Nothing can have exceeded the splendour of this romantic Saracen Empire in Spain.
"Palaces, mosques, minarets rose like an exhalation in vanquished Spain," writes Rowbotham in his book on the troubadours.
The country, he says, produced a wealth of valuable metals, loadstone, crystals, silks, corals, rubies, pearls, and the cities were dreams of colour and Eastern loveliness, where there was always the sound of lutes and the enchantment of song. The Caliph lived in unimaginable luxury at Zahra, where the "Pavilion of his Pleasures" was constructed of gold and polished steel, the walls of which were encrusted with precious stones. In the midst of the splendour produced by lights reflected from the hundred crystal lustres a sheaf of living quicksilver welled up in a basin of alabaster. "The banks of the Guadalquiver were lined with twelve thousand towns and villages; lights in never-ending myriads troubled the whole length of the stream. And as the boatmen glided past village after village ... came the perpetual sounds of instruments and voices."
In the sumptuous houses was generally a cool central court with a fountain, and here for the contentment of all good Moslems, the Saracen minstrels would come and sing of love and beautiful ladies, while the water splashed quietly into the basin in the languorous noonday heat.
There was no variation in the theme: always love and beautiful ladies.
"Shut your eyelids, ye eyes of the gazelle," was the popular mode of beginning the entertainment.
Banished from religion, "music," according to the same author, "became to Moslems an illicit pleasure like wine, and it grew up amid myrtle blossoms and the laughter of women."
A life like this, splendid with colour and brilliance, might well have inspired imitation among the impressionable people of Provence, and so would help to account for certain elements in the movements of chivalry; but it would scarcely account for the romantic adoration of the sex which the Arabs—for all their songs in praise of charm and beauty—treated after the immemorial fashion of the East.
Yet we are told that the first Crusade acted as a sort of edict for their emancipation. "Women who had lived in constant terror ... of ill-usage and violent treatment now came out in crowds—went to distant countries, and a squadron of them even took up arms for the Cross. This brought them into contact with the most gallant men on earth, famous for their passionate adoration of women."
One can see how all this may, and indeed must have ousted many of the older traditions and created a new romantic spirit. The mere fact of increased liberty and experience for the subject sex tended to produce a changed and more human relationship. But it is difficult to believe that the woman of the West owes her salvation to the Moslem!