ART. III.-MOROCCO, PAST AND PRESENT.

1. The Moorish Empire: a Historical Epitome. By Budgett Meakin, for some years editor of The Times of Morocco.' London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1899.

2. Au Maroc. By Pierre Loti. Paris: C. Lévy, 1890. And other works.

STUDENT, traveller, and Christian who should make us better acquainted with any part of the world of Islamso unlike our own, yet in many points touching it as with a sword of fire-would deserve, we think, very ample recognition. Such a well-equipped writer is Mr. Budgett Meakin, who, in putting forth his volumes on Morocco and the Moors, may claim that he is doing England a public service. Mr. Meakin's ambition is to write history in the spirit of Arnold when editing Thucydides he would offer us not an idle inquiry about remote ages and forgotten institutions,' but a living picture of things present' for the guidance of the statesman and the citizen. He has spent fifteen years of labour and study in this 'Western Turkey,' and is exceedingly familiar, as every line of his published works proves, with its language, customs, and institutes. He has travelled in all the Mohammedan countries, from India to Morocco. There is no previous author on this subject whom he has not consulted, or indeed epitomised, from those picturesque Hamites, Ibn Khaldun and Leo Africanus, to the rough sailor Pellow, the erudite Höst, and the incomparable Dozy. A style unpretending, but clear and persuasive, carries us along to the end, while incidental allusions to minute but telling circumstances in the everyday life of this curious people satisfy us that the author has used eyes and ears to good purpose, and may be trusted when he appeals to his own experience.

Few names convey to English ears associations at once so opulent in romance and so confused in their setting as the words 'Moor' and 'Moorish.' They belong hardly at all to the present; but in the past they signified a whole world of heroism, suffering, art, and literature which has sunk out of sight, though it can never be forgotten. When we think of 'the Moor,' Othello rises up before us with his dusky features; we glance at that Prince of Morocco, the aspirant to Portia's hand, who, in The Merchant of Venice, boasts that his complexion is the shadowed livery of the burnished sun'; we call to mind Robinson Crusoe, taken by the 'Sallee rovers'; and there, perhaps, our reminiscences fail, unless we have 'crammed' the story of Tangiers for some examination which

dealt with the reign of Charles II, with Colonel Kirke, Lancelot Addison, and Pepys' 'Diary.'

But still, we know that during hundreds of years the Moor was spoken of in this country as a 'blackamoor,' though his skin was by no means sable; and a blackamoor was the fiercest and most formidable of barbarians, a sort of 'Tamburlaine' on land, a pirate at sea, before whom Christian merchantmen fled in terror, like doves at the swoop of the falcon. The Moor had boundless courage and no pity; his tremendous onset would ' outbrave the heart most daring on this earth'; and Venice, England, Holland paid him a tribute, as shameful as it seemed indispensable, to protect their subjects from evils worse than death. For this barbarian held the Pillars of Hercules, lorded it over many waters from the Canaries to Candia, reckoned his Christian slaves by thousands, and laughed to scorn the prayers of Spanish friars, the diplomacy of the Dutch, the threatenings of infidels, English, French, or Castilian, to whom so late as the year 1779 he gave haughty licence to destroy one another in his ports or on his shores.' Such had the Moors been for over six hundred years, from 1189, when Pope Innocent III wrote to Yakub el Mansur 'the Victorious,' begging protection for the monks who went to ransom captives out of his hand, down to 1803, when the Americans, first among civilised peoples, refused blackmail to these most cruel villains,' as they were justly termed by an English historian in the preceding century. In character, if not in blood, they were Turks, who preyed on Western Christendom as their brethren at Constantinople preyed on the Nazarenes of Asia Minor and in the Balkan Peninsula, without truce or compassion.

Yet this lugubrious picture had some splendid and even gracious lights. While the Moors of Morocco displayed qualities which their religion, so far from curbing, did but consecrate with a Mexican ferocity, the Moors of Spain were eminent for their patronage of letters, their taste in architecture, their orders of chivalry; and the names of their capital cities, Seville, Cordova, and Granada, to this day affect us like music heard in a dream. Not many Europeans, except scholars or travellers, possess even a dim idea of the African Marrakesh, Fez, or Mequinez; but who does not know the Court of Lions in the Alhambra, or the exquisite outline of the Giralda Tower at Seville? By an amazing though not unexampled stroke the romance of the Moorish Empire in Spain has conquered even those whom a common faith and love of freedom should have ranged on the side of the Christians; nor do we yet altogether prize at a just value the achievements of the native genius in

art as well as in war. To Englishmen medieval Spain is Moslem; they are apt to imagine it was Arabic in race no less than in language, and on this point they have much to learn.

We are accustomed to speak of the soldiers of Islam who, in less than a century after Mohammed's death, overran North Africa, as Saracens, from an Arabic word which signifies the East.' Easterns, indeed, these 'Sharkein' were, true disciples of the Koran, that least poetical among sacred books; and their dry, legal, and furious temper has lasted on, unchanged like the Desert, whose sons they have always shown themselves to be. But though they conquered, they did not colonise the Mauretanian sea coast, much less the wild and inaccessible highlands of the Atlas, which the Romans had never penetrated, and which even the Carthaginians never subdued during the palmiest days of their dominion. The Mohammedan conquest of Africa,' says Dozy, than whom no more competent authority has ever written on this subject, was only achieved after seventy years of murderous warfare, and then on condition that the rights [of the Berbers] should never be interfered with, and that they should be treated, not as vanquished, but as brothers.' Before the hundredth year of the Hegira, in A.D. 718, says Ibn Abd el Hakim, 'there remained not a single Berber who had not become a Moslem.' This circumstance, by making the wholesale confiscation of native property impossible, would itself have checked immigration from the East; but it appears that no general movement of Arab tribes across Africa took place until after 1049, when many inhabitants of Nejd and the Hejaz, who had been transported to Upper Egypt and would not stay there, fled to Morocco. Such were the Hilali Arabs, who occupied the plains of which they then made themselves masters, while the older inhabitants retired to the mountains where their descendants are now dwelling. But long before this revolution at home, the Berbers had carved Spain into kingdoms for Islam. They were not Saracens; the Spaniards whom they drove out knew and feared them under the name of Mosarabite, which means only Arabicised'; and undoubtedly that is a true account of this picturesque and chivalrous people. In religion they were Easterns of the Desert; in race, it is plausible to maintain that old European affinities bring them within the circle of our cousins, if not of our brothers.

Morocco, which its inhabitants call Maghrib el Aksa, the Far West,' lies, in fact, at an enormous distance from the home of the Semites. Geographically, it is a continuation of Spain across the Straits of Gibraltar. It has a similar conformation of high mountains and arid plains, watered by rivers which are

We may

foaming torrents at one season to disappear the next. describe it as the country of the Atlas, leaning down to meet the Atlantic on its western slope, the Mediterranean on its northern. To the east and south its limits have ever been

vague or fluctuating. From Algeria it is divided by an artificial line, which the French, who contemplate some day absorbing Morocco, may overstep when they find it convenient. One of their boldest travellers, the Viscount de Foucauld, now a Trappist, has visited not only the valley of the Sus, but the littleknown Southern Atlas, and other points below Mogador, where the frightful Iron Coast begins, dangerous at all times and during winter inaccessible. But the Great Atlas, called Daran of the Berbers, is itself a magnificent country of mountains, rising from four to twelve thousand feet along the main ridge, with peaks still higher. In its secluded glens timber is plentiful; from its snowy steeps countless rivers descend. Unhappily, the lowlands above which it soars have been stripped bare of forest; the beauty of their colour depends on bright spring blossoms and a transparent atmosphere; in summer they are scorched and brown. Every tourist has lifted his eyes to the lesser ranges of Atlas or the Riffian hills that stretch for two hundred miles along the Mediterranean; but the interior is less known than almost any part of the Dark Continent. The tribes which have marched over this African Spain-five times as large as England and Wales-from before the dawn of history, may well be allied in blood to the Basques, the Celtiberians, and other mixed families, not Canaanite or Punic, whatever else they were; and Dr. Bertholon maintains that the Berber language, yet surviving, is a Phrygian dialect of Greek. The designation of Morocco is, however, late and Oriental, connected with words like Algarve, Oreb, Erebus, and perhaps Europe-all of which are names indicating sundown, or darkness, given to places by a population that kept moving towards the West. The earlier races belonged to the Stone Age, and have left, as Tissot informs us, 'dolmens, menhirs, galgals, barrows, and cromlechs' in the land where they were cave-dwellers. Such were the men that Hanno fell in with during his Periplus, when he sailed from Carthage into the Great Ocean and perhaps advanced as far south as the Niger.

With the Roman conquests in Africa, the history of Morocco may be said to begin. There is a wild legend in Procopius, who talks of two white columns existing near Tangiers in his day-the period of Belisarius and his triumph over the Vandals -on which an inscription stated, We have fled before the face of Joshua, the robber, son of Nun.' It may be permitted Vol. 192.-No. 384.

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us to say with Gibbon, I believe in the columns, I doubt the inscription, I reject the pedigree.' We know, however, that Sertorius in 78 B.C. invaded Spain from Africa with an army which contained seven hundred Berbers; and a most interesting anticipation it was of the raid, some eight centuries later, which Tarik made with only one hundred horse and an equal number of foot-soldiers. Three times have the Moors conquered Spain, once from the Visigoths, and twice from their fellows in Islam. The prospect across that narrow strait must have been always tempting; and if the races were mingled from prehistoric periods a great deal which has hitherto seemed mysterious in the Moorish development of Spain will admit of explanation. The 'Saracens,' to whom our mediæval ancestors were indebted for their philosophy and their science-in whatever degree-will then be more or less of the Aryan stock, and by temper susceptible to the influences which distinguish Greeks, Latins, and Germans from unprogressive Orientals.

However this may be, it is certain that the Roman province never extended farther along the coast than to Salli; while its innermost limit was a little beyond Volubilis, the ruins of which are still extant on the hill of Zarhon. Mountains to the south and east hemmed in these northern plains; the country below Salli was fertile and deserted-Pliny says it was the home of elephants. Mauretania (such is the correct spelling) under Tiberius included little except Algeria. The province was not considered a valuable one, although its forests yielded the citrus wood, called by the natives thuja, of which we read in descriptions of Roman luxury; and a purple dye was drawn from its seas which vied with the Tyrian. Berber troops assisted Trajan under Lusius Quietus, who for these services was made Governor of Palestine; but with him they revolted against Hadrian; and the last we hear of Mauretania during the Imperial age is that a general of Antoninus Pius drove certain Moors into the valleys of the Atlas. Gibbon tells us of the Gætuli and other native tribes, that during the vigour of the Roman power they observed a respectful distance from Carthage and the sea-shore; under the feeble reign of the Vandals they invaded the cities of Numidia, occupied the sea-coast from Tangier to Cæsarea, and pitched their camps with impunity in the fertile province of Byzacium.' The Vandals, Suevi, and Goths had passed into Spain with Genseric in 429. They entered Africa, and made Ceuta and Tangiers tributary; but they do not appear to have established themselves in Morocco. Nor would it be safe to infer from the one hundred and seventy episcopal sees which were reckoned within the Imperial pro