CONDITION OF THE SOUDAN 291 by the blows which were struck against its distracted kingdoms from outside, the work of Gutenburg was perhaps even more effectual in rendering the angular forces malleable by mutual comprehension from within.

It took more than a hundred years for the use of printing to spread to some of the remoter parts of Europe. There need be no surprise that it took more than a hundred years for Europe to emerge sufficiently from the disunited state described by neas Silvius, to present a united front to the Turk, and it is a curious but not inappropriate coincidence that we find the use of printing extended to the farthest western shore of Europe by its first adaptation to Irish characters in 1 57 1, the very year of the battle of Lepanto. There is no need to dwell on the part that must have been played by the discovery of this art alone in the movement which drew the warring nations of Christendom together. Similarity of thought is the great unifier of peoples, and from the middle of the fifteenth century the learned in all the nations of Europe had the means of communicating their thoughts not only to each other, but to the body of their respective nations.

But if in 1453 Europe was unfit, as a whole, to oppose the progress of the Turk, there were individuals who burned with a holy zeal. The sack of Otranto, which, in 1481, had almost driven the Pope to abandon Italy, found Isabella and Ferdinand on the throne of Spain, and it is hardly to be wondered at that these Catholic sovereigns, sharing to the full in the grief and terror which Turkish triumphs were spreading through Christendom, were inclined to act with something of the harshness of panic towards the Mohammedan peoples who filled the southern towns of Spain, and still held within the precincts of Granada an independent kingdom upon Spanish soil. The policy pursued against the Moors, the ruin of the industries of Spain by the expulsion, under circumstances of the utmost rigour, of immense multitudes of its most skilful artisans and most