and a half desultory eddies of Mussulman invasion ebbed and flowed over her southern provinces; but the maritime republics were already gathering strength to stem their progress, even before the fair-haired northern warriors appeared upon the scene, like demigods among the races of fallen humanity, to hurl back forever the dark tide that had so long threatened the shores of Europe. The new champions of the cross, come of a race fresh from Scandinavian fiords and forests, and but recently converted to Christianity from the worship of Thor and Odin, brought the vigorous vitality of their northern blood, and the first fervor of a purer faith, to overthrow by the mere impact of their touch the hectic civilization of the East and the spent fury of Mahometan fanaticism. The record of their conquest reads more like an heroic poem than a sober page of history, and we should doubt the veracity of its chroniclers were not the bare outline of its manifest results as wonderful as any of its romantic episodes. A little band of warriors cast away upon a foreign shore, who become within a few years one of the leading powers of Europe, sought as allies by both empires, courted by princes and pontiffs, and dreaded by the followers of the prophet from the Atlantic to the Ægean — their story is surely as wonderful as that of any paladins of romance.
But while they overthrew Mussulman rule in the Two Sicilies, they could not so easily obliterate the traces of Mussulman colonization. The manners and morals of the conquerors were first modified by its influence; those of the ruling family so notoriously so, that the descendants of the pious house of Hauteville were renegades in all but name, and the second Roger and the second Frederick kept court at Palermo more in the style of Eastern sultans than of Christian princes. Mere local corruption of manners, however, introduced by a luxurious court, passed away with the foreign dynasty; while the effect of a strong infusion of African blood among all classes of the native population is still perceptible after the lapse of six centuries; and no one can estimate the difficulties of the present Italian government in ruling its southern provinces who does not take into account the survival of the Saracen element among their inhabitants. This persistence of race in Italy, where the boundary of a commune sometimes has been for centuries a line of demarcation between two hostile states, and a few miles of water channel still form an impassable barrier to hereditary traits of feature and costume — where a dialect of Greek lingers still among the mountains of Calabria, and a dialect of Arabic is the common language of Sicily — must always be a problem to Anglo-Saxons, whose mother country has blent so many discordant elements into one homogeneous whole. The most superficial observer, however, cannot but conjecture the terracotta-tinted skin, the lizard-like rapidity of glance and gesture, and the mobile irregularity of feature common to the natives of Sicily and Calabria to be inherited from other ancestors than those of the more sedate and lighter-complexioned Roman or Tuscan, while a more intimate knowledge of the people only brings to light a still greater difference in their morals and modes of thought.
The condition of Sicily is notorious; but while Liberals and reactionaries dispute over the share of their respective parties in causing it, they do not care to trace its origin further back, and connect it with the history of the remote past. Yet it is a striking fact that the ancient geographical distribution of Saracens and Sicilians still influences the comparative degree of public safety in the island, and that tracing on a map the territory where violence and anarchy at present reign supreme, we accurately define the zone where Christianity was almost extirpated under the rule of the Moslem, where Mahometanism triumphant struck its roots deepest, and persecuted, found its last refuge in the land.
It is at least a coincidence that the country round Palermo, Girgenti, and Trapani, known to-day as the disturbed provinces, was described in the thirteenth century as the Saracen march. There in the wild borderland, where the war of race was fought to the bitter end, the dim tradition of violence still survives under other forms, and adapts itself to altered circumstances. There the Mahometan settlers, again and again expelled from their homesteads, harassed and plundered the new occupants from their retreats in the mountains; and there the modern brigands, lording it over the land as if they felt themselves its lawful proprietors, still levy fine and blackmail as the ransom of its possession by others. There the Saracens, driven from their capital by religious persecution, organized themselves in the wilderness as bands of outlaws, resuming their hereditary classification as Arab tribes; and there, in Palermo and its district, the names of those very tribes, imported by the aristocracy of the desert
