What were these Moors? Were they savage beasts, cruel robbers?
They appear to have brought into Spain not only Art, but the arts, sciences, learning, literature. Under the strong and able rule of Abderrahman III. (912 to 961), agriculture, science, trade, and decent living, throve as they never yet had done in Spain. During the five or six centuries in which the Moors held the land, it is easy to believe that Spain enjoyed a greater measure of worldly prosperity than before or since. In this time Cordova, the seat of the caliphate, grew to have a population of a million souls; it had three hundred mosques and nine hundred baths. Its greatest mosque, begun in 786, shone with four thousand silver lamps, and its dome was raised aloft on twelve hundred slender pillars.
The city of Granada was built, and upon the sides of its mountain sprang into being the fairy fortress and palace of the Alhambra. Its halls, its courts, its galleries, its arabesques, its fretwork, its fountains, even in their ruin, tell us of the power of this singular people.
In Seville, too, the Alcazar and the Giralda even now bear beautiful witness to their art, their skill, their industry.
There seems little question now that the Moorish potters brought with them into Spain the arts which the Persian or Arabian potters knew, not only for the preparing the clays, but that they also had the secret for making the stanniferous enamel, or glaze, into which the use of tin enters. They also applied to the decoration of their wares certain lustres, which Demmin says were produced by the fumes of bismuth, of antimony, or of arsenic. It is not probable that gold was a component part of these lustres.
Just when the Moors went to work to make their tiles and their lustred dishes, we do not know. But as ornamental tiles—azulejos—were used to decorate their walls, we conclude that the production began almost at once. These tiles were not only used in bands or strips on the walls; they were also used as pavements, and the floors of the Alhambra were glittering with them, some few of which still remain there.
Mr. Ford’s description of them, thus quoted by Marryat, says: “Moorish very fine, and most ancient; surface plain, painted and enameled blue; the elaborate designs in gold lustre. The inscription on the shield is the well-known motto of the Mussulman founders of the palace of Granada: ‘There is no conqueror but God.’ The date of its manufacture may be placed about 1300.”
