Mohammedanism, religion of Mohammed. The historian- philosopher of our day has painted his portrait so perfectly that it would be a mistake to present any other to readers.

To have an idea, he says, of Mohammedanism , which has given a new form to so many empires, one must first recall that it was at the end of the sixth century, in 570, that Mohammed was born in Mecca in Arabia. His country was at the time defending its freedom against the Persians and against those princes of Constantinople who still kept the name of Roman Emperors.

The children of the great Noushirvan, unworthy of such a father, ruined Persia by civil wars and by parricides. The successors of Justinian were demeaning the name of the Empire; Maurice had just been dethroned by the forces of Phocas and by the intrigues of the Syriac patriarch and some bishops, whom Phocas later punished for having served him. The blood of Maurice and his five sons had flowed under the hand of the executioner, and Pope Gregory the Great, enemy of the patriarchs of Constantinople, tried to attract the tyrant Phocas into his party by showering him with praise and by condemning the memory of Maurice, whom he had praised during his lifetime.

The empire of Rome in the Occident was destroyed; a deluge of barbarians, Goths, Herules, Huns, and Vandals were inundating Europe when in the deserts of Arabia, Mohammed laid the foundations of Muslim religion and power.

We know that Mohammed was the youngest son of a poor family; that he was for a long time in the service of a woman of Mecca named Khadijah, who was a merchant; that he married her and that he lived in obscurity until the age of forty years. Only at that age did he deploy the talents that rendered him superior to his compatriots. He had a lively and strong eloquence, bare of artifice and method, such as was necessary to the Arabs; an air of authority and ingratiating himself, animated by piercing eyes and by a fortunate physiognomy; the intrepidness of Alexander and his liberality, and the sobriety that Alexander would have needed in order to be a great man in everything.

The love that an ardent temperament made necessary for him, and which gave him so many wives and concubines, did not weaken either his courage or his application, or his health. This is how contemporary Arabs speak of him, and this portrait is justified by his actions.

Knowing the character of his fellow citizens, their ignorance, their credulity, and their disposition to enthusiasm, he saw that he could stand as a prophet, he feigned some revelations, he spoke: he made himself believed first in his house, which was probably the most difficult. In three years, he had forty-two convinced disciples; Omar, his persecutor, became his apostle; at the end of five years, he had one hundred and fourteen.

He taught the Arabs, adorers of the stars, that one should adore only the God who made them, that the books of the Jews and Christians being corrupted and falsified, one should hold them in horror: that one was obliged under pain of eternal punishment to pray five times a day, to give alms, and especially, in recognizing only one God, to believe in Mohammed as his last prophet; and finally, to risk one's life for one's faith.

He prohibited the use of wine because abuse of it is dangerous. He kept the circumcision practiced by the Arabs as well as by the ancient Egyptians, instituted probably to prevent the abuses of the first puberty, which often enervate youth. He allowed men a plurality of women, an immemorial custom in all the Orient. He in no way altered the morality that has always been the same deep down among all men, and which no legislator has ever corrupted. Moreover, his religion was more demanding than any other, by its legal ceremonies, by the number and form of the prayers and ablutions, nothing being more awkward for human nature than practices that nature does not demand and that have to be repeated every day.

As recompense he proposed a life eternal, in which the soul would be intoxicated by all the spiritual pleasures, and in which the body, resuscitated with the senses, would taste by these very senses all the voluptuousness that is its own.

This religion is called Islamism , which signifies resignation to the will of God. The book that contains it is called the Qur'an , that is to say, the book , or the writing, or the reading par excellence .

All the interpreters of this book agree that its morality is contained in these words: « search for the one who chases you, give to the one who takes from you, pardon the one who offends you, do good to all, do not argue with the ignorant». He also recommended never disputing with scholars. But, in this part of the world, it was not suspected that there were science and Enlightenment elsewhere.

Among the incoherent declamations with which this book is filled in accordance with Oriental taste, one can still find morsels that might appear sublime. Mohammed, for example, in speaking of the cessation of the flood, expresses himself thus: «God says: earth, swallow up your waters: sky, draw up the waters that you have poured: the sky and the earth obeyed».

His definition of God is of a veritably sublime kind. When asked who was that Allah that he was announcing: « He is the one," he replied, "who takes being from himself and from whom others take it, who engenders nothing and who is in no way engendered, and to whom nothing is similar in the whole realm of beings ».

It is true that contradictions, absurdities, and anachronisms are spread thickly in this book. One finds there especially a profound ignorance of the simplest and most well-known Physics. This is the touchstone of books that false religions claim to be written by the Divinity; for God is neither absurd nor ignorant: but the vulgar who do not see these faults, adore them and the Imams employ a deluge of words to palliate them.

Mohammed having been persecuted in Mecca, his flight, named hegira , was the epoch of his glory and the foundation of his empire. Formerly a fugitive, he became a conqueror. Taking refuge in Medina, he persuaded the people there and subjugated them. He first defeated with a hundred and thirteen men from Mecca who had come with him a thousand in number. This victory was a miracle in the eyes of his sectarians and persuaded them that God was fighting for them as they were for him. After that, they hoped for the conquest of the world. Mohammed took Mecca, saw his persecutors at his feet, and conquered in nine years, through word and through arms, all of Arabia, a country as large as Persia, and which neither the Persians nor the Romans had been able to subjugate.

In his first successes, he had written to the King of Persia Cosroes I, to the Emperor Heraclius, to the prince of the Copts, governor of Egypt, to the king of the Abyssinians, and to a king named Mandar who reigned in a province near the Persian Gulf.

He dared to propose that they embrace his religion; and what is strange is that of these princes two made themselves Mohammedans: the King of Abyssinia and this Mandar. Cosroes tore up the letter from Mohammed with indignation. Heraclius responded with presents. The prince of the Copts sent him a girl who passed for a chef - d'oeuvre of Nature and who was called the beautiful Maria.

After nine years, Mohammed, thinking he was strong enough to extend his conquests and his religion among the Greeks and Persians, began by attacking Syria, then subject to Heraclius, and took several towns from him. This emperor able in the metaphysical disputes of religion and who had embraced the party of the Monotheists, soon met with two rather singular propositions; one on the part of Cosroès II, whom he had long since vanquished, and the other from Mohammed. Cosroès wanted Heraclius to embrace the religion of the Mages and Mohammed wanted him to become a Muslim.

The new prophet gave a choice to those he wanted to subjugate, of embracing his sect or paying a tribute. This tribute was set by the Al-Qur'an at thirteen drachmas of silver per year for each head of family. Such a modest tax is a proof that the peoples that he subjected were very poor. The tribute has since increased. Of all the legislators who have founded religions, he is the only one who has extended his by conquests. Other people have carried their worship with iron and fire among foreign nations; but no founder of a sect has been a conqueror. This unique privilege is in the eyes of Muslims the strongest argument that the Divinity takes care to assist their prophet.

At the end, Mohammed, master of Arabia and redoutable to all his neighbors, struck by a mortal sickness in Medina at the age of sixty-three years and a half, wanted his final moments to appear those of a hero and righteous man: « may anyone to whom I have done violence and injustice appear", he cried, "and I am ready to make him reparation». A man stood up who asked him to return some money; Mohammed had it given to him and expired shortly afterward, regarded as a great man even by those who knew he was an imposter and revered as a prophet by all the rest.

Contemporary Arabs wrote his life in the greatest detail. Everything therein shows the barbarous simplicity of the time they call heroic . His contract of marriage with his first wife Khadijah is expressed in these words: « given that Khadijah loves Mohammed, and similarly that Mohammed loves her ». One finds the meals his wives prepared and one learns the names of his swords and his horses. One may remark among his people customs especially conforming to those of the ancient Hebrews (I am speaking only of customs): the same ardor for running to combat in the name of the Divinity, the same thirst for booty, the same sharing of spoils, and everything relating to this subject.

But in considering here only human things, and always setting aside the judgments of God and his unknown ways, why did Mohammed and his successors, who commenced their conquests precisely like the Jews, do such great things and the Jews such small ones? Is this not because Muslims took the greatest care to subject the vanquished to their religion, sometimes by force, sometimes by persuasion? The Hebrews on the contrary scarcely associated foreigners with their cult; the Arab Muslims incorporated to themselves the other nations and the Hebrews always kept themselves separate. It appears, finally, that the Arabs had a more courageous enthusiasm, a more generous and more hardy policy. The Hebrew people had a horror of other nations and always feared being enslaved. The Arab people on the contrary wanted to attract everything to them, and thought themselves made to dominate.

Mohammed's last will was not executed. He had named Ali his son-in-law and Fatima his daughter as heirs of his empire: but the ambition that triumphs even over fanaticism, engaged the chiefs of his army to declare as caliph (that is to say, vicar of the prophet) the elderly Abu Bakr, his father-in-law, in the hope that they might soon themselves share the succession: Ali remained in Arabia, awaiting the time to be right.

Abu Bakr first gathered into one corpus the disparate pages of the Al-Qur'an. The chapters of this book were read in the presence of all the chiefs and its invariable authenticity was established.

Soon Abu Bakr led his Muslims into Palestine, and there defied the brother of Heraclius. He died shortly afterward with the reputation as the most generous of all men, having taken for himself only about forty sols of our money per day of all the booty that was shared, and having made it be seen how much the contempt for small interests may accord with the ambition that great interests inspire.

Abu Bakr passes among the Mohammedans for a great man and a faithful Muslim. He is one of the saints of the Al-Qur'an. The Arabs report his testament conceived in these terms: « in the name of God most merciful, here is the testament of Abu Bakr made in the time that he was going to pass from this world to the other, in the time when the infidels believe, when the impious cease to doubt, and when liars speak the truth ». This beginning seems to be from a persuaded man; nevertheless, Abu Bakr, father-in-law of Mohammed, had seen this prophet up close. He may have been himself fooled by the prophet, or else he had been complicit in an illustrious imposture that he regarded as necessary. His place required him to impose it upon men during his life and until his death.

Omar, elected after him, was one of the most rapid conquerors who ever desolated the earth. He first took Damascus, celebrated for the fertility of its territory, for the best works of steel in the Universe, for the silk stuff that still bears its name. He chased from Syria and Phoenicia the Greeks who were called Romans . He received in settlement, after a long siege, the city of Jerusalem, which had been almost wholly occupied by foreigners succeeding each other, one after another, since David had captured it for its ancient citizens.

At the same time, the lieutenants of Omar advanced into Persia. The last of the Persian kings, whom we call Hormidas IV, engaged the Arabs in battle a few leagues from Madain, which had become the capital of this empire; he lost the battle and his life. The Persians passed under the domination of Omar more easily that they had gone under the yoke of Alexander. Thus fell the ancient religion of the Mages, which the victor over Darius had respected, since he never touched the cults of vanquished peoples.

While a lieutenant of Omar subjugated Persia, another took all of Egypt from the Romans, and a great part of Lybia. In this conquest was burned the famous library of Alexandria, a monument to the knowledge and errors of men, commenced by Ptolemy Philadelphia and augmented by so many kings. Then the Sarrazins wanted no other science than the Al-Qur'an; but they already let it be seen that their genius might extend to everything. The entreprise to renovate in Egypt the ancient canal dug by the kings and later restablished by Trajan, and thus to connect the Nile with the Red Sea, is worthy of the most enlightened centuries. A governor of Egypt undertook this great project under the caliphate of Omar, and finished it. What a difference between the genius of the Arabs and that of the Turks! The latter left handiwork to perish, whose conservation was worth more than the possession of a great province.

The success of this conquering people seems more due to the enthusiasm that animated them and to the spirit of the nation, than to its leaders: for Omar was assassinated by a Persian slave in 603. Otman, his successor, was killed in 655 in a riot. Ali, the famous son-in-law of Mohammed, was elected and ruled only amidst the troubles; he was assassinated after five years like his predecessors and yet Muslim arms were still victorious. This Ali whom the Persians revere today and whose principles they follow in opposition to those of Omar, finally obtained the caliphate, and transfered the siege of the caliphs from the city of Medina where Mohammed was buried, to the city of Couffa on the banks of the Euphrates: today barely the ruins remain! This was the fate of Babylon, of Seleucia, and all the ancient towns of Chaldea, which were built only of bricks.

It is evident that the genius of the Arab people, put into movement by Mohammed, alone accomplished everything for almost three centuries and resembled in that the genius of the ancient Romans. In fact it was under Valid, the least warlike of the caliphs, that the greatest conquests were made. One of his generals extended his empire as far as Samarkand in 707. Another attacked at the same time the empire of the Greeks around the Black Sea. Another, in 711, passed from Egypt to Spain, which had been easily subjected in turn by the Carthaginians, by the Romans, by the Goths and Vandals, and finally by these Arabs we call Moors . There they first established the kingdom of Cordoba. The sultan of Egypt truly shook the yoke of the Grand Caliph of Baghdad, and Abderam, governor of conquered Spain, no longer recognized the Sultan of Egypt: neverthless everything bowed still to Muslim arms.

This Abderam, grandson of the Caliph Hesham, took the kingdoms of Castille, Navarre, Portugal, and Arragon. He established himself in Languedoc; he took Guienne and Poitou; and without Charles Martel who took from him victory and life, France would be a Mohammedan province.

After the reign of nineteen caliphs of the house of the Ommiades began the dynasty of the Abassid caliphs around 752 of our era. Abu Amir Almanzor, second Abbasid Caliph, fixed the seat of this great empire at Baghdad, beyond the Euphrates, in Chaldea. The Turks say that he laid its foundations. The Persians assure us it was very ancient and that he merely repaired it. It is this city that is sometimes called Babylon and which has been the object of so many wars between Persia and Turkey.

The domination of the caliphs lasted 655 years: despotic in religion as in government, they were certainly not all adored like the Grand Lama, but they had a more real authority; and even in the time of their decadence, they were respected by the princes who had persecuted them. All these sultans—Turkish, Arabic, Tartar— received investiture from the caliphs, with much less contestation that several Christian princes have received from the popes. One never kissed the feet of the caliph, but one prostrated oneself on the threshold of his palace.

If ever any power threatened the whole earth, it was that of these caliphs, for they had the rights derived from throne and altar, from the sword of justice and from [popular] enthusiasm. Their orders amounted to oracles, and their soldiers to so many fanatics.

After 671, they laid siege to Constantinople which would one day become Mohammedan; internal divisions, almost inevitable among so many ferocious chiefs, did not arrest their conquests. They resembled in this point the ancient Romans, who amidst their civil wars had subjugated Asia Minor.

As the Mohammedans became powerful, they became more polished. These caliphs, always recognized as the sovereigns of religion and apparently of the Empire by those who no longer received their orders from so far away, were tranquil in their new Babylon and there gave the arts a re-birth. Aaron Rashild, contemporary of Charlemagne, more respected than his predecessors, and who knew how to make himself obeyed as far away as Spain and the Indies, reanimated the sciences, made the agreeable and useful arts flourish, attracted people of letters, composed verses, and replaced barbarism with courtesy. Under him the Arabs, who had already adopted Indian numbers, brought them to Europe. In German and in France we would not have known the course of the stars except by means of these same Arabs. The very word almanach still testifies to this.

The Almagest of Ptolemy was translated from Greek into Arabic by the astronomer Ibn Hunayn. The caliph Al-Mamun had geometrically measured one degree of meridian to determine the size of the earth: an operation that was only done in France more than 900 years afterward under Louis XIV. This same astronomer Ibn Hunayn pushed his observations quite far, recognized that either Ptolemy had fixed the greatest declension of the sun too much to the north, or that the obliqueness of the ecliptic had changed. He even saw that the period of thirty-six thousand years that had been assigned to the assumed movement of the fixed stars from occident to orient, must be much shortened.

Chemistry and Medicine were cultivated by the Arabs. Chemistry, perfected today by us, was only made known to us by them. We owe them new remedies, called minoratifs , more gentle and more salutary than those that were previously in use in the school of Hippocrates and Galen. Finally, from the second century of Mohammed, it was necessary for the Christians of the West to be instructed among the Muslims.

An infallible proof of the superiority of a nation in the arts of the mind is the culture perfected by Poetry. We are not referring to that bombastic and gigantesque poetry, to a collection of insipid commonplaces on the sun, moon and stars, mountains and seas: but to that wise and brave poetry such as flourished in the time of Augustus, such as was seen to be reborn under Louis XIV. This poetry of image and sentiment was known in the time of Aaron Rashild. Here is an example among others that struck M. de Voltaire, and which he reports because it is short. It deals with the famous disgrace of Giafar le Barmécide:

"Mortal, feeble mortal, whom fate makes prosper/ Taste from its gifts the dangerous charms/ Know what is a king's passing favor;/ Contemplate Barmécide, and tremble at being happy" . This last verse is of great beauty. The Arabic language had the advantage of being perfected for a long time; it was fixed before Mohammed, and has in no way altered since. None of the jargons then spoken in Europe has left the least trace. Wherever we turn, it must be admitted that we exist only since yesterday. If we go farther than other peoples in more than one genre, it is perhaps because we arrived last.

If one envisages the Muslim religion at present, one sees it embraced by all the Indies, and by the east coasts of Africa where they were trafficking. If one looks at their conquests, first the caliph Aaron Rashild imposed a tribute of seventy thousand écus of gold per year on the Empress Irene. The Emperor Nicéphore having then refused to pay the tribute, Aaron took the Island of Cyprus, and came to ravage Greece. Al-Mamun his grandson, a prince so commendable for his love of the sciences and for his knowledge, with his lieutenants took possession of the Island of Crete in 826. The Muslims built Candia, which they retook more recently.

In 828, the same Africans who had subjugated Spain and made incursions into Sicily, came back again to desolate this fertile island, encouraged by a Sicilian named Ephemius , who had married a nun, after the example of his emperor Michael, was pursued by the laws that the empereor had rendered favorable to himself, did almost the same in Sicily as the Count Julian had done in Spain.

Neither the Greek emperors nor those of the occident were able to chase the Muslims from Sicily at that time, so badly governed were both Orient and Occcident! These conquerors would have made themselves masters of Italy if they had been united; but their mistakes saved Rome, as those of the Carthaginians had once saved it. They left Sicily in 846 with a numerous fleet. They entered by the mouth of the Tiber; and finding only an almost deserted country, they went to lay seige to Rome. They took the outskirts, and having pillaged the rich church of St. Peter outside the walls, they lifted the seige to go to combat an army of the French, who came to help Rome under a general of the Emperor Lothaire. The French army was beaten; but the relieved city was not taken and this expedition, which should have been a conquest, became due to their discord only an incursion of barbarians.

They quickly came back with a formidable army that seemed about to destroy Italy, and make a Mohammedan village of the capital of Christianity. Pope Leon IV, taking in this danger an authority that the generals of Emperor Lothair seemed to have abandoned, proved himself worthy in defending Rome of ruling it as sovereign.

He had employed the riches of the Church to repair the walls, to elevate towers, to lay chains on the Tiber. He armed the militia at his own expense, engaged the inhabitants of Naples and Gayette to come defend the coasts and the port of Ostia, without lacking the sage precaution of taking hostages from them, knowing well that those who are powerful enough to rescue us are also powerful enough to harm us. He himself visited all the posts, and met the Sarrazins when they raided, not in the equipage of a warrior, as Goslin Bishop of Paris had done, upon an even more urgent occasion, but as a pontiff who exhorted a Christian people and as a king who ensured the safety of his subjects.

He was born Roman; the courage of the first age of the Republic was revived in him at a time of cowardliness and corruption, like one of the fine monuments of ancient Rome that one sometimes finds in the ruins of the new one. His courage and his care were seconded. They valiantly met the Sarrazins on their raid; and the tempest having dissipated half of their vessels, a party of these conquerors, escaped from shipwreck, were put to the chain.

The pope made his victory useful, by putting to work on the fortifications of Rome and on its embellishment, the same hands that were going to destroy it. The Mohammedans, though, remained masters of Garillan, beween Capoue and Gayette; but more as a colony of independent corsairs than as disciplined conquerors.

And so in the ninth century, the Muslims were simultaneously in Rome and in Constantinople, masters of Persia, of Syria, of Arabia, of all the coasts of Africa to the Atlas Mountains, and of three quarters of Spain: but these conquerors did not form a nation like the Romans, who, although extended almost as far as they, made only a single people.

Under the famous caliph Al-Mamun around the year 815, shortly after the death of Charlemagne, Egypt was independent, and the great Cairo was the residence of another caliph. The prince of Mauritania Tangitane, under the title of miramolin , was absolute master of the empire of Morocco. Nubia and Lybia obeyed another caliph. The Abderams who had founded the kingdom of Cordoba, could not prevent other Mohammedans from founding that of Toledo. All these new dynasties revered the caliph as the successor of their prophet. Like the Christians who went in crowds on pilgrimage to Rome, the Mohammedans of all parts of the world went to Mecca, governed by a sherriff named by the caliph; and it was principally due to pilgrimage that the caliph, master of Mecca, was venerable to all the princes of his faith; but these princes distinguished religion from their interests, divesting the caliph in rendering him homage.

Neverthless, the arts flourished in Cordoba; sophisticated pleasures, magnificence, and gallantry reigned at the court of the Moorish kings. The tournaments, the combats on the barriers, are perhaps the invention of these Arabs. They had spectacles, theatres, which, crude as they were, showed again that the other peoples were less polished than these Mohammedans: Cordoba was the only country of the Occident where Geometry, Astronomy, Chemistry, and Medicine were cultivated. Sancho the Fat, King of Léon, was obliged to go to Cordoba in 956, to put himself in the hands of an Arab doctor, who, invited by the king, wanted the king to come to him.

Cordoba is a country of delights, watered by the Guadalquivir, where forests of lemon trees, orange trees, and pomegranates perfume the air, and where everything invites limpness. Luxury and pleasure ultimately corrupted the Muslim kings; their domination was in the tenth century like that of almost all the Christian princes, divided into small states. Toledo, Murcia, Valencia, Huesca each had its king; it was time to overwhelm this divided power, but this time did not arrive until a century later; first in 1085 the Moors lost Toledo, and all of New Castille fell to the Cid. Alphonse, called the battler , took from them Zarragoza in 1114; Alphonse of Portugal took Lisbon from them in 1147; Ferdinand III robbed them of the delicious city of Cordoba in 1236, and chased them from Murcia and Séville: James, King of Arragon, expelled them from Valencia in 1238; Ferdinand IV relieved them of Gibraltar in 1303; Ferdinand V, dubbed the Catholic , finally conquered from them the kingdom of Granada, and chased them from Spain in 1492.

Let us come back to the Arab of the East; Mohammedanism flourished and yet the empire of the caliphs was destroyed by the nation of the Turkomans. One tires of searching for the origin of these Turks: they were all savages at first, living from rapine, formerly inhabiting beyond the Taurus and the Immaüs; they spread around the eleventh century from the coast of Moscovy; they inundated the borders of the Black Sea and those of the Caspian Sea.

The Arabs under the first successors of Mohammed had subjected almost all of Asia Minor, Syria and Persia: The Turkomans in turn subjected the Arabs, and quite despoiled the Fatimite caliphs and the Abassid caliphs.

Toghril–Beg, from whom the race of Ottomans supposedly descends, entered into Baghdad, rather like so many emperors entered into Rome. He made himself master of the city and of the caliph by prostrating himself at his feet. He led the caliph to his palace holding the bridle of his mule; but more able and more fortunate than the German emperors had been in Rome, he established his power, leaving to the caliph only the responsibility for starting the Friday prayers at the mosque, and the honor of investing with their estates all the tyrant Mohammedans who wanted to be sovereigns.

It must be remembered that like these Turkomans, imitating in their eruptions the Francs, the Normans and the Goths, also imitated them by submitting themselves to the laws, customs and religion of the vanquished; it was thus that other Tartars have used the Chinese, and this is the advantage that any civilized people, although the more feeble, must have over the barbarian, although the more strong.

In the midst of the Crusades undertaken so foolishly by the Christians, arose the great Saladin, who must be placed among the ranks of captains who seized the lands of the caliphs, and none was as powerful as he. He conquered in short order Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Persia, Mesopotamia and Jerusalem, where after having established Muslim schools, he died in Damascus in 1195, admired even by Christians.

It is true that in the course of time, Tamberlain conquered the Turks, Syria and Asia Minor; but the successors of Bajazet soon re-established their empire, retook Asia Minor and conserved all they had had in Europe under Amurath. Mohammed II, his son, took Constantinople, Trebizonde, Caffa, Scutari, Cephalonia, and in short, marched over the thirty-one years of his reign from conquest to conquest, flattering himself with taking Rome like Constantinople. A colic delivered the world from him in 1481, at the age of fifty-one years; but the Ottomans still conserved in Europe a land more beautiful and more grand than Italy.

Until now their empire has not feared foreign invasions. The Persians have rarely tested the frontiers of the Turks; on the contrary, one has seen Sultan Amurath IV take Baghdad in an assault upon the Persians in 1638, still remaining the master of Mesopotamia, on one side sending troops to the Great Moghul against Persia, and on the other menacing Venice. The Germans never presented themselves at the gates of Constantinople, like the Turks did at Vienna. The Russians did not become formidable to Turkey until after Peter the Great. In the end, force established the Ottoman Empire and the divisions of the Christians have maintained it. This empire in augmenting its power has for a long time kept its ferocious customs, which now commence to soften.

This is the history of Mohammed, of Mohammedanism , of the Moors of the West, and finally of the Arabs, vanquished by the Turks, who, becoming Muslims from the year 1055, have persevered in the same religion until today. This was five pages on this subject, the history of eleven centuries.