Slavery in Europe under the Moslems brought with it the numerous privileges and indulgent treatment enjoined by the Prophet. The Mohammedan slave was rarely abused or persecuted. His acceptance of the faith of Islam rendered his manumission easy. No stigma attached to his condition. He could aspire to the most noble matrimonial alliance. He was eligible to the most important political employments. While his master was entitled to exercise despotic authority over him, the patriarchal customs of the Orient discouraged all exhibitions of unmerited severity, and designated the slave rather as a companion than a dependent in the household. It was contrary to law to put him in chains. His personality was never sacrificed to the convenience of trade; his classification as a chattel would have been abhorrent to all Mussulman ideas of justice and humanity; and in this respect the laws of the Koran are immeasurably superior to the provisions of Roman and Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence. An obligation, whose force the lapse of time could never diminish, was imposed upon the descendants of a freedman to assist and protect at the risk of their lives all members of the family which had liberated their ancestor from bondage. The dignity of human nature was never outraged by the infliction of torture upon those whom fate had condemned to a state of helpless subjection; on the contrary, the slave was usually educated by his master; he became his secretary, his agent, his counsellor; he superintended the affairs of his family; he executed with diligence and fidelity important commissions in distant lands.
The cheapness of slaves indicates their abundance; their price was within reach of the humblest laborer. After the battle of Zallaca, an ordinary captive could be obtained for a dirhem. Many inmates of the harems came from the East. Circassian and Georgian girls, purchased in the markets of Constantinople, were imported into Spain as early as the ninth century. In Mussulman law a distinction existed between slaves bought for service and prisoners taken in battle. The latter shared few of the privileges of the ordinary bondman, and, strictly speaking, could never be liberated or ransomed.
The amusements of the Spanish Arabs were derived from the East. There was nothing in Roman tradition or Visigothic inheritance which appealed to their imagination like the diversions of the idle and sensuous races that inhabited the tropics, and which, with other congenial customs, they had appropriated. They felt but a languid interest in the chase of ferocious beasts. They shrank with horror from the gladiatorial contests of the arena and their scenes of blood and butchery. Exhibitions of strength, where muscular superiority carried off the palm, were scarcely less distasteful to a people accustomed to rely for success on fertility of resource and personal agility. While active exercise was not neglected, those pastimes were in highest favor which required the least physical exertion. Among these, the principal one was the game of chess. Of unknown but high antiquity, it had been brought by Arabic merchants from India. In that country it had long been used as an instrument of divination, and, in time of war, the movements of its pieces frequently directed the evolutions of armies on the march and in battle. A part of the sacred furniture of every Hindu temple, the board had also a cabalistic and astrological significance. Long before the appearance of Mohammed, this game was the solace of the vagrant sheiks of the Desert and the delight of the wealthy traders of Yemen. It followed everywhere in the train of the Moslem armies. In Spain it was universally popular. The chessmen of the khalifs were not inferior in richness to the other accessories of royal luxury,—the arms, the plate, the furniture of the palace. Some were made of the precious metals; others were curiously carved of ivory; most of them were incrusted with gems. The boards were of ebony and sandalwood inlaid with gold. In this instance, also, as in many others, the prohibition of the Koran relating to the representation of animal forms was disregarded. The Spanish Moslems were passionately fond of chess. It became one of the favorite diversions of the court; and it was no unusual occurrence for players to pass the entire day engrossed by its fascinations and entirely oblivious of their surroundings. The story, already related, of the prince who pleaded for time to finish his game after his death-warrant had been read to him, is an example of the absorbing interest excited by this scientific pastime in the mind of the Moor. Cards were known to the Arabs long before the Hegira. Naipe, the Spanish name for them, is from the Arabic word naib, “viceroy,” whence comes the English “nabob.” Introduced into Italy by the Saracens, they were at first called The Game of the Kings. They were not generally used in Europe until the latter part of the fourteenth century. Backgammon and draughts were also familiar to the Moors of Spain. The genius of Mohammed recognized the hidden danger which beset his followers when he forbade indulgence in all games of chance. To such a temptation the ardent and romantic nature of the Oriental is peculiarly susceptible. No information, in this respect, is now obtainable concerning the Mohammedan population of the Peninsula, but the copious accounts of the prevalence of other vices under the domination of the emirs and the khalifs would seem to indicate, from the general silence on this point, that gaming was not commonly practised.
The feats of jugglers were a source of popular amusement in mediæval Cordova. These mountebanks were intimately associated with itinerant minstrels and extemporaneous rhymers, whose coarse effusions, while they could scarcely be dignified by the name of poetry, yet often contributed to the diversion of the court, and whose calling and example produced the troubadour, such an important agent in the civilization of Europe. The lascivious contortions of the dancers of ancient Gades, immortalized in the epigrams of Martial, and which have been transmitted with probably trifling changes through the Phœnician, Carthaginian, Roman, Gothic, and Mussulman dominations to the Spanish gypsies of our day, were constantly exhibited, in all their suggestive indecency, before the appreciative audiences of Moorish Spain. Nothing can indicate more positively the general relaxation of manners than the popularity of such an amusement. Even the indulgent and profligate spirit of Roman society eyed it with marked disfavor. The poets lampooned those who patronized or encouraged it. Moralists and legislators condemned it as a prolific source of corruption. Mohammed forbade it to his followers as a relic of Paganism and an incentive to immorality. Under no circumstances did men participate in it, or, indeed, in any of the terpsichorean exercises practised by Orientals. The dance, as we understand it, was unknown to the Moslems. Among them the practice was abandoned to female professionals, who constituted a caste, who were distinguished by a peculiar costume, and whose calling was infamous. This prejudice, descended from a remote antiquity, exists in full force in all Eastern countries to-day. The degradation of Herodias was far more reprobated by the Hebrews than her inhumanity. The character of the bayadere of India, of the ghawazee of Egypt, of the Jewess of Tunis, of the gypsy of Spain, inheritors of the lewd Phœnician positions and gestures, is familiar to all travellers.
In the dances of Mohammedan Spain, as in those still practised at Cairo, the lower limbs were stationary, and all movements were performed with the body and the arms. Their impropriety generally consisted rather in their suggestiveness than in any flagrant personal exposure. Rarely were they performed in a condition of nudity; as a rule, the form was completely enveloped in graceful folds of silk and linen. The dancers kept time with castanets, which were originally small copper cymbals, and every motion was made in perfect cadence with the music. The extraordinary effect of these exhibitions upon the imagination, even when represented by women not adepts in the art, can be understood only by those who have witnessed them.
The taste for improvisation pervaded the music of the Hispano-Arabs as it did their poetry. Although to foreign ears it might appear wholly destitute of measure and harmony, the monotonous execution of the performer impressed the feelings of his audience to an extent incomprehensible to nations of northern blood. The profoundly emotional nature of the Moor, readily susceptible to every kind of mental excitement and passionately devoted to rhyme, at one time roused him to frenzy, at another deprived him of consciousness. No race has ever enjoyed to an equal degree with the Arabs the faculty of investing fiction with the semblance of truth, of transforming images created by an inexhaustible fancy into the realities of life, of giving
—“to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
The music of the khalifate was largely derived from Greek and Roman sources. Its peculiarities, inherited by the Spaniards, have imparted a national character to their minstrelsy, as well as measures unknown to the other nations of Europe. It had nothing in common with our ideas of harmony. It consisted principally of monotonous chants, whose time was marked by rude instruments of percussion; whose melody was partly classic, partly barbaric; and which disclosed none of that novelty and variety which constitute the greatest charm of modern music. The Spanish Arabs had no theory, used no notes, and possessed no means of preserving musical compositions except by memory and oral tradition. Under these disadvantages, improvement in one of the most pleasing of sciences was impossible, and most pieces rarely survived their composers. The musical instruments of the Spanish Moslems were of many kinds; there were thirteen different varieties—among them viols, lutes, dulcimers, harps—made in Seville, which was the most celebrated seat of their manufacture in the world. The great Ziryab, who lived at the court of Abd-al-Rahman II., added a fifth string to the lute, to which, as to the others, the Moors attached a symbolic significance. The remaining strings, which were of different colors, represented the supposed four humors of the human body; that of Ziryab was presumed to represent the soul. The school of music which he founded at Cordova endured until the last days of the khalifate, to which is no doubt due the fact that the writers of Spain on this subject are the most numerous and prolific of any age.
The antipathy with which this science was regarded by theologians did not prevent it from being the delight of the prince and an indispensable diversion of the people. Its power was so great that it early invaded the shrines of the religion that condemned it, and for centuries the verses of the Koran have been intoned in the mosques. The story-teller recited his tales to music; the itinerant buffoon interspersed his coarse but expressive pantomime with rhyming jests and ribald songs. The Arab notes are harsh, nasal, and guttural, unpleasant beyond measure to European ears. Their scale includes seventeen intervals in the octave, and it is said by learned authority on the subject that the Italian, from which ours is derived, was originally copied, without alteration, from that of the Arabs of Sicily and Spain.