CONDITION OF THE SOUDAN 289 sea. The greater part of the North African coast passed into Turkish hands, a position which was not conquered without much fighting, taking and re-taking of towns. Tunis and TripoH changed hands more than once.

Italy itself was not spared. A separate squadron, under Dragout, another famous Turkish sailor, ravaged its coasts. In 1569, in a great naval campaign, the Turks attacked and pillaged the coasts and islands belonging to Venice. They took parts of Crete and Cyprus. Finally, on the 1st of August 1571, Famagosta capitulated to the Turks, after a long and arduous siege, and the island of Cyprus was theirs. This was the last Turkish triumph of the century. The Christian Powers were at last able to combine effectively under the leadership of Don John of Austria against the common enemy, and the battle of Lepanto, which was fought on October 7th of the same year, destroyed the Turkish sea-power in the Mediterranean.

I owe an apology to the reader for this crude list of dates, but the rapid rise of a relatively new Mohammedan power on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean must be borne in mind in order to understand with what a different world the commercial and intellectual intercourse of Bornu was carried on, to that known and frequented in the West by the caravans of Melle, and of Songhay in its earlier days, and also to explain the fury of hatred and persecution by which the Moorish citizens of Spain were, in the fifteenth century, attacked, conquered, and driven out of the country which they had once civilised and still enriched. As the crescent waxed stronger in the East it waned in the West, and the decline of those nations of the Western Soudan which were dependent on their touch with Western markets and Western sources of civilisation, is proportionately observable. It was not to be supposed that Christian Powers, however indifferent individually to each other's fate, could collectively regard with indifference the rise of T