ABSTRACT
Unfortunately for them, this was impossible. If they wished to live in security, they should have done what the Romans had done of old: they should have provided themselves with defensible frontiers. Spain was theirs, but they did not hold it up to the Pyrenees. All the islands of the Tyrrhenean Sea were theirs, but neither Provence nor Italy. And how could they retain Sicily without Italy? One might say that they stopped too soon, as though in fatigue. There was something incomplete about the present state of their domain. Nothing could have been more difficult to defend than their advanced positions in Europe. It was inevitable that their neighbours should attack them, being poorer than they, and inspired, since the 10th century, by an ever-increasing religious enthusiasm.
