7. Such were the palace and gardens of Zehra, in which Abderrahman III honored his favorite sultana. The edifice had twelve hundred columns of Greek, Italian, Spanish, and African marble. The body-guard of the sovereign was composed of twelve thousand horsemen, whose cimeters and belts were studded with gold. This was that Abderrahman who, after a glorious reign of fifty years, sat down to count the number of days of unalloyed happiness he had experienced, and could only enumerate fourteen. "O man!" exclaimed the plaintive caliph, "put not your trust in this present world."
8. No nation has ever excelled the Spanish Arabs in the beauty and costliness of their pleasure-gardens. To them also we owe the introduction of very many of our most valuable cultivated fruits, such as the peach. Retaining the love of their ancestors for the cooling effect of water in a hot climate, they spared no pains in the superfluity of fountains, hydraulic works, and artificial lakes in which fish were raised for the table. Into such a lake, attached to the palace of Cordova, many loaves were cast each day to feed the fish.
9. There were also menageries of foreign animals, aviaries of rare birds, manufactories in which skilled workmen, obtained from foreign countries, displayed their art in textures of silk, cotton, linen, and all the miracles of the loom; in jewelry and filigree-work, with which they ministered to the female pride. Under the shade of cypresses cascades disappeared; among flowering shrubs there were winding walks, bowers of roses, seats cut out of rock, and crypt-like grottoes hewn in the living stone. Nowhere was ornamental gardening better understood; for not only did the artist try to please the eye as it wandered over the pleasant gradation of vegetable color and form—he also boasted his success in the gratification of the sense of smell by the studied succession of perfumes from beds of flowers.
10. In the midst of all this luxury, which can not be regarded by the historian with disdain, since in the end it produced a most important result in the south of France, the Spanish caliphs, emulating the example of their Asiatic compeers, were not only the patrons but the personal cultivators of human learning. One of them was himself the author of a work on polite literature in not less than fifty volumes; another wrote a treatise on algebra. When Taryak, the musician, came from the East to Spain, the Caliph Abderrahman rode forth to meet him with honor. The College of Music in Cordova was sustained by ample government patronage, and is said to have produced many illustrious professors.
John W. Draper.
XXXVI.—CHARLEMAGNE.
1. We come now to one of the greatest men of all times, Charles the Great, son of Pepin the Short, a man who has left his mark on history for all time. Charles (called by the French Charlemagne) was great in many ways, whereas most great men are great in one or two. He was a great warrior, a great political genius, an energetic legislator, a lover of learning, and a lover also of his natural language and poetry at a time when it was the fashion to despise them. And he united and displayed all these merits in a time of general and monotonous barbarism, when, save in the church, the minds of men were dull and barren.
2. From 769 to 813, in Germany and Western and Northern Europe, Charlemagne conducted thirty-two campaigns against the Saxons, Frisians, Bavarians, Avars, Slavs, and Danes; in Italy, five against the Lombards; in Spain, Corsica, and Sardinia, twelve against the Arabs, two against the Greeks, and three in Gaul itself, against the Aquitanians and Bretons—in all, fifty-three expeditions in forty-five years, among which those he undertook against the Saxons, the Lombards, and the Arabs were long and difficult wars.
3. The kingdom of Charles was vast; it comprised nearly all Germany, Belgium, France, Switzerland, and the north of Italy and of Spain. He had, in ruling this mighty realm, to deal with different nations, without cohesion, and to grapple with their various institutions and bring them into system.