Excerpt from Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, Vol. 3 Western Asia, and to plant herself down there so firmly that the lands of the debatable zone seemed incorporated for ever with the Western world. Alexander the Great, and after him the Romans, made so thorough a conquest of Asia Minor, Syria, and Egypt, and planted there so deeply the laws and language of the West, that it seemed for long centuries incredible that these regions Should ever slip back again into Orientalism. On the other hand the Persians, in the old days before the Christian era, the Saracens of Mohammed in the Dark Ages, the Tartars of the house of Genghiz Khan in the central Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turk in modern times, cut great cantles out of Europe and added them to the East. For six hundred years Southern Spain was an Oriental land, looking to Mecca and Bagdad for its culture and its creed, not to Rome and the nearer West. For more than four and a half centuries Constantinople and the lands behind it were in similar case at the moment when I am speaking it seems that they may be so left for a few years more - thanks to the internal jealousies of Christendom, which now, as during the last whole century, have been retarding the inevitable, and still at this moment leave the Sultan -though with his baggage packed - sitting by the Golden Horn. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.