IV
THE DOCTORS OF THE GAY SCIENCE
Before joy and its parliaments had dispersed the general gloom, minstrels went about singing distressed maidens, imprisoned women, jealous husbands, the gamut of love and lore. Usually they sang to ears that were indifferent or curious merely. But occasionally a knight errant overheard and at once, lance in hand, he was off on his horse to the rescue. The source of the minstrel’s primal migration was Spain.
In the mediæval night, Spain, or, more exactly Andalusia, was brilliant. On the banks of the Great River, Al-Ouad-al-Kebyr, subsequently renamed Guadalquivir, twelve hundred cities shimmered with mosques, with enamelled pavilions, with tinted baths, alcazars, minarets. From three hundred thousand filigree’d pulpits, the glory of Allah and of Muhammad his prophet were daily proclaimed.
At Ez Zahara, the pavilion of the pleasures of the Caliphs of Cordova, forty thousand workmen, working for forty years, had produced a stretch of beauty unequalled then and unexceeded since, a palace of dream, of gems, of red gold walls; a court of alabaster fountains that tossed quick-silver in dazzling sheafs; a patio of jasper basins in which floated silver swans; a residence ceiled with damasquinures, curtained with Isfahan silks; an edifice filled with poets and peris, an establishment that thirteen thousand people served.[47]
Ez Zahara, literally, The Fairest, a caliph had built to the memory of a love. It was regal. The caliphs were also. The reigns of some of them were so prodigal that they were called honeymoons. At Seville and Granada were other palaces, homes as they were called, but homes of flowers, of whispers, of lovers or of peace. Throughout the land generally there was a chain of pavilions and cities through which minstrels passed, going up and down the Great River, serenading the banks that sent floating back wreaths of melody, the sound of clear voices, the tinkle of dulcimers and lutes. But most beautiful was Cordova. Under the Moors it eclipsed Damascus, surpassed Baghdad, outshone Byzance. It was the noblest place on earth.
Throughout Europe at that time, the Moors and the Byzantines alone had the leisure and the inclination to think. They alone read and alone preserved the literature of the past. Together they supplied it to the Renaissance. But from the Moors went poetry of their own. It was they who invented rhyme.[48] Charmed with the novelty, they wrote everything in it, challenges, contracts, treaties, diplomatic notes, and messages of love. The composition of poetry was an occupation, usual in itself, which led to unusual honors, to the dignity of office and high place. Ordinary conversation not infrequently occurred in verse which was otherwise facilitated by the extreme wealth of the language. Some of the dictionaries known generally from their immensity as Oceans—which, escaping later the unholy hand of the Holy Office,[49] the Escorial preserved, were arranged not alphabetically but in sequence of rhyme. In addition to the latter the Moors invented the serenade and for it the dulcimer and guitar. They not only lived poetry and wrote it and talked it but died of it. The unusual honors to which it led and which resulted in a government of poets left them defenceless. Verse which was their glory was also their destruction. Meanwhile it was from them that the world got algebra and chivalry besides.
Chivalry has been derived from Germany. The Teutons invented the false conception of honor—revenge for an affront, the duel and judgment by arms. That is not chivalry or even bravery, it is bravado. Bravery itself, perhaps the sole virtue of the early Teuton, was not the only one or even the first that was required of the Moorish Rokh. To merit that title which was equivalent to that of knight, many qualities were indispensable: courtesy, courage, gentility, poetry, diction, strength, and address. But courtesy came first. Then bravery, then gentility, in which was comprised the elements that go to the making of the gentleman—loyalty, consideration, the sense of justice, respect for women, protection of the weak, honor in war and in love.[50]