d commercial treaties with the
African sovereigns, and renewed them from time to time. Some of these
States had special quarters reserved for them at Tunis, Ceuta, and
other towns; and all had their consuls in the thirteenth century, who
were protected in a manner that the English agent at Algiers would
have envied seventy years ago. The African trade was especially
valuable to the Pisans and Genoese, and there was a regular African
company trading at the Ports of Tripoli, Tunis, Buj[=e]ya, Ceuta, and
Sal[=e]. Indeed, the Genoese went so far as to defend Ceuta against
Christian crusaders, so much did commerce avail against religion; and,
on the other hand, the Christian residents at Tunis, the western
metropolis of Islam, had their own place of worship, where they were
free to pray undisturbed, as late as 1530. This tolerance was largely
due to the mild and judicious government of the Ben[=i] Hafs, whose
three centuries' sway at Tunis was an unmixed benefit to their
subjects, and to all who had relations with them.

Not that the years passed by without war and retaliation, or that
treaties made piracy impossible. In the early and more pugnacious days
of the Saracen domination conflicts were frequent. The F[=a]tim[=i]
Khalifs conquered and held all the larger islands of the Western
Mediterranean, Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearic Isles. In
1002 the Saracens pillaged Pisa, and the Pisans retaliated by burning
an African fleet. Three years later El-Muj[=a]hid ("Muget"), the lord
of Majorca, and conqueror of Sardinia, burnt part of Pisa; and another
incursion is recorded in 1011. From his stronghold at Luni in Etruria
this terrible scourge ravaged the country round, until the Pope drove
him out of Italy, and the Pisans and others turned him out of Sardinia
(1017). We read of African fleets cruising with hostile intent off the
Calabrian coast, and of the Pisans taking Bona, which was then a nest
of Corsairs (1034). Mahd[=i]ya was burnt in 1087, and Sicily conquered
by the Normans about the same time (1072). But these were in the early
days, and even then were the exceptions; in succeeding centuries,
under more settled governments, war became very rare, and mutual amity
was the prevailing policy.[3]

Piracy was always distinctly prohibited in the commercial treaties of
the African States; nevertheless piracy went on, and most
pertinaciously on the part of the Christians. The Greeks, Sardinians,
Maltese, and Genoes