DECLINE OF MOHAMMEDAN POWER 69 modern Europe learned to associate with the emotions of love the grace and joy of cultivated life. It was from their hands that the growing life of the young nations of the West received Its happiest direction. We have but to turn to the vocabularies of Europe and to trace in them the many Important words of Arabic origin in order to appreciate to some extent the debt of which we have lost sight.

I have no intention of entering Into the history of Spain during the centuries which led to the conquest of Granada by Ferdinand and Isabella, and the final expulsion of the Arabs from Europe in 1502. My purpose in briefly relating the outlines of the Arab- African conquest of Spain has been merely to Indicate the nature of the national life to which Negroland owed the Impulse of Its medieval civilisation. If the Impression made by Arab- African civilisation upon Europe has been indelible, It Is only natural that the same Impression should have been strong upon the nations which were brought in contact with it — even though in some instances they were of a wholly different race — in. the continent from which It sprang.

Here Is a picture quoted by Ibn Said, the ''truthful historian," to whom allusion has been already made, from a previous writer, the truth of whose words he endorses, of the Immediate effect upon Africa of the downfall of the Almohade dynasty in Spain. Ibn Said was born In Granada in 12 14; he died In Tunis in 1287, and was therefore a personal witness of the condition of things which he describes.

"Africa," he quotes, "may be said to have derived its present wealth and importance, and its extent of commerce, from Andalusians settling in It. For when God Almighty was pleased to send down on their country the last disastrous civil war, thousands of its inhabitants, of all classes and professions, sought a refuge in Africa and spread over Maghreb el Aksa (Morocco), and Africa Propria (Barbary), settling wherever they found comfort or employment. Labourers and country people took to