Cervantes Author:Margaret Oliphant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 14 CHAPTER II. HIS CAPTIVITY. There is scarcely anything in modern history so extraordinary as the existence of the pirate princedom of Algiers in the d... more »ays of Cervantes. It continued long after his time to terrify and ravage the Mediterranean coasts; but at no time have we so full a knowledge of it, or were its power and terrors so great. A State which lived by robbery, and that of the worst and most cruel description, a stealer of souls, a merchant in human flesh and blood,—it was a perpetual danger to every traveller whose duty or business led him across that mid-world sea. There were no journeys of pleasure in those days, and it may well be supposed that the risk of finding himself in the hands of the barbarous corsairs was enough to deter every man who could help himself, from venturing upon the waters which were swept by their galleys. Though the state had been founded by the Moors on their expulsion from Spain, it was in the hands of Turkish rulers, tributary to Constantinople, and almost as scornful of their native fellow-religionists as of the Christians—living upon exactions and plunder, a nest of robbers, with few redeeming virtues save those of cour- CAPTIVITY. 15 age and nautical skill. To make the barbarity still more cruel, many of the leaders of this fierce community were renegades, Greeks and Italians, the scum of the earth,— since a man of ability and commanding character must have been lost indeed before he would place himself in this degraded and degrading position. A man might turn Turk in the present day, or Mohammedan, which means the same thing, and be no more than a nine days' wonder, smiled and marvelled at rather than denounced and given up by his contemporaries. But no such tolerant indifference existed in the sixteenth century, when men b...« less