They were expelled for ever from Christian soil, or else
were forced to live in a state of degrading servitude, sore oppressed by an
alien rule, in the land which their forbears had won and kept by the sword.
There was jubilation, as has been said, in Christendom, but the knights and
nobles who flocked from all parts of Europe to join the standard of the
Catholic monarchs had no prevision of the consequences, no idea of the
legacy that they were leaving to their descendants.
It is of this legacy that we have to speak, and there has been none more
terrible, none fraught with more awful suffering for the human race. The
broken hosts of the Moslem chivalry became the corsairs of the
Mediterranean: ruthless pirates freed from all restraint of human pity,
living only to inflict the maximum of suffering upon their Christian foes,
who, having sown the wind at the taking of Granada, reaped in the coming
centuries a whirlwind of blood and agony which continued down to the
bombardment of Algiers by Lord Exmouth in 1816, and even later than that
date.
Warriors to a man, the hosts of Boabdil crossed the Straits of Gibraltar
into Africa; warriors but now broken men, from whom had been reft not only
their lands and houses but even the chance of remaining in their native
country. Religious toleration had been the rule of the Moslem States in
Spain. In the name of religion they had been expropriated; therefore
toleration was slain, and to exalt the Crescent above the Cross became the
duty of every fighting Mohammedan.
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