Ever since the purple sails of Phœnicia first flaunted along its coasts the history of Tripolitania has been one of invasion and conquest. In the very dawn of history the galleys of Greece dropped anchor off this shore, in the belief that it was the Garden of the Hesperides, and the vestiges of their colony of Cyrenaica lure the archæologists to-day. The Greeks, who, because of its three leagued cities of Oëa, Sabrata, and Leptis, named their new possession Tripolis, just as Decapolis signified the region of ten cities and Pentapolis of five, retreated before Carthage's colonial expansion, and the Carthaginians gave way in turn to the conquering Romans, who included the captured territory within their province of Africa and called it Regio Tripolitana—whence the name it bears to-day. Christianity was scarcely four centuries old when the hordes of fierce-faced, skin-clad Vandals, sweeping down from their Germanic forests, burst into Gaul, poured through the passes of the Pyrenees, overran Spain, and, crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, carried fire and sword and torture from end to end of the Mediterranean. Before another century had rolled around, however, Belisarius, the great captain of Byzantium, had broken the Vandal power forever, and the troubled land of Tripolitania once again came under the shadow of the cross. Then the wave of Arab conquest came, rolling across North Africa, breaking upon the coasts of Spain, and not subsiding until it reached the marches of France, supplanting the feeble Christianity of the natives of all this region with the vigorous and fanatical faith of Islam. Though Ferdinand the Catholic, not content with expelling the Moors from Spain, continued his crusade against the infidel by capturing the Tripolitan capital, the Knights of Saint John, to whom he turned the city over, surrendered to the beleaguering Turks just as the sixteenth century had reached its turning-point, and Turkish it has remained, at least in name, ever since.