The Turks, a people of the same kin as those Tartars who formed part of the mixed population of Russia, had come down from the east and north and settled themselves in force in the eastern part of Asia Minor. It would seem that they were a tougher and a rougher race than the Arabians, whose religion they had adopted. But the fact that they had accepted the religion founded by the Arabian Mahomet, did not save the Arabs from the attacks of these invading Turks, who dispossessed them of all their conquests in Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. Further westward it was chiefly a race of African natives, who had adopted the religion of Mahomet, with but a small contingent of any Arabian people, that conquered Spain and had its {133} capital city at Cordova, in that country. And a little later in the story another Mahommedan African tribe, closely akin to the conquerors of Spain, seized and kept a long slice of that southern shore of the Mediterranean as far east as the Egyptian boundary. It is the more necessary to make a note of these divisions, because it seems to have been the way of the Crusaders and of all Christian people of that time to group together all Mahommedans, no matter of what race they were, under the common name of Saracen, which originally was applied to one tribe only of the Arabian nation. By the end of the eleventh century, when the first Crusaders went to the Holy Land, the hold of the Moors in Spain was neither as firm nor nearly as extensive as it had been. The country was divided between Christian and Moslem, the Moslem still possessing the southern part, nearer that Africa whence he had come. The fighting was continual, with results that gave now one side and now the other the advantage, but it inclined, on the whole, to favour the Christians. This was the time to which belong the splendid stories about the Cid Campeador and many other great Spanish and Christian heroes. But while, in the West, the Christian was thus forcing the African Saracen gradually to loosen his grip on Spain, in the East the Turkish Saracen was pressing the Christian so hard as to cause the ruler of Constantinople, though still claiming the title of Eastern Emperor, to send a prayer to all Christians to come to his aid. [Sidenote: Plague in Europe]