their sabres, by extending the faith of their prophet by force of arms and usurpation of dominion. Strengthened and inspired by a commission which they esteemed divine, the rapidity of their conquests far exceeded those of the Goths and Vandals. The majority of the inhabitants of every country they subdued embraced their religion, imbibed their principles, and the professors Mohammedism became the most formidable combination ever was leagued together against the rest of mankind. Morocco and the adjacent countries, at this time amazingly populous, had now received the doctrines of the Koran, and incorporated with the Saracens. And the Turkish arms spread slaughter and desolation from the south of Spain to Italy and the islands of the Mediterranean. All the rapine and carnage committed by the Gothic conquerors were now amply returned on their less warlike posterity. In Spain, and the province now called Portugal, the Mohammedans erected powerful kingdoms, and their lust of conquest threatened destruction to every Christian power. But a romantic military spirit revived in Europe, under the auspices of Charlemagne. The Mohammedans, during the reign of this sovereign, made a most formidable irruption into Europe, and France in particular felt the weight of their fury;when that political monarch, by inventing new military honours, drew the adventurous youth of every Christian power to his standards, and in fact, a circumstance, however neglected by historians, gave birth to the Crusades, the beginning of which, in propriety, ought to be dated from his reign. Few indeed are the historians of this period, but enough remains to prove that though the writers of the old romance seized upon it, though they gave full room to the wildest flights of imagination, and added the inexhaustible machinery of magic to the adventures of their heroes, yet the origin of their fictions was founded on historical facts[1]. Yet, however this period may thus resemble the fabulous ages of Greece, certain it is, that an Orlando, a Rinaldo, a Rugero, and other celebrated names in romance,
- ↑ Ariosto, who adopted the legends of the old romance, chose this period for the subject of his Orlando Furioso. Paris besieged by the Saracens, Orlando and the other Christian knights assemble in aid of Charlemagne, who are opposed in their amours and in battle by Rodomont, Ferraw, and other Saracen knights. That there was a noted Moorish Spaniard, named Ferraw, a redoubted champion of that age, we have the testimony of Marcus Antonius Sabellicus, a writer of note of the fifteenth century.
