages; others gold and silver, money and cloth; others health in their bodies and deliverance from perils which they have gained by means of thee; others countless servants both male and female; while others there are that tell me of monasteries and churches that thou didst repair and rebuild, and of the great and rich ornaments that thou didst offer in many holy places. Others, again, pointed out to me the marks of the chains they bore in the captivity from which thou didst rescue them. What shall I say of the needy beggars that I see before me laden with alms? And of the great multitude of friars of every order that shew me the garments with which thou didst clothe their bodies, and the abundance of food with which thou didst satisfy their necessities? I had already made an end of this chapter, had I not descried the approach of a multitude of ships with tall sails laden from the islands thou didst people in the great Ocean Sea,[N14] which called on me to wait for them, as they longed to prove that they ought not to be omitted from this register. And they displayed before me their great cattle-stalls, the valleys full of sugar cane from which they carried store to distribute throughout the world: they brought also as witnesses to their great prosperity all the dwellers in the kingdom of the Algarve.[N15] Ask, said they, whether these people ever knew what it was to have abundance of bread until our Prince peopled the uninhabited isles, where no dwelling existed save that of wild beasts. Next they shewed me great rows of beehives full of swarms of bees, from which great cargoes of wax and honey are carried to our realm; and besides these, lofty houses towering to the sky, which have been and are being built with wood from those parts. But why should I mention the multitude of things that were told me in thy praise, though all of them were things that I could write without injuring the truth? Let me tell how there now sounded in my ears some other voices very contrary to these I have recounted hitherto: voices for which I should have felt great compassion had I not discovered them to be the cries of those outside our law. For there addressed me countless souls of Moors, both on this side the Straits, and also beyond,[N16] of whom many had died by thy lance in the cruel war thou hast ever waged against them. And others presented themselves before me loaded with chains, their countenances pitiable to behold, men who were captured by thy ships through the strength of the bodies of thy vassals; but in these I noticed that they complained not so much of the ill fortune that overtook them at the end as of their fate in earlier life, that is, of the seductive error in which that false schismatic Mohammed[N17] left them. And so I conclude my preface, begging that if thy great virtues, if the excellence of thy great and noble deeds, suffer any loss by my