The descendants of Abou Abd Allah Muhamed el Mostancer soon forgot to pay their tribute to the kings of Sicily, and the Beni Hafs continued to enjoy absolute power in their dominions till nearly the middle of the sixteenth century, when they succumbed to the successive attacks of the Spaniards and the Turks. The invasion of Tunis by Charles V. was incontestably one of the most celebrated _gesta_ of the age in which it occurred; it has been celebrated alike in poetry, painting, and even on porcelain, and its traces have hardly yet entirely disappeared. The emperor brought in his train one Jan Cornelis Vermeyen, who painted ten pictures of the most striking episodes in the campaign. Six of the original paintings were discovered by the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and they were subsequently restored and brought to England by the late Prince Consort. The localities depicted in them can be easily recognised by any one well acquainted with the principal features of the country, and I have been enabled to place before the reader the drawings representing the capture of Tunis and the bombardment of the Goletta forts. The remains of the ramparts thrown up by the captains of Barbarossa are still visible. They consist of a triple wall with the intervening spaces filled up by layers of sand, stones, and rubbish. This line of fortification passed from shore to shore, across the neck of land which divides the Mediterranean from the Tunis lake, close to the railway terminus erected by an English company in 1872. In making some improvements in 1874, the lake end of the rampart was cut through. Nearly two hundred skeletons were found outside it. Several pieces of Spanish money, a heap of cannon balls, and some broken weapons were picked up. The bones were afterwards re-interred in the adjoining burial-ground. A skull, pierced apparently by a conical bullet, is still preserved in Tunis. A short time afterwards I pointed out these remains to Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, who remained some time in Tunis and visited all the ruins of the Spanish fortifications. He much regretted he had not seen them before writing his charming book on “The Cloister Life of Charles V.,” and his untimely death alone, I believe, prevented him from becoming the most modern chronicler of the Spanish emperor’s African conquest. One of the finest known specimens of majolica ware is covered with a painting of the storming of Goletta, which Joseph Marryat erroneously describes as “an island in the Mediterranean Sea.”[17] It bears the following inscription:— M.D. XXXI (?) “Da Carlo d’Austria Imperatore potente _L’alta Goletta_ inespugnabil tanto Astretta e presa con furor repente In Urbino nella bottega di Francesco Silvano.” [Illustration: CHRISTIAN SLAVES AT TUNIS. From the picture by Jan Cornelis Vermeyen, in the possession of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Reproduction by Maclure & Macdonald.] [Illustration: SIEGE OF GOLETTA BY CHARLES V.