Note 4 — XVIII AFRICAN INTRUDERS

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.