the most agreeable description. Both parties had denounced
piracy, and had as far as in them lay done all in their power to discourage
this form of robbery. But now all was changed, and, as has been said in the
previous chapter, a situation arose analogous to that of the Spaniards in
the West Indies a century and a half later when Morgan and the buccaneers
were at the height of their maleficent prowess. The situation was
analogous, but whereas Morgan, Scott, L'Ollonais, and others terrorised
only such forces as Spain possessed in far-distant colonies, the corsairs
were a terror to all the great nations of the world.

Granada fell, as has been said, in 1492 amid the rejoicings of the
Christian States; but it had been well for Christendom as a whole if the
Caliphs of Cordova and Granada had never been defeated, and they and their
subjects driven from their homes: to form the nucleus of those piratical
States which existed from this date until well into the nineteenth century,
as the scourge and the terror of all those who, during those ages, desired
to "pass upon the seas on their lawful occasions." The capture of Granada
was separated from the fall of the Byzantine Empire by a period of
thirty-nine years, as it was in the year 1453 that Constantinople was
captured by the Caliph Mahomet II. Byzantium fell, and perhaps nothing in
the records of that Empire became it so well as that last tremendous
struggle; and when on May 29th, 1453, the Ottoman legions were victorious,
the body of the last Emperor of Byzantium was found beneath a mountain of
the slain only recognisable by his purple mantle sewn with golden bees. The
Cross which Constantine the Great had planted on the walls 1125 years
before was replaced by the Crescent, and the Christian Cathedral became
that Mosque of St. Sophia which still endures.

From the earliest days of the Moslem corsairs of the Mediterranean they
were in close communication with their co-religionists of the Ottoman
Empire; and this for a very good reason, which was that the Turk had not
the habit of the sea, but was essentially a land warrior, and, as the story
of the Sea-wolves progresses, we shall see how in a sense the Grand Turk
and the pirates became interdependent in the ceaseless wars which were
waged in the epoch of which we treat.

The fall of Constantinople resounded throughout Christendom as though it
had been the crack of doom, and all men held their breath wondering what
next mig