There is this difference between them,
that the corsairs merely paid flying visits; a change of wind, the
appearance of an Italian sail, an unexpected resistance on the part of
the inhabitants, sufficed to unsettle their ephemeral plans.
The
coast-lands were never in their possession; they only harried the
natives. The system of the Saracens on the mainland, though it seldom
attained the form of a provincial or even military government, was
different. They had the animus manendi. Where they dined, they slept.
In point of destructiveness, I should think there was little to choose
between them. One thinks of the hundreds of villages the corsairs
devastated; the convents and precious archives they destroyed,
[Footnote: In this particular branch, again, the Christians surpassed
the unbeliever. More archives were destroyed in the so-called "Age of
Lead" - the closing period of Bour-bonism - than under Saracens and
Corsairs combined. It was quite the regular thing to sell them as
waste-paper to the shopkeepers. Some of them escaped this fate by the
veriest miracle - so those of the celebrated Certoza of San Lorenzo in
Padula. The historian Marincola, walking in the market of Salerno,
noticed a piece of cheese wrapped up in an old parchment. He elicited
the fact that it came from this Certosa, intercepted the records on
their way for sale in Salerno, and contrived by a small present to the
driver that next night two cartloads of parchments were deposited in the
library of La Cava.] the thousands of captives they carried
off - sometimes in such numbers that the ships threatened to sink till
the more unsaleable portion of the human freight had been cast
overboard.
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