As to the influence of Arabs on architecture, the only one of the fine arts which religion permitted Moslems to cultivate, it seems that it cannot be set in doubt that it appears with as much certainty as distinction. The question has often been asked: Whence came it that the architecture of the close of the Middle Ages, that which passed from the round to the pointed arch, and from basilicas to cathedrals, was called Gothic? As this name, if it implied a northern origin, would be in flagrant contradiction with the facts, the question has remained unanswered.
But we must remind ourselves that the name Gothic has not been given only to the architecture which the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw prevailing. The handwriting and the missal, which in the year 1091 were replaced in Spain by the Latin (then called French) characters, and by the Roman ritual, were also called Gothic. They had received and preserved this name of Gothic because their use dated from the time when Spain was the domain of the Goths. Might it not also be because the first lessons in the new architecture came to Europe through Spain, that this architecture, e.g., like the Spanish handwriting and liturgy, was named Gothic?
This perfectly simple and natural explanation is, moreover, in complete accordance with history. The conjectures of men versed in the matter are agreed on this point—that modern architecture had its birth at Byzantium, that second Rome where the arts took refuge when they were driven out of Italy. The Byzantine architects, who were the first to mingle the capricious and flowery style of the East with the sober and regular style of ancient Greece, had two sorts of pupils—the Arabs and the Germanic peoples. The former first founded the architecture called Moorish or Saracen; and afterwards the latter, that which later on was called Gothic. Starting from the same point the two architectures remain analogous, almost similar, during two centuries, both preserving, with the differences imposed by the climate, the traditions of their common origin. Thus the mosque of Cordova, raised by a prince of Syria, and the old basilicas of Germany are equally sprung from the Byzantine style. Then they separate, to take each a style of its own. The Moslem architecture preserves the system of surbased naves, and takes as its special characteristic the horseshoe arch, that is to say, one narrowing at its base, and having the form of an inverted crescent.
Christian architecture adopts the system of high, pointed naves, and its distinctive characteristic becomes the pointed arch, substituted for the pagan round arch. But it must be noticed that the Arabs had employed the pointed arch before the Christians; that, in Spain especially, a multitude of monuments prove their use of this form which was unknown to antiquity; and that it is doubtless because the pointed arch, now become the striking and characteristic feature of Christian architecture, had passed from Spain into Europe, that the whole system was named Gothic. Finally, these two architectures derived from Byzantium, the Arab and the Germanic, becoming ever more and more assimilated, end by merging, at the close of eight centuries, into the style called Renaissance. No one denies, no one disputes, the striking resemblance which exists between the Arab monuments and those of Europe in the Middle Ages. This resemblance is not only found in the great edifices of the capitals, for the construction of which Saracen architects were sometimes called in, as happened in the case of Notre Dame de Paris itself. It can be traced even in the humblest buildings of the little towns.
“Thus,” says Viardot,[m] “I have found the multilobar arch of the Mezquita at Cordova in the cloisters of Norwich cathedral, and the delicate colonnette of the Alhambra in the church of Notre Dame at Dijon. This resemblance was, then, not merely casual and fortuitous; it was general and permanent. Nothing further is needed to prove the thesis. If Christian and Arab art resembled each other, and if one preceded the other, it is evident that of the two one was imitated and the other the imitator. Was it the Arab art which imitated the Christian art? No; for the priority of its works is manifest and incontestable; for Europe, in the Middle Ages, received all its knowledge from the Arabs, and must also have received from them the only art whose cultivation the law of religion permitted.”
MUSIC
The impossibility which exists, in spite of the efforts of all modern scholars, of our having an acquaintance, even an imperfect and approximate one, with the music of the Greeks, must teach and give a conception of the great difficulty of procuring proofs of the state of this art, or discovering and understanding monuments of it, once the traditions are interrupted. It is a dead language in which none can now read. In the preceding section we have had to limit ourselves to demonstrating that the Arabs cultivated music as a very important and very advanced art. In the archives of the chapter of Toledo, there exists a precious monument of the influence which they exercised on modern music. This is a manuscript, annotated in the hand of Alfonso the Wise himself, and including the canticles (cantigas) composed by that prince, with the music to which they were sung. In it we find not only the six notes ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, invented, towards 1030, by the monk Guido of Arezzo, but also the seventh note, the five lines, and the keys, whose discovery was subsequent, and even the upward and downward tails of the notes, the use of which was not introduced into the musical writing of the rest of Europe until much later. Up till then music had served only for the psalmodies of the church, for the plain chant of hymns and antiphons. This manuscript, copied and cited in the Paleographia Castellana is, according to all appearance, the most ancient monument of the regular application of music to ordinary and profane poetry.
As Alfonso X owes his prodigious learning chiefly to the study of the Arabs, it would be scarcely possible to doubt that, for this book as for all his works, he borrowed from them a science already formed and even then committed to writing by Al-Farabi, Abul-Faraj, etc., and which Alfonso might very well have understood with the help of the Muzarabs of Seville. This supposition, which would attribute to the Arabs a notable share in the creation of modern music, has all the more the appearance of truth since the first instruments adopted by the Spaniards, the French, and the other nations of Europe were named moresques in all languages. To this day the chirimia and dulzaina of the Moors, so often mentioned by Cervantes and his contemporaries, are still used in the country of Valencia. As to the modern stringed instruments, they all had as model the lute (al-aoud, whence laud in Spanish) of the Arabs, who have also given Spain the kitara (guitarra), since become the national instrument of the people whose masters they were in all things.
Several theorists, J. J. Rousseau amongst others, have proposed to write music in figures, assuredly without suspecting that the Arabs had already practised that mode of notation. Kiesewetter[n] calls attention to the fact that, the Arab scale having seventeen intervals, the Arabs were able to write and actually did write music with their figures, employing the numbers one to eighteen for the first octave, one to thirty-five for two octaves, and so on. May it not be from this ancient use of the Arab figures in musical writing that the employment of the same figures for the figured bass, in which a simple number denotes a chord, came into vogue? It is possible and very probable.