The fabrication of leathern hangings—whose surface exhibited the play of many hues brightened with gold and silver—was early one of the specialties of Cordovan industry, from which city it derived its name. Superb effects must have been produced by this curious tapestry, embossed and gilded, stamped and embroidered with graceful arabesques, and suspended between rich and capricious cornices of stucco and dadoes blazing with a score of colors in mosaic. These elegant hangings find no counterpart in modern decorative art save perhaps in the finest binding of a book. Goatskins formed the material, but the process by which they were prepared and ornamented passed away from the Peninsula with the expulsion of the Moriscoes, and its memory alone remains in the leather of Morocco, the most valuable known to commerce.
In the perfection of their textile fabrics, the Spanish Moors demonstrated their infinite superiority to all contemporaneous nations. In other kingdoms of Europe, silk was reserved for the use of royalty. Constantinople alone, by reason of its relations with the Orient, was able to provide a limited supply of this precious material. From Sicily the manufacture had been introduced into Spain, and, as already mentioned, was the most lucrative industry of Granada in the days of its greatest prosperity. After the eleventh century, in both those countries all classes used this fabric, elsewhere regarded as so valuable; the garments of men and women of the middle class of Granada were made of it, as were also the uniforms of the royal guards of Norman Palermo. The lightness and strength of these silks were remarkable, and their beautiful ornamentation displayed to the utmost the finished efforts of the designer and the artisan. The great Moslem banner captured at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa and preserved in the Abbey of Las Huelgas near Burgos is an elegant example of the weaver’s art. Upon the ground of crimson silk appear inscriptions, medallions, and interlacing curves, interwoven in blue, white, green, and yellow. The harmonious arrangement of these colors denotes the exercise of the greatest taste and dexterity. Throughout the maze of graceful designs the name of God appears thousands of times, emblazoned in gold. In the patterns of the cloaks and robes of royal personages, mingled with brilliantly tinted arabesques, rich floral embroidery, and formulas from the Koran, appeared portraits of the owners, in the colors of nature, depicted with consummate skill. The tiraz, or tunic of Hischem II., preserved in the Museum of the Academy of History at Madrid, is the only specimen of this branch of the textile fabrics for which the khalifate of Spain was so celebrated now to be found in the world.
Modern science with all its improvements has never been able to equal in strength and delicacy of texture the products of the Moorish looms of the Peninsula. The extraordinary permanence of the dyes employed in these fabrics constitutes one of their best established claims to superior excellence. Of the few examples which have survived the revolutions of ages, little, if any, diminution of brilliancy in color is discernible. In this department of industry, also, Asiatic influence, transmitted successively through Byzantine and Sicilian channels, was disclosed in the manufactures of Mohammedan Spain, a country whose life and traditions have bequeathed to our times so many impressive reminiscences of the luxurious Orient. In numerous other fields of industry was the artistic and inventive spirit of the Hispano-Arab artisan developed,—in damascened treasure-chests of iron and steel, the complicated structure of whose locks is the wonder of the mechanic of to-day; in furniture, inlaid with precious and aromatic woods, and embellished with ebony, tortoise-shell, and pearl; in gem-incrusted caskets of ivory and onyx which Christian superstition has not deemed unworthy to enshrine the relics of her saints; in manuscripts, upon whose bindings fortunes were lavished, embossed with jewels, glittering with silver, lapis-lazuli, malachite, and gold.
The art of calligraphy, so greatly appreciated by the Arabs that it was styled The Golden Profession, and in which the Spanish Moslems acquired extraordinary proficiency, was developed, under the Khalifates of both the East and West, to a condition of almost absolute perfection. Before the invention of paper, their parchments exhibited a luxury which far surpassed that of the Byzantines, until that time the most renowned calligraphists in the world. The skins they used had a ground of gold or silver or were dyed of various colors,—scarlet, green, purple, blue, and black; their lustre was so great that they reflected light like the polished surface of a mirror. Their inks were also of many kinds; their brilliancy and durability exceeded those of any known to modern manufacture; the writing in distinctness, accuracy of alignment, and elegance—accomplishments in which the Mussulmans of Spain, who wrote a peculiarly graceful hand, excelled all the other nations of Islam—rivalled the most finished labors of the compositor; in epistles and documents destined for royalty the characters were written in liquid gold. The manuscripts were enriched with illuminations, an art which, carried into France and Italy, was subsequently borrowed by the mediæval monks, whose missals represent the highest, and, indeed, almost the sole, artistic manifestations of their time. The designs of the Arabs were not only geometric, floral, and grotesque, they included medallion portraits and representations of men and animals delineated with astonishing skill. These products of Moorish talent and ingenuity have, so far as is known at present, entirely perished; their curiously wrought borders, without the mysterious and unintelligible script which was supposed to contain formulas for the invocation of evil spirits, were alone sufficient to proscribe them.
The knowledge of the various mechanical processes referred to in this chapter—methods by which the artistic conceptions of Arabic genius were endowed with form and stability—has absolutely vanished. Not only is this the fact, but even all tangible evidences, upon whose existence was dependent the reputation for proverbial dexterity enjoyed by the Moorish artisan, have been destroyed, and we are forced to rely for their enumeration and character upon the vague and imperfect accounts of ill-informed and often unfriendly historians. In the eyes of the fanatic Castilian, everything derived from Moslem sources was necessarily tainted with heresy. The articles of luxury displayed in such profusion by the vanquished were indisputable proofs of mental superiority, and, as such, offensive to his pride. He denounced the splendidly bound and embossed volumes of the libraries as magic scrolls, whose contents should be regarded by good Christians with every demonstration of aversion and contempt. The mysterious and unfamiliar characters of the Arabic alphabet assumed in his superstitious eyes the symbols of witchcraft, sorcery, and incantation. He hastened to prohibit the use or preservation of the souvenirs of Moslem culture and power by sumptuary laws, whose provisions were enforced by every resource of original and ingenious cruelty. In the estimation of the clergy, Mohammedanism, blasphemy, and scientific knowledge were, to all intents and purposes, synonymous terms. Without taste to admire or capacity to emulate the achievements of Arabian skill, alike inestimable for their variety and excellence, they could at least annihilate the material evidences of that civilization whose monuments were at once an open challenge and a secret reproach. How thoroughly this congenial task was performed has been described in these pages. No people mentioned in history who rose to eminence in the various arts that contribute to national glory or domestic happiness have left behind them so few memorials upon which their title to superiority can be founded. But while the architectural remains have been defaced and destroyed, the libraries abandoned to the flames, the mechanical processes that gave to the world artistic results unrivalled in that age and unapproached in this, have been neglected and forgotten, priceless treasures, representing years of industry, broken to pieces for the sake of the materials of which they were composed, tens of thousands of skilful artisans exiled, plundered, murdered, there still remained in the public mind the impression insensibly produced by contact with a race of superior attainments, which, in its turn, was destined to form the germ of a new and far more widely extended civilization.
Africa, despite its innate barbarism, exercised some influence on the arts in Spain. As the Moslem conquest was planned in that country, so it subsequently became the avenue by which architectural and artistic ideas were transmitted to the people of the Peninsula, many of whom were natives of its soil. By the latter, still under the spell of Ommeyade culture and traditions, the crude, robust, and semi-barbaric conceptions of Mauritania were, however, soon refined and improved beyond recognition. The door of the Mosque of the Aljaferia at Saragossa, and an arch in the Cathedral of Tarragona, are almost the only remaining examples of the primitive African style. The Almohade princes made a more distinct and permanent impression on architecture than any sovereigns who had preceded them. They introduced many novel and striking features in exterior mural ornamentation. They were the first to make use of the raised terra-cotta work, the graceful festoons, the glazed bricks of many colors, which render the Giralda of Seville the most elaborate and majestic tower ever reared by the hand of an architect. While the largest and most superb, this magnificent minaret had yet many counterparts, in all but size, throughout the provinces of Moorish Spain. Those attached to the mosques of Toledo, Valencia, and Almeria were but little inferior to it in elegance. Their prominence, and the uses to which they were destined, were sufficient to insure their early demolition. The modified African style differed from that of the khalifate in that it was more florid than graceful, and exhibited a barbaric love of pomp rather than an inclination to observe the principles of good taste and just architectural proportion.
The artistic relics of a people are the surest criterion of its manual dexterity, its material progress, its intellectual culture. The paucity of souvenirs relating to the Hispano-Arab period has in certain quarters, as already mentioned, raised serious doubts as to the claim of that race to mediæval supremacy.
The same skepticism as to the influence of the literary and philosophical principles adopted and promulgated by the Mohammedans of Spain prevailed for centuries. After a closer acquaintance with the educational facilities they possessed, the scientific methods they employed, the intimate mercantile relations they established with every state accessible to commerce, the extent of that influence becomes strikingly apparent. Even among the descendants of the conqueror, bound by faith and tradition to eternal hostility, it was, and is still, manifested in a thousand forms. There is to-day in the Spaniard far more of the romantic and artistic temperament of the Saracen, whose blood is a reproach, than of the sullen ferocity of the Goth, whose lineage is the glory of Castilian ancestry. Reminiscences of that domination which seven centuries of warfare were required to overthrow survive in the forms and ornamentation of garments; in the terms, the construction and the pronunciation of language; in the crude imitation of mosaic effects; in the florid sculpture of magnificent cathedrals. In other countries of Southern Europe, their traces, while not so marked or general, are none the less distinguishable; Moorish customs and traditions, eminently congenial to the national disposition of Gaul and Latin, reacted strongly upon the literary and social life of France and Italy. In the latter country the glowing artistic conceptions of the Arab speedily succumbed to the omnipresent examples of classic genius; in France they were somewhat more persistent; in both countries they exercised no unimportant influence in the suppression of barbarism, in the promotion of efforts that tend to the material improvement of society, in the cultivation of politeness, in the revival of letters.
CHAPTER XXX
AGRICULTURE, MANUFACTURES, AND COMMERCE OF THE EUROPEAN MOSLEMS. THEIR MANNERS, CUSTOMS, AND AMUSEMENTS
750–1609
Disappearance of the Memorials of Arab Civilization—Agricultural System of the Spanish Moors—Its Wonderful Perfection—Irrigating Apparatus—The Tribunal of the Waters—The Works of Ibn-al-Awam—Universal Cultivation of the Soil—Mineral Resources of the Peninsula—Manufactures—The Great Moslem Emporiums of the Mediterranean—Commerce—Its Extensive Ramifications—Articles of Traffic—Commercial Prosperity of Sicily—The Magnetic Needle—Gunpowder and Artillery—War—Coinage—Characteristics of the Khalifs—Demoralization of the People—The Bath—General Prevalence of Superstition—Social Life of the Moslems of Europe—Privileges of Women—Polygamy and Morals—Slavery—Amusements—The Game of Chess—Other Pastimes—Dances—Music—Equestrian Sports—The Bull-Fight—The Tilt of Reeds—The Course of the Rings—Hawking—Peculiarities of Hispano-Arab Civilization—The Crusades—Their Effect on Christendom—Unrivalled Achievements of the Moors in Europe—Conclusion.