He lived, as we have said, for another eight years after the
battle of Prevesa, but his great age prevented him from pursuing a very
active career. There were, however, other and younger men, trained in the
terrible school of hardship in which his life had been passed, who proved
themselves to be his very worthy successors, even if they did not display
the same genius in war and statecraft. The conditions of this period are
somewhat remarkable when we come to consider them; Europe, which had been
sunk in a rude and uncultured barbarism during the middle ages, was
emerging under the influence of the Renaissance into a somewhat higher and
nobler conception of life. It is true that the awakening was slow, that
morally the plane on which the peoples stood was far from being an elevated
one, that altruism was far from being the note of the lives lived by the
rulers of the so-called civilised nations. For all this they had emerged
from that cimmerian darkness in which they had lived so long, and the dawn
of better things, of more stable government, of some elementary recognition
of the rights of those governed, was beginning to show above the murky
horizon.
But if the sun of European progress was slowly and painfully struggling
through the clouds, the light which had shone brightly for over seven
centuries of Moslem advance was certainly and surely dying. Beneath the
mail-clad heel of the Christian warrior the torch of learning which had
burned so brightly in Cordova and Granada had been extinguished and ground
into the dust, and the descendants of the alumni of those universities were
seeking their bread in the Mediterranean Sea in the guise of bloodthirsty
and desperate pirates.
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