Perhaps some reader will be glad to learn that, after a few years, "he is weary of sea-fights and of hewing men in twain," and returns home to marry Ingeborn.
Such was one of the early chess-players.
IV.
It is remarkable in the history of chess how very trifling the variations which have ever been made in it. The lapse of time, which has swept away cities and their inhabitants, which has so blotted from human speech the words of those who once held converse around it that their inscriptions on stone are unintelligible, has left it almost unaltered.
Coming close to that domestic life of nations of which chess made one pleasure, what has not changed? Modes of dress, construction of dwellings, fashions of entertainment—all have had their mutations. Yet the game, as far back as the earliest accounts of it, has been almost literally such as we see it. One feature has always marked it, chess; there has always been a sovereign to be attacked and defended, and inferior pieces to accomplish these ends in combination, yet by different means. The board of sixty-four squares has also almost invariably been maintained.
Two pieces were modified when it passed from Arabia to Spain, or rather, from the Saracen to the Christian. In Arabia and Persia, there was no female on the board; what we call "queen" was, with them, "vizier or counsellor," and called pherz, ferz, or fers. This was retained in Europe until about the eleventh century, when it was supplanted by our queen. But wherefore a queen? We shall see.
Several events combined to make this period the age of poetry and of a peculiar deference to womankind. It will be remembered that in the eleventh century, 1095, was preached the first Crusade, a thing of romance and poetry itself. However different the motives which actuated that crowd of nobles and warriors who joined in creating the mighty army whose advance-guard was led by the monk Peter, to all appearance each one was a hero. Country and kingdom, home and love, happiness of wife or maiden, was the sacrifice professedly offered at the shrine of a holy enthusiasm enkindled by faith. Every earthly interest, every tie of affection, all consideration of self, was to be accounted nothing, compared with the sacred obligations involved in the expedition.
The means of expressing all these delicate sentiments and deep emotions, and furthermore of expressing them in poetry, was happily opened to them at this era in the language of the troubadours—the Langue d'Oc. The polish which poetry had received from the Arabians in Spain had elevated it to an art, and made it so attractive to the more refined classes that the highest born, even kings and princes, did not think it beneath them to cultivate it; and he added greatly to his renown who had qualified himself to express in it the two ruling passions of his soul—his martial ardor and his devotion to his ladye-love. Every knight, almost, was a troubadour, and the homage rendered to woman seems almost fabulous. A French writer says of this period:
"Love had assumed a new character.... It was not more tender and passionate than among the Romans; but it was more respectful, and something of a mystery was mingled with its sentiment. Women were considered rather as angelic beings than as dependents and inferiors. The task of serving and protecting them was considered honorable, as though they were the representatives of the divinity upon earth; and to this worship was added an ardor of feeling, passion, and desire, peculiar to the people of the south, and the expression of which was borrowed from the Arabians."[169]
Woman was not slow in extending her influence to more prosaic matters than Les Cours d'Amour and the inspirations of poetry; and history furnishes an abundance of examples where female interference was permitted and female decision respected in the gravest affairs of life. After Alphonso VI. of Castile had driven the Moors from Toledo, he granted to such of them as chose to return the use of a cathedral to serve as a mosque; but, says history, "he soon broke his promise, and deprived them of it, at the instigation of and in order to please his wife."