This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 edition. Excerpt: .their dream of an Oriental empire, the Arabs of the north, with whom were mixed the half Jewish Canaan-itish tribes, Idumeans, Moabites, &c., began to take some part in Western life, and to be influenced by Judaism and Christianity.

Mahomet appeared with his incoherent and inoffensive book, but also with his terrible doctrine of the identity of the two powers, religious and civil; and Islam, let loose upon a world still shaken by the fall of the Roman empire and by the struggle for its territory of the swarming new races, Islam gave a tremendous power to the Semitic races, a power far more fatal to the Mediterranean world than the domination of the cruel Assyrians or that of the superstitious Chaldeans. In less than a hundred years the Arabs had conquered Syria and Persia, Egypt, the African coast and Spain, and France as far at Poitiers. This conquest of the East and South by races which had not attained a high degree of intellectual culture jeopardised the future of the world, until the day when John Sobieski, in the seventeenth century, forced the Ottoman vizier to raise the siege of Vienna. It is true, indeed, that the part played by the Arabs was not lacking in brilliancy, and the evils of which they were the cause are not without compensation. There was a brief and splendid civilisation at Bagdad, at Cairo, at Kairouan, at Tlemcen, at Fez, at Cordova, and Granada; a rich literature; an active commerce which reached to China, the Malay Archipelago, and India; finally, a shock which, sending back upon Europe the translations of forgotten Greek authors, driving from Constantinople the last custodians of Hellenic science, determined the Renaissance in Italy, France, and Germany, the revolt against the humiliating, stupefying yoke of the.