from the Land of Yemen, survive in the nomenclature of the criminal associations to this day. These fugitives, finally starved into submission and deported by Frederick the Second, formed the great military settlement of Lucera in Apulia, and colonized great part of the Calabrias, where the conquerors of Sicily, exiled by the grandson of Barbarossa, have left their wild blood and long inheritance of wrong to filter through many a generation and break out in many a form of crime.
Amari's description of the depredations systematically committed by the despoiled and outlawed Palermitans in the thirteenth century, might almost pass for an extract from the Italian papers in our own day; and the capture by the Saracens in 1221 of Orso, Bishop of Girgenti, who ransomed himself for a large sum of money, after fourteen months' captivity, differs little from the case of the English banker kidnapped by Leone's band in the autumn of 1876. Nay, to go even further back, we might, with little alteration, make the account given by Ibu-Haukal, an Arabian traveller, of the ribât of Palermo in 972, serve to describe the haunts of the Mafia of Palermo in 1877. The ribât were barracks for volunteers, who, kept in the frontier towns at the public expense in readiness to repel invasion, formed a sort of Mahometan militia; and degenerating with the degeneracy of Islam, became a public evil instead of a public safeguard. Retaining nothing of the zealot save his disregard of human life, and nothing of the soldier save his contempt for all peaceful avocations, every form of depravity and crime found in them instruments ready made to its hand. The swaggering cutthroats who lord it in the streets of the Sicilian capital to the present hour, disdaining every trade save that of violence and bloodshed, have faithfully preserved the characteristics of their Saracen prototypes.
In Sicily, however, a fortuitous concurrence of circumstances might possibly have caused a single though startling coincidence; that between the boundary line separating conquerors and conquered six centuries ago, and the frontier of order dividing comparative tranquillity from open violence to-day. But on the Italian mainland, where we can invariably connect isolated Saracen colonization with localized modern brigandage, and track it from point to point by the moral taint it has left in the population, we are forced to ask ourselves if the recurring association can be due to mere chance? The great Saracen settlement of the Garigliano — the plague spot of central Italy — has transmitted its inheritance of violence to Fondi and Itri, the robbers' nests of the Neapolitan frontier. Round the former of these roved Marco Sciarra, the courteous bandit of the sixteenth century, immortalized by his message to Tasso, while the latter is distinguished as the birthplace of the still more famous hero, Michele Pezza, known to opera-goers as Fra Diavolo. Bovino, on the edge of the great table-land of Apulia, enjoys the reputation of being the greatest brigand nursery in that part of Italy, and a glance at the map shows its proximity to Lucera, where Frederick the Second established his swarthy chivalry in 1239. So tender was he of their religious susceptibilities, that Christian worship was prohibited within the walls of the Saracen sanctuary, and the fierce warriors, when expelled from their stronghold thirty years later, must have carried with them to the neighboring mountains a bitter sense of wrong, and undying enmity to civil order. A band of turbaned marauders occupied at Agropoli, in the mountains of Pæstum, the very haunts of the brigands who still hold at their discretion the province of Salerno, while the whole population of Calabria, which, from the deportation of exiles across the straits became assimilated to that of Sicily under the Normans, may for irreclaimable violence and savagery be classed with that of Sicily to-day.
The trade in human flesh and blood seems to spring from some instinct inherent in the African race, like that of the predatory black ants, whose expeditions are always directed to the capture of prisoners of a different species. White captives, either to put to ransom or sell as slaves, were the choicest booty of the Saracen pirates of the Mediterranean; the slave trade is still the main obstacle to civilization throughout Africa; and the same propensity, modified by circumstances, breaks out in the favorite practice of the Italian brigands of kidnapping to exact ransom. That it is no modern invention is shown by the instance above quoted — no doubt one of many — of its practice by the Sicilian Saracens as far back as the thirteenth century.
The hereditary or traditional character of brigandage is indicated by its localization for each band, while its component members are always changing, is yet perpetuated in its own district with a mysterious persistency, like some indigenous product of the soil. Its vague and undefined identity endures from generation to
