To return to the North coast of Africa. Here, by the capture of Ceuta, Prince Henry gained a starting-point for his work; here he is said (probably with truth) to have gained his earliest knowledge of the interior of Africa; here especially he was brought in contact with those Sudan and Saharan caravans which, coming down to the Mediterranean coast, brought news, to those who sought it, of the Senegal and Niger, of the Negro kingdoms beyond the desert, and particularly of the Gold land of "Guinea." Here also, from a knowledge thus acquired, he was able to form a more correct judgment of the course needed for the rounding or circumnavigation of Africa, of the time, expense, and toil necessary for that task, and of the probable support or hindrance his mariners were to look for on their route. We must, however, qualify in passing the statements of Azurara, in ch. vii, which would imply that Christianity had for ages been utterly extinct in North Africa. "As it was said that the power of the Moors in ... Africa was ... greater than commonly supposed, and that there were no Christians among them." "During the one-and-thirty years that he had warred against the Moors, he had never found a Christian King nor a lord outside this land,[101] who for the love of ... Christ would aid him."[102] The old North African Church, though constantly declining, survived the Musulman Conquest of the seventh and eighth centuries for nearly 800 years. True, its episcopate, which could still muster 30 members in the tenth century, was practically extinct by the time of Hildebrand[103] (Pope Gregory VII), and in 1246 the Franciscan missionary bishop of Fez and Morocco was the only Christian prelate in "Barbary"; but a number of native Christians still lingered on, though without Apostolic succession. In 1159, the Almohade conqueror, Abdu-'l Mu'min ben Ali, on subduing Tunis, compelled many of these to change their faith; but all through the next centuries, down to 1535, a certain number of Tunisians preserved their ancient religion so far that, when Charles V gained possession of the city in the above-named year (1535), he congratulated these perseverants on their steadfastness. The same fact is evidenced by the tolerant behaviour, as a rule, of the Mediæval Barbary States towards Christians, both native and European. [Footnote 101: Portugal.] [Footnote 102: To find such a "Christian Lord" in the person of Prester John was said to have been one of the chief objects of D. Pedro's travels. This object Pedro avowed in Cairo; and with this, among other aims, he visited not only Egypt but Sinai and the Red Sea (see Martins, _Os Filhos_, pp. 83, 97, 121-2, etc., and pp. xvii-xviii of this volume).]