The Moors thoroughly understood the almost magical effects which follow the judicious employment of music. Not only was it indispensable on all festive occasions, but its notes brought consolation and comfort to the house of bereavement. It was considered an important remedial agent in disease. It was used to correct the distressing condition of insomnia. In the hospitals of great cities bands were constantly entertained, because it was well known that harmony of sound promoted convalescence. Its aphrodisiacal qualities were appreciated and utilized to fully as great an extent as those of perfumes,—the delight of the Oriental. It was a favorite maxim of the Mussulman doctors that “to hear music is to sin against the law; to make music is to sin against religion; to take pleasure in it is to be guilty of infidelity.” Notwithstanding this, and the fact that it was anathematized by Mohammed, no people were more fond of it than the Arabs; and the professional musician, whose talents had raised him above mediocrity, was sure of distinguished attention at the court of the khalifs; and, once become famous, he was the recipient of honors elsewhere reserved for the descendants and the representatives of royalty. It was not unusual for a master of his art to receive ten thousand pieces of gold for a single performance. Instruments of percussion, and especially drums and tambourines, were most employed by the Spanish Moslems, but their constructive genius produced radical changes in others; they improved the guitar, the flute, and the clarionet; they were the inventors of the mandolin and the organ.
In equestrian sports, which required the highest degree of adroitness and agility, the Moors of Spain had no superiors. First among their pastimes of this description was the bull-fight, which had little in common with the modern spectacle, whose revolting characteristics are the result of long-continued sanguinary and brutalizing influences. The performers were all of noble birth; they were splendidly mounted; their equipments were of the most sumptuous description. No weapon was allowed them but a short, heavy javelin, whose point was partly encased in leather. The rules of the sport required that the animal be killed by a thrust along the spine in front of the shoulder, to deliver which properly demanded great skill and almost superhuman strength. If a blow was landed elsewhere, the knight was compelled to retire from the arena; if his weapon was broken or lost, he was adjudged to have sustained an irretrievable disgrace. The intelligence and training of the horse and the dexterity of the rider were ordinarily sufficient guarantees against disaster; but the occasional sacrifice of a cavalier reminded the survivors of the fearful dangers of the encounter. Trained from early childhood to the use of the horse and the javelin, accustomed to every manly exercise, adepts in the arts of the tourney and the chase, the Spanish Moslems found in the bull-fight the climax of enjoyment, second only to the martial pleasures and excitements of war. With such an education, it is not strange that they were recognized as the finest light cavalry in Europe.
Of equal interest, and of even greater magnificence, was the spectacle presented by the tilt of reeds. In its exhibition and accessories were displayed the inexhaustible profusion and opulence of Moorish luxury. The scene was laid in one of the many squares of the vast Moslem capital. A series of arcades and galleries, supported by columns of colored marble, brilliant with mosaics and gilded stuccoes, were crowded with an enthusiastic audience representing the noblest families of the court and the wealth and fashion of the principal city of the empire. The Khalif was there, surrounded by his body-guard, gigantic blacks from the Atlas and the Soudan, with gem-studded weapons and armor damascened with gold. The balustrades of the galleries were hung with scarlet, emerald, and sky-blue velvet. The inmates of the harems, models of the voluptuous type of Andalusian beauty, unveiled, revealed their smiling features to the public gaze,—a sight to be witnessed in no other quarter of the Mohammedan world. Their silken cloaks striped with every color of the rainbow; their strings of superb jewels, whose collection was an absorbing passion with every Moorish woman of rank; the golden belts and bracelets gleaming in the sunlight; the personal charms of their owners, enhanced to the utmost by every resource of attire and adornment, presented a splendid and enchanting picture unsurpassed in either classic or mediæval times. In the audience, sometimes by courtesy among the cavaliers in the arena were to be seen Castilian knights exiled for political reasons, or competitors for distinction in the national sports of their hereditary foes. The parapets and terraces which commanded the amphitheatre, the arches of the aqueducts, the minarets, the trees, even the spurs of the distant sierra, were white with the robes and turbans of the populace, attracted by the novelty and magnificence of the scene. The performers, in whom all interest centred, were worthy of the attention they excited. Twenty-four in number, they included the flower of the Moorish warriors selected from two of the principal tribes composing the aristocracy of the Peninsula. All were clad in flexible coats of mail covered with tunics of blue or crimson velvet sowed with stars of gold. Their heads were protected by silken turbans; their waists were encircled by sashes of the same material; upon the small buckles worn by each horseman were emblazoned his motto and family crest, from which custom Christian chivalry borrowed its heraldic devices and its coats of arms. The horses of one division were white, those of the other black; they were almost concealed by embroidered housings; the bridles were enriched with jewels, the bits were of massy gold. A short lance, whose point was blunted, was the sole arm upon which the cavalier was permitted to rely for attack or protection; to it were attached the colors of his mistress,—sometimes represented by a knot of ribbons, but more frequently by a scarf of silken tissue, upon which she had traced in golden embroidery the characters of some amorous legend. In the fantastic devices of Oriental imagery, which originated in the voluptuous regions where love is an art, each color, each gesture, even the most prosaic of objects, is invested with more than a passing significance.
These equestrian diversions of the Spanish Moslems, unlike the tournaments of the Middle Ages, which were derived from them, were never polluted by the wanton shedding of blood. They represented all the exciting phases of battle,—the attack, the mêlée, the retreat. In the confusing movements of each encounter every facility was afforded for the exhibition of the highest degree of strength, activity, and skill. Their object was not the disabling of an antagonist, but the seizure and retention of the decorations which adorned both horse and rider; and in the evolutions performed for the accomplishment of these ends the most daring feats of horsemanship were exhibited. The course of the rings terminated the brilliant festival. Among the branches of a tree, planted at one extremity of the arena, were suspended a number of rings of gold. One after another the competitors for knightly honors, moving at the greatest speed, endeavored to bear away these trophies of adroitness upon the point of the slender reed which served the purpose of a lance. A magnificent prize, usually a golden vase enriched with jewels, was awarded the victor, who in turn was expected to present it to the lady whose colors he had worn in the contest. The talents of the most famous poets of the khalifate were exercised in the celebration of these splendid spectacles, wonderful exhibitions of human dexterity, whose attractiveness was not marred by suffering, and which revealed to the greatest advantage the chivalrous sentiments and martial ardor of a refined and polished race.
Nor were these the only sports which occupied the leisure of the elegant society of the Moslem court. Its members rarely participated in the chase. Hawking, introduced by Abd-al-Rahman I., was, however, a favorite diversion with them; their hawks were the finest and best trained in Europe, and they constituted an important article of commerce, especially with Italy, France, and England. In the extensive gardens of Granada and Palermo were artificial lakes, where naval spectacles were frequently given upon a much larger scale than in the amphitheatre of Titus during the palmy days of Imperial Rome.
Under a government whose beneficent policy provided work for the industrious and shelter for the helpless, it may well be supposed that mendicancy was neither an honorable nor a lucrative profession. The horrible exhibitions of real or simulated deformity which in Southern Europe now shock the eyes of the traveller were not tolerated under the Moslem domination. While the bestowal of alms is a cardinal principle of the Mohammedan religion, its objects, when worthy, were not permitted to openly solicit the aid of the generous and sympathetic passer-by. The suffering and the crippled were carried to hospitals, where every means was applied to effect their restoration to health; while the impostor, seized by the police, expiated in prison or under the scourge the penalty of his idleness and fraud. Conducted on a plan of boundless charity, no factitious impediments of race or religion interposed to exclude from the public institutions those unfortunates whose physical afflictions claimed the indulgence or the generous solicitude of mankind. Hospitals were open to the worthy applicant, and the Jew, the Christian, even the idolater, received within their walls the same assiduous care bestowed upon the most orthodox Moslem.
In all its tendencies the spirit of Moorish civilization was eminently practical. Even its speculative labors were rather serious than sportive,—the occasional relaxations of arduous and prolonged mental effort. Its grand aims were the security of the individual, the dispensation of impartial justice, the systematic development of the noblest faculties of the human intellect, the amalgamation of the heterogeneous constituents of a proud and turbulent society, the progressive improvement and durable prosperity of a vast and populous, but constantly disintegrating, empire. In the accomplishment of these ends, war, while presumed to be an object, was in reality but an instrument. Public policy required the occupation of the streams of restless barbarians and needy adventurers incessantly pouring into the Peninsula. For their employment in foreign campaigns, the Koranic injunction of perpetual hostility offered a plausible and convenient excuse. This practice, while appealing at once to the religious enthusiasm of the fanatic and the cupidity of the warrior, insured the succession of the dynasty and the permanence of the throne. Without its aid even the administration of Al-Mansur, directed by the consummate ability of that leader, must speedily have fallen. It required semi-annual campaigns, followed by an unbroken succession of victories, to restrain the native insubordination of the African immigrants, whose multitudes, constantly recruited from the innumerable tribes of Mauritania, constituted not only the bulk of the army, but the predominant element of the population.
This mingling of races and the resultant prevalence of crosses, combined with the influence of climate and the stimulants of military and commercial activity, will readily account for the versatility of the Hispano-Arab mind, which was among its most prominent characteristics. No greater contrast in comparative ethnology can be drawn than that presented by the precarious and barbaric existence of the Desert and the polished and highly cultivated life of the Western Khalifate in its most glorious days. And yet but a comparatively insignificant period of time separates the vagrant Bedouin, whose favorite occupation was the plunder of his neighbors and who resented the interference of even his acknowledged chieftain as an infringement of his liberties, and the Spanish Arab, whose despotic government insured the enjoyment of personal freedom and public tranquillity, where intelligence, order, prosperity, took the place of insubordination and discord, and the prestige of foreign conquest and the blessings of civilization travelled in parallel lines and side by side. To the development of that civilization every people became tributary, coincident with its subjection to the Moslem arms. In the character of the conqueror was revealed a spirit of acquisition in no wise inferior to its inventive faculty, and which at once appropriated, and often improved, all that was useful in the systems of others while forming and developing new ideas of its own.
It is with mingled sentiments of admiration and regret that we contemplate the phenomenal rise, the dazzling splendor, the rapid fall, of the Moslem empire in Spain. The material relics which remain to tell the story of its architectural grandeur, of the munificence of its sovereigns, of the acquirements of its scholars, of the skill of its artisans, are few and widely scattered. The destruction has been most complete. The supremacy of Christian ideas and Castilian customs, enforced by diligent persecution, was in all instances necessary before the intellectual aspirations fostered during nine generations of august and learned princes could be subordinated to the sacerdotal ignorance and military ferocity of the age. Some edifices defaced by malice or neglect, their apartments so altered by barbarous innovators that their original plans and the purposes of their construction can often no longer be traced or even conjectured; their delicate ornamentation concealed by many successive layers of lime and plaster; their precincts abandoned to the vilest uses; a meagre collection of manuscripts, whose characters are half obliterated by moisture and rough usage; an occasional trophy rusting in the solitude of the museum, are all the tangible evidences extant of a monarchy once the marvel of Europe. It is elsewhere that we must look for the proofs of its greatness and the trophies of its glory. Its salutary influence in modifying the debased instincts and savage manners of mediæval society is no longer questioned. The enduring impulse it imparted to philosophical investigation, its prosecution of the exact sciences, the consideration in which it held intellectual ability, the honors with which it rewarded proficiency in literature, transmitted through many generations, have placed their seal upon the civilization of the twentieth century. The obligations we are under to the Spanish Arabs cannot be too frequently nor too generally acknowledged; and in ascribing the origin of our progress to the nation whose genius was its inspiring spirit, we are only offering a just and well deserved tribute of gratitude.
It was said by Seneca, “Wherever the Roman conquers, he inhabits.” It might, with almost equal truth, be asserted of the Arab that, wherever his religion and his language are once established, there they will forever prevail. The countries originally subdued by the lieutenants of the Prophet are still Mohammedan. The idiom of Mecca is still spoken from the eastern shore of the Atlantic to the China Sea. Nor does Islam seem to have lost its power of expansion. Its progress has never been arrested. It has penetrated to Central Russia,—in that empire its votaries number eleven millions. It is the faith of hundreds of thousands of Negroes at the equator. In Europe there are seven million Mussulmans, in India fifty-three million, in China twenty-two million. The people of Sicily and Spain alone of the great colonies founded by the Moslem—the seat of his most highly developed civilization, the home of races equally accomplished in learning, advanced in arts, illustrious in arms—were compelled to go into exile or renounce their faith and abandon their language. In neither of these countries have the discoveries, the inventions, and the experience of six centuries, which have long been the common property of all nations, exerted any appreciable effect in repairing the awful damage consequent on Moorish expulsion.