The importance of his foreign commerce is shown by the wealth and size of his seaports. Of these Almeria stood first in rank; its merchants not only maintained the closest intimacy with the nations of the Mediterranean, but penetrated as far as Persia and China. It employed three thousand eight hundred looms in the fabrication of damasks and brocades; the gardens and plantations of its environs embraced an area of four hundred square miles. Each city had its specialty: Baeza was famous for woollens, Murcia for coats of mail, Valencia for perfumes, Malaga for pottery and glass, Xativa for paper, Toledo and Seville for swords of perfect temper. In the early part of the twelfth century there were six hundred villages engaged in the manufacture of silk. Granada was the chief mart of this industry, and soon after the accession of Charles Fifth, when the Inquisition had already driven thousands of skilful artisans into exile, the crown revenues from this source alone amounted annually to one hundred and eighty-one thousand five hundred gold ducats, or seven hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars of our money.
The luxurious tastes of the East caused the introduction of many useful plants and fruits, among them the buckwheat, the sugar-cane, the peach, and the pomegranate, and the first palm ever seen in Andalusia was brought from Damascus by Abderrahman, in memory of his native land. In his control over water, the most valuable treasure of his forefathers, the Moor displayed a power little short of marvellous, and a reverence as for something peculiarly sacred. Every drop of the precious fluid was utilized, and its distribution protected by a code of stringent regulations, causing its benefits to be felt in the remotest hamlets of the kingdom. This code is still in force in Valencia, and the ancient tribunal of seven judges, chosen from the farmers of the province, holds its sessions in that city every Thursday, the last day of the Mohammedan week, to hear and decide without appeal all questions involving the laws of irrigation.
The rapid progress made by the Spanish Arabs in those arts that tend to diminish the burdens and increase the enjoyments of life, unexampled as it was in history, was not more remarkable than the diligence with which they applied themselves to literary and scientific pursuits, studies destined to exert such lasting effects upon the happiness and well-being of mankind....
In the personal appearance and mode of life of the Andalusians, and particularly in those of the inhabitants of Cordova, can be detected unmistakable signs of their Arab ancestry. Their skins are darker, and the women especially have larger and more lustrous eyes than those of the other provinces of Spain. Their dialect, full of proverbial expressions, and unintelligible by its elision of consonants, seems a barbarous jargon to the Castilian of Salamanca or Valladolid. The popular cloak is the burnous; the hat of the muleteer a degenerate turban; the haick, under whose folds Eastern jealousy required the features of all females to be concealed, survives in the mantilla, that once covered the face, and does yet in certain towns, as Tarifa, and which has even travelled to Spanish America as the tapada of Lima. The sandal is much worn by the poorer classes, and the silken sash, or girdle, passes yet under its Arab name of faja. The irrigating apparatus, the cart, the plough,—which is nothing but a crooked stick,—are all Oriental; the mills were either actually built by the Moors, or modelled after those of that industrious people. Grain is still tramped out by cattle upon the primitive threshing-floor, and winnowed by the wind. The charcoal vender, with his panniers and his scales, is identical in all save costume with the vagrant charbonnier of Cairo.
The clapping of hands to call servants reminds one of the “Arabian Nights;” the seclusion of women savors strongly of the restraints of the harem.
Instances might be indefinitely multiplied to show the derivation of similar customs interwoven with every act of social and domestic life. And, notwithstanding the untold advantages and invaluable practical knowledge—the results of ages of experience—bequeathed by the Saracen to his conqueror, with the ruins of massive castles, and of palaces unrivalled in magnificent decoration, scattered all over the land; with the museums crowded with priceless relics of Arab art; with the fields watered by an ingenious yet simple system of irrigation, yielding prodigious returns with but trifling labor; it is the greatest insult you can offer a Spaniard to call him a “Moor,” or insinuate that in his veins courses a drop of the blood of that despised race whose industry was once the boast, as its neglected souvenirs are now the glory, of his country.