ose
strongholds, hung up by their thumbs or feet, fire applied to them,
knotted strings twisted round their heads, and many other torments
inflicted to extort ransom" (Ibid, p. 266). When the barons had nearly
finished their evil lives, the church stepped in, claiming her share of
the plunder and the wealth thus amassed, and opening the gates of
paradise to the dying thief. The cities were as wretched as their
inhabitants: no paving, no cleaning, no lighting. In the country the old
Roman roads were unmended, unkept; Europe was slipping backwards into
uttermost barbarism. Meanwhile things were very different where the
blighting power of Christianity was not in the ascendant. "Europe at the
present day does not offer more taste, more refinement, more elegance,
than might have been seen, at the epoch of which we are speaking, in the
capitals of the Spanish Arabs. Their streets were lighted and solidly
paved. The houses were frescoed and carpeted; they were warmed in winter
by furnaces, and cooled in summer with perfumed air brought by
underground pipes from flower-beds. They had baths, and libraries, and
dining-halls, fountains of quicksilver and water. City and country were
full of conviviality, and of dancing to the lute and mandolin. Instead
of the drunken and gluttonous wassail orgies of their northern
neighbours, the feasts of the Saracens were marked by sobriety. Wine was
prohibited.... In the tenth century, the Khalif Hakem II. had made
beautiful Andalusia the paradise of the world. Christians, Mussulmans,
Jews, mixed together without restraint.... All learned men, no matter
from what country they came, or what their religious views, were
welcomed. The khalif had in his palace a manufactory of books, and
copyists, binders, illuminators. He kept book-buyers in all the great
cities of Asia and Africa. His library contained 400,000 volumes,
superbly bound and illuminated" (Ibid, pp. 141, 142). When the
Christians in the fifteenth century seized "beautiful Andalusia," they
erected the Inquisition, burned the books, burned the people, banished
the Jews and the Moors, and founded the miserable land known as modern
Spain.

There was but little heresy during this melancholy century; people did
not think enough even to think badly. The Paulicians spread through
Bulgaria, and established themselves there under a patriarch of their
own. Some Arians still existed. Some Anthropomorphites gave some
trouble, maintaining that God