294 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY ceeded in capturing the town, which was held by a Spanish garrison till the Turks, under Barbarossa, retook it in 1550. But though the Christians were able to take certain seaports, and eventually, after the battle of Lepanto, to hold the sea, the Turks gradually possessed themselves of the coast of Northern Africa. The provinces which surrounded the seaports were in their hands.

** Where the Turks have once taken foot," says Marmol, who wrote about the year 1573, "they can never again be dislodged." Charles V. abdicated in 1556. His son Philip abated nothing of his policy, and while he persecuted Protestants in Flanders, he found time to pursue with equal zeal Turks, Jews, and heretics in the Mediterranean. This reign saw the battle of Lepanto. The fleets of Spain and Italy could close the Mediterranean to the Turks, but the Italians and Spaniards could never penetrate into Africa. All that happened was that the Turks — banned as militant infidels by the nations of Europe — possessed themselves of the fruitful provinces stretching from Egypt to Morocco, that harbours once crowded with the merchant shipping of the world became mere nests of corsairs, sallying out to prey upon a trade that passed them by, and that between the interior of Africa and the civilised world a barrier was erected which, as years went by, became impassable — Africa was cut off from Europe.

The Moors, suffering equally beneath the blows of Turks and Christians, withdrew into the north-western corner of the continent. Unable to maintain external relations with any equal power, they lost the finer elements of national life, and rapidly became a decadent people.

During the long struggle of the sixteenth century we hear of them as taking part, under their chiefs, from time to time in the sieges and battles of the coast. At the end of that century they made one effort, which was as the last flicker of their expiring glory, to obtain for themselves in some other direction the outlet which had