It was also held lawful to enslave any infidel or person who did not receive the Christian faith. The early common law of England doomed heretics to the stake; the Catholic Inquisition did the same; and the laws of Oleron, the maritime code of the middle ages, treated them "as dogs," to be attacked and despoiled by all true believers. It appears that Philip le Bel of France, the son of St. Louis, in 1296, presented his brother Charles, Count of Valois, with a _Jew_, and that he paid Pierre de Chambly three hundred livres for another _Jew_; as if Jews were at the time chattels, to be given away, or bought.[19] And the statutes of Florence, boastful of freedom, as late as 1415, expressly allowed republican citizens to hold slaves who were not of the Christian faith; _Qui non sunt Catholicæ fidei et Christianæ_.[20] And still further, the comedies of Molière, _L'Étourdi_, _Le Sicilien_, _L'Avare_, depicting Italian usages not remote from his own day, show that, at Naples and Messina, even Christian women continued to be sold as slaves. [Footnote 19: _Encyclopédie Méthodique_, (Jurisprudence,) Art. _Esclavage_.] [Footnote 20: Biot, _De l'Abolition de l'Esclavage Ancien en Occident_, p. 440; a work crowned with a gold medal by the Institute of France, but which will be read with some disappointment.] This hasty sketch, which brings us down to the period when Algiers became a terror to the Christian nations, renders it no longer astonishing that the barbarous states of Barbary,--a part of Africa, the great womb of slavery,--professing Mohammedanism, which not only recognizes slavery, but expressly ordains "chains and collars" to infidels,[21] should maintain the traffic in slaves, particularly in Christians who denied the faith of the Prophet. In the duty of constant war upon unbelievers, and in the assertion of a right to the services or ransom of their captives, they followed the lessons of Christians themselves. [Footnote 21: Koran, chap. 76.] [Illustration] It is not difficult, then, to account for the origin of the cruel custom now under consideration. Its _history_ forms our next topic.