72 A TROPICAL DEPENDENCY of the Internal history of North Africa, thus summarises, on his opening page, the fate of the Arab nation to which he belonged : *' Raised to the height of power in Asia Minor under the dynasty of the Ommeyades, formidable still under that of the Abbassides, attaining the highest fortune in Spain under the second dynasty of the Ommeyades, the Arabs found themselves in possession of such glory and prosperity as had never been the lot of another people.

Surrounded by luxury and devoted to pleasure, they yielded to the seductions of idleness, and, tasting the delights of life, they fell into a long sleep under the shadow of glory and of peace. Then the soldier was no longer to be distinguished from the artisan, except by his ineptitude for work ; their hardy habits were gone, and they were overthrown, not in the first instance by strangers, but by their own Caliphs. They were enslaved, then broken and dispersed."

Allowing for the somewhat over-flowery rhetoric of Arabian writers, the facts would seem to justify both sides of this description. The later decadence of the Arabs, when, after the final expulsion of 1502, they entirely lost touch with the progressive life of Europe, can only be accounted for on the assumption that they had, as Ibn Khaldun perceived, lost their early vitality, and that they carried with them into Africa the elements of their own decay. They were overthrown, not, in the first instance, by strangers, but by themselves.

Yet, without a doubt, their influence upon Africa, when the civil wars first drove them out of Spain, was that described by Ibn Said.