Truly, the task was no easy one. The inhabitants of Mecca and Medina were, usually, at odds, and unanimous only in obstinacy and insubordination. The nomads of the intervening district continued to be, under Islam, the anarchists that they had been from time immemorial. Only a very strong hand could bridle the disorders native to the Holy Land. And a strong hand had always been lacking. Very soon after its rise, the great empire of Islam fell asunder and the continuous contests between the state and statelets into which it dissolved made the central authority of the Caliph a mere fiction, incapable of efficient exercise of power. Even the states, prominent from their position and thus better situated to maintain order in the Holy Land, as it was their interest to do, could not spare the military force essential for the governor of the Hijaz (West Arabia). Thus the holiest, the least productive, and most difficult-to-rule portion of the Moslem Empire was practically given over to confusion as its natural vital element, and the more vigorous Mohammedan countries limited themselves to the protection of the pilgrim caravans which set out from their realms for Arabia, and of su ch of their own subjects as had settled there. Out of the chaos in West Arabia, resulting from the disintegration of the Islamic Empire, was born the Shereefate of Mecca. From the extraordinarily numerous posterity of Mohammed, issue of the union of his daughter Fatima with his nephew Ali, many remained settled in Arabia as owners of date gardens, as robber knights at the head of Bedouin clans, or as speculators in the gradually increasing superstitious adoration of the Mohammedans for the Prophet’s blood. Outside of Arabia, the descendants of Ali participated in political revolutions on greater or lesser scale, or had their hands filled by the governors of the Moslem lands. Their short-sighted avarice and their common lack of political talent, however, hindered them from carrying any important project to completion. Any success which they achieved was always transient. The universal condition of things in Arabia afforded the opportunity of turning a portion of the Holy Province into a personal domain In about 1000 A.D., the heads of certain families among the descendants of Ali began to make themselves powerful in the Hijaz and held their ground. From 1200 A.D. to the present time, one line of these children of Ali, that of Katada, has succeeded in maintaining supremacy in Mecca.