between them. One thinks of the hundreds of villages the corsairs
devastated; the convents and precious archives they destroyed,
[Footnote: In this particular branch, again, the Christians surpassed
the unbeliever. More archives were destroyed in the so-called "Age of
Lead"--the closing period of Bour-bonism--than under Saracens and
Corsairs combined. It was quite the regular thing to sell them as
waste-paper to the shopkeepers. Some of them escaped this fate by the
veriest miracle--so those of the celebrated Certoza of San Lorenzo in
Padula. The historian Marincola, walking in the market of Salerno,
noticed a piece of cheese wrapped up in an old parchment. He elicited
the fact that it came from this Certosa, intercepted the records on
their way for sale in Salerno, and contrived by a small present to the
driver that next night two cartloads of parchments were deposited in the
library of La Cava.] the thousands of captives they carried
off--sometimes in such numbers that the ships threatened to sink till
the more unsaleable portion of the human freight had been cast
overboard. And it went on for centuries. Pirates and slave-hunters they
were; but not a whit more so than their Christian adversaries, on whose
national rivalries they thrived. African slaves, when not chained to the
galleys, were utilized on land; so the traveller Moore records that the
palace of Caserta was built by gangs of slaves, half of them Italian,
half Turkish. We have not much testimony as to whether these Arab slaves
enjoyed their lot in European countries; but many of the Christians in
Algiers certainly enjoyed theirs. A considerable number of them refused
to profit by Lord Exmouth's arrangement for their ransom. I myself knew
the descendant of a man who had been thus sent back to his relations
from captivity, and who soon enough returned to Africa, declaring that
the climate and religion of Europe were alike insupportable.

In Saracen times the Venetians actually sold Christian slaves to the