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                           CHAPTER XXV

                The Moorish Civilization in Spain

  The Crescent and the Cross -- The Brilliance of the Moors --
 The City of Light and Love -- Moorish Science and Literature --
                     The Ministry of the Jew

                   THE CRESCENT AND THE CROSS

     THE phrase which, like all historical writers, I have
repeatedly used for the most degraded period of Christendom, the
Dark Ages, applies especially to the tenth century. Europe had then
been "Christendom" for five or six centuries. Nearly six hundred
years had elapsed since popes and bishops had directed the hands of
ignorant emperors to sign the doom of every rival source of
inspiration, to close schools as well as temples, to proscribe art
as well as literature. The avalanche of uncivilized Teutons from
the north had ceased. Only the western coast of Europe now suffered
from the seafaring Norsemen.

     But we saw what Christendom was. Except where the conventional
but sustained art of the Greeks alleviated its squalor, as in
Venice, the continent was a picture of economic, social, moral and
intellectual desolation. It was the hour of blackest degradation of
the Papacy. It was the time when the lasciviousness of bishops,
priests, monks and nuns did not even wear the cloak of hypocrisy.
It was an age when a modest modern millionaire could have bought a
kingdom; when ninety-nine percent of the people were serfs with as
intolerable a lot as slaves ever had; when not one man in one
hundred, or one woman in one thousand, could read; when the weaker
were trodden into the mud and blood, and even the strong winced
before the ghastly plagues, the ever-flashing knife, the comet in
the heavens, the legions of imaginary devils in the air.

     "If you seek his monument, look around you." says an
inscription in a great cathedral (London), referring to the
architect. If you want to know the social inspiration of
Christianity, study the tenth century. No seductive phrase of the
preacher, no lie of the apologist, no diplomatic concession of the
historian, can conceal from a thoughtful mind the stark
responsibility of the Church, especially of the Papacy, for that
unparalleled degradation of a civilization. It is one of the
saddest chapters of the martyrdom of man, one of the sternest
counts in the indictment of God. Paul and Augustine had triumphed
-- in part. They had certainly shattered the City of Man. But
whether this that they had created might without humor be called
the City of God ...

     They had triumphed in all Europe except one corner: the
Iberian peninsula, which we now call Spain and Portugal. From that
land the cross of Christ was removed at the beginning of the eighth
century. The Mohammedans ruled it. Indeed, the embroidered banners
of the Moor, blazing with texts of the Koran, were borne
triumphantly across the Pyrenees, glittered in the sun of Provence,
and reached Lyons and the towns of Burgundy. Christendom was
"threatened." And the innocent teachers in our high schools still
tell innocent children, from not very innocent manuals of history,
how the glorious Charles Martel, of blessed memory, met the Moors
on the plains of France and saved the world -- from civilization.

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     For there is not a teacher in any university or school in the
world who dares tell his pupils that, as every historian knows, the
banners of the "Saracens" stood for one of the most progressive
civilizations in the world; that Charles Martel and his army were
vandals, hoboes, semi-civilized barbarians; and that if the Moors
had succeeded in conquering Europe, and it had two centuries later
received everywhere the civilization which the Moors set up in
Spain, we should today, in every part of the world, be at least
five centuries more advanced than we are. No man can count the
cost, in blood and tears and poverty and injustice, of that victory
of Charles Martel on the plains between Tours and Poitiers.

     You may have wondered that an account of the Moorish
civilization in Spain should be included in a study of religion.
You will very quickly cease to wonder. It yields two lessons of
vital importance. First, that it is sheer bunk to say that any
country in Europe could not be restored more quickly to
civilization because the Roman regime had been trodden under foot
by the northern barbarians. Secondly, that the real impulses to the
restoration of civilization in Europe had no connection with the
Christian religion and were largely antagonistic to it.

     A few years ago I stood on the bridge at Cordova and
contemplated the melancholy spectacle. Some guide-book assured me
that Cordova was "a vivacious over-grown village," which I could
only take to be a reference to its goats and asses. Gautier, who
once stood where I was standing, imagined it as the "whitened
skeleton" of a once beautiful maid; but I could not find the
whiteness. Garbage-laden bullocks and impoverished Spaniards wander
along its narrow dirty streets; which were paved in the ninth
century and have never since been mended, says one ironic writer.
Its river-edges are ragged and squalid. Less than a hundred
thousand people struggle for life in its decaying frame. Yet a
thousand years ago it was the greatest city on earth, with near a
million prosperous and happy people in it, with a wealth that could
have bought up the whole of European Christendom many times, with
miles of glorious marble mansions shining out of superb gardens
along that river-front, with art and learning that drew men from
every part of the world where art and learning were still
appreciated.

     Spain, like Britain, Gaul, South Germany, Italy and North
Africa, had been civilized by the Romans. Those uninspired,
materialistic, sensual, immoral Romans had made of its primitive
inhabitants a happy cultured folk immeasurably higher than any
section of Christendom was a thousand years later. You still tread
their roads and cross their bridges in Spain.

     And this Roman-Spanish civilization had been trodden under
foot -- I use the stereotyped phrase -- by the Teutonic tribes as
heavily as Gaul, and more heavily than Italy. The Vandals had
thundered over it. The Visigoths had dominated it and settled it.

     In fact, even in this early stage of its history Spain teaches
us to distrust the conventions, or the religious concessions, of
history. A very promising Visigothic civilization was established.
The people were prosperous; the rulers extraordinarily wealthy and


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luxurious; the administration of justice one of the best in the
world. But, says Scott, the leading authority, "no nation has ever
flourished under the rule of a hierarchy," and "the piety of the
priesthood had been supplanted by an insatiable thirst for temporal
power" (i, 263). Stanley Lane-Poole has to admit the same situation
in his "Moors in Spain" (p. 7)

          The Goths remained devout, indeed, but they regarded
     their acts of religion chiefly as reparation for their vices.
     ... They were quite as corrupt and immoral as the Roman nobles
     who had preceded them. ... The very clergy, who preached about
     the brotherhood of Christians, now that they had become rich
     and owned great estates, joined in the traditional policy and
     treated their slaves and serfs as badly as any Roman noble,




These are pictures of Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries.
You see the moral. The Visigoths, when they had settled in Spain in
the fifth century, had at once shown that the barbaric strength of
the Teutons grafted on the culture of the Romans could beget a new
civilization. That refutes (as Theodoric did in Italy also) the
first part of the conventional statement -- that it must take ages
for Christianity to civilize the barbarians. Then, within two
centuries, the Visigoths and their Church degenerated together to
the level of vice and violence and ignorance of the rest of Europe;
which refutes the second part of the statement -- that Christianity
was a civilizing force.

     Now let us see whence the real civilizing forces came. Arabia
had never yet been conquered and civilized when, in the early years
of the seventh century, Mohammed fired it with his new religion.
This religion was not a civilizing force -- no religion is or ever
has been -- but it put a marvelous energy into the Arabs, and they
set out to conquer and convert the world. Within a very short time
they overran the old civilizations of Persia and Egypt, and they
did not take long to evolve a brilliant Arab-Persian civilization.
As Scott says: "Less than one hundred years intervened between the
vagabondage and ignorance of the desert and the stability and
intellectual culture of the great Abbaside and Ommeyade capitals."
Here is lesson number two: still clearer than the lesson taught us
by the Visigoths and Ostrogoths. The Arabs were as rude and
uncultivated as the Teutons, but, when they overran an older
civilization, they became fully civilized within a century. And
Scott, although he does not see the force of the point, gives ample
evidence of the reason. The faith in Islam rapidly decayed.
Damascus, the new capital, was saturated with skepticism and
resounded with blasphemy. The religion did not inspire
civilization, but the neglect of its precepts permitted human
nature to civilize itself.

     We shall now see how far this applies to the Moors, but we
have first to see how these Mohammedan Arabs, or "Saracens" (which
means "Easterners"), became "Moors" and entered Europe.




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     From Egypt, the Arabs, still thirsting for conquest, again
looked westward. The desert upon which they gazed had no terrors
for the children of Arabia, whereas the sea repelled them. Beyond
the desert, they heard, was a fruitful and prosperous land (now
Tunisia, Algiers and Morocco) which Carthaginians and Romans had
made rich. So one day in the year 647, an Arab general and twenty
thousand men on horses and camels plunged into the unknown, and
they swept the thousand-mile strip of territory on the north coast
of Africa. Within about half a century the Arabs dominated the
whole southern shore of the Mediterranean and looked covetously to
the rich lands of its northern shore.

     Some of them were settled amongst the Moors ("Blacks" --
though the Berbers of Morocco are merely swarthy whites, not
blacks) opposite Gibraltar, and no doubt they intermarried with
them, so to Europeans they became known as the "Moors." On the
European coast the formidable fortress of Cluta checked their
ambition. It was held by a Greek officer, Count Julian, nominally
for the Greek emperor. But in 709 or 710 Count Julian became an
ally of the Moors. The story runs that he sent his daughter to the
corrupt Visigothic court and there she was ravished by the king.
Julian, in revenge, invited the Moorish governor to cross and take
Spain. He painted the colossal wealth of the Visigothic court and
Church in glowing colors and he pointed out that the degeneracy of
the country would permit a small force to conquer it.

     In the year 710, after a reconnoitering expedition, a Berber
general was sent over with seven thousand men (to whom later were
added five thousand Berber cavalry), and before the end of 711
almost the whole peninsula was in the hands of the Moors. The
remnants of the Visigothic army, nobles and clergy were penned up
in a small mountainous district on the Bay of Biscay. The Moors
ascended the Pyrenees and built a chain of watch-towers on the
mountains to protect themselves against the (to them) strange
people of Gaul.

     In time, as I have already said, they invaded Gaul. The
reports of the vast wealth found in Spain and the prosperity of the
country brought increasing numbers of Arabs from the east. A
viceroy and four hundred select Arab nobles were sent from
Damascus. The thirst for conquest was renewed, and at one time a
hundred thousand Moorish troops were scouring France. By this time
they were highly civilized, and the people of the south of France
welcomed them as new Romans in comparison with the brutal Franks
and Germans of the north.

     Over their failure to advance further in Europe, and what that
failure (represented in most schools as a victory for Christianity
and civilization) meant to Europe, we must not linger. We have to
see how in Spain itself they developed a policy which makes the
rest of Europe look like savagery. But note, before we pass on,
that the brilliance and refinement of the Moors made a lasting
impression on the people of southern France, and for centuries
these people remained culturally in contact with the Moors. The
passes of the Pyrenees were the real source of the first
inspiration of barbaric Europe; and the south of France soon became
the most prosperous and most skeptical or heretical region in


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Europe. It is not merely the warm sun that has made Provence the
proverbial land of song and gaiety.

     Let us turn back to Spain. Representatives of an already
civilized race and acting under constant instructions from the
Khalif of Damascus, the Moorish governors at once took over and
remodeled the civic and political administration and the
agricultural system. There was, they found, no exaggeration of the
amount of the royal and clerical treasures. Toledo, the Visigoth
capital, yielded an incredible amount of gold and jewels; though it
is believed that great treasures are still hidden underground,
where the fleeing priests buried them, and the earliest fugitives
(including the bishop) had taken much with them. It is related that
Moorish soldiers overtook a group of clerical fugitives with a
solid gold lectern, heavily encrusted with rubies, emeralds and
pearls, worth half a million dollars in modern currency, though
money was then worth ten times as much. But the basis of the
Moorish civilization which was now developed in Spain was the solid
economic life of the country itself.

                   THE BRILLIANCE OF THE MOORS

     The splendors of Granada, the best known of the Moorish cities
today, belong to a much later date, and I am taking the Moorish
civilization as it existed about the middle of the tenth century.
Europe generally was then at its lowest depth of degradation. Rome
stank with corruption. Charlemagne's great effort to restore a
large part of the continent had failed. France was ravaged by the
Northmen and England by the Danes. The clergy in every country were
generally corrupt, and cared not the toss of a coin for what we
call civilization.

     Spain, on the contrary, was one "highly cultivated and
extraordinarily productive garden," with nine large cities, three
thousand towns, and tens of thousands of villages. There were
twelve hundred villages along the banks of the Guadalquivir alone.
In one day's journey, the chroniclers say, you could, though there
was no speeding in those days, pass through three cities and almost
a continuous series of towns and prosperous villages. Cordova, the
capital, must have had a population of about a million people.
Seville at one time had five hundred thousand, Almeria five hundred
thousand, Granada four hundred and twenty-five thousand, Malaga
three hundred thousand, Valencia two hundred and fifty thousand,
and Toledo two hundred thousand.

     It is estimated that the total population in the middle of the
tenth century was about thirty millions: a phenomenal increase of
population, betokening of itself a very high degree of
civilization. A population normally, with fair sanitation and
hygienic conditions, doubles in a quarter of a century. It will
tell you in a word what the Moors had done, and what the Spaniards
afterwards undid, if you reflect that this Spanish population,
which was thirty millions in the tenth century, is now only twenty-
two millions. The figure of thirty millions in the tenth century is
an extraordinary tribute to the science and wisdom of the Moors.
England, for instance, had then a population of about two or three
million people.


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     The prosperous and carefully fostered conditions of
agriculture was the basis of the country's prosperity. People who
have never been in Spain have a vague idea (largely derived from
novels and films) that it is a land of fruitful soil, luscious
vegetation, undying flowers, and unending song and love. Andalusia,
the Moorish area -- they cared little for the north -- is
proverbial for its bright eyes and amours, its roses and guitars.
It is an undeserved reputation. I like the Spanish people as well
as any among whom I have traveled, but gaiety is not their
characteristic, nor is Andalusia a land of love and flowers and
song. Spain today is miserably poor, priest-ridden, abominably
governed. The country generally has, for most of the year, a
scorched and thin carpet of vegetation, and the hard-working
peasants wring a poor living from the soil. Irrigation will one
day, when Spain casts out its Royalty, its Church, and its Army,
make a paradise of it once more, but today it is devoid of capital
or enterprise.

     A paradise, comparatively, it must have been in the tenth
century to encourage such a growth of population. Men had the wit
to assist nature. Aqueducts and canals distributed water where
today the helpless peasants see the rains from the ubiquitous
mountains race at once to the sea. The vast barren plains of today
were well wooded, and bore golden crops for the Moors. The bleak
sides of the hills were terraced and furnished with soil. In many
places four different crops were raised from the same field in a
year. Food was very abundant and cheap; and all the resources of
the east were added to the resources of Roman Spain. The myrtle
blended its perfume with that of the rose and the orange. The palm
raised its graceful lines against the deep blue sky. It was a land
of gardens, and such gardens as few countries know today.

     Upon the groundwork of this rich primary production rose a
very effective industrial and commercial system. I am not concerned
with the details of this, and will only remind the reader how the
steel blades of Toledo and the leather work of Cordova were the
most treasured in the world, and how the Moorish mercantile fleet
scoured the seas in search of luxuries and rarities for the
hundreds of thousands of rich people. The Moors were the new
Romans, attracting scholars and artists, slave-dealers and
purveyors of dancing girls, silk-merchants and jewel-merchants,
from every part of the earth.

     The taxation was not oppressive. In the main it consisted of
a tenth of the yield of crops and mines or of the profits of
industry or commerce. But the revenue was astonishing. The Khalif
of the time I am describing, Abd-al-Rahman III, is said to have had
an annual income of more than $30,000,000; and money would then
purchase many times more than it now does. Nobles and merchants
were proportionately wealthy. We read of the Vizier of Abd-al-
Rahman III making his monarch a present of an estate with forests
of twenty thousand trees, sixty beautiful slaves, one hundred
horses and mules, eight hundred magnificent suits of armor, and a
million dollars' worth of gold and other valuables. The present is
valued by the Arab writers, a very different lot from the ignorant
monkish chroniclers of Europe, at about $5,000,000.



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     But, erotic and luxurious as the Moorish princes were, they
used their vast resources for public and philanthropic purposes as
few Christian monarchs ever did. The rulers who chiefly made the
civilization of the Moors (from 756 to 961) were munificent patrons
and friends of learned men, most generous and ardent supporters of
education, and themselves in some cases no mean scholars. The
Khalif Hakim II, at a time when few Christian monarchs could write
their names, had a library of half a million books, and was reputed
to be familiar with them. Large numbers of schools were maintained
by the Khalifs themselves.

     Equally generous were they, both with their own and the State
funds, in executing public works. The solid roads and bridges of
the Romans were supervised, and where necessary repaired, so that
the country had a system of communications worthy of its industry
and commerce. The heavy motor vehicles of today rush, at Toledo and
Cordova and elsewhere, over the magnificent bridges which the
Romans built and the Moors restored. Aqueducts were repaired and
new aqueducts built, so that abundant supplies of water were
secured, not only for irrigation, but for distribution in the
towns. A post service, with relays of fast horses, covered the main
roads of the kingdom.

     In order to appreciate these things one has to be reminded
constantly of the contrast with the rest of Europe. Six hundred and
more years later than this there would still be no drainage system
in the largest cities of Europe. Foul and contaminated water
trickled along, or lay in stagnant pools, on the unpaved streets of
Paris and London centuries after the Renaissance had done its work.
Yet the streets of the Moorish cities were paved, lighted, and
finely drained by the middle of the tenth century. Scott says that
some of the sewers under the streets of Valencia could take an
automobile, and the smallest of them would permit an ass. The
streets were also well policed.

     This excellent sanitation was supported by a general
cleanliness which the modern American will take for granted, but it
was then a marvel of refinement in Europe. Cordova alone had nine
hundred public baths, and private baths were everywhere; at a time
when there was probably not a bath in the whole of the rest of
Europe. The ways of the feudal nobility of Christendom were then of
a coarseness that one must hesitate to describe. Clean linen was
unknown, until the fashion of wearing linen was borrowed from the
Mohammedans. Carpets were not manufacture. Straw covered the floors
of the castles of the nobility and the lecture-rooms of the
schools, and dogs and humans made it inexpressibly filthy. No one
had a pocket handkerchief ... Gardens also were generally beyond
the imagination of Christendom, but in a Moorish Spain the utmost
care and expense were devoted by all classes to their beautiful and
perfumed gardens. Fountains sparkled in the sun everywhere, in the
courts of private houses and in the palaces and public places. Two
immense and beautiful marble basins still decorate the courtyard of
the great mosque at Cordova, where every worshiper once washed
before entering.





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     The administration of justice -- presently to be replaced by
the horrors of the Inquisition and its torture chambers -- was, say
the authorities, "untainted by even the suspicion of corruption."
Education was better even than it had been in the Roman Empire; and
higher education was second only to that of Greece in its best
days. Hospitals and orphanages were founded by the Khalifs
themselves, as they had been founded by the Stoic emperors (and had
since almost disappeared from Europe), and the nobles and merchants
were not slow to follow the royal example in this fulfillment of
the precepts of the Koran. The Khalifs themselves visited the sick
and sought cases of distress to alleviate.

     Women, reduced to subjection elsewhere in Europe on account of
the absurd biblical story of Eve and the misogyny of the early
Fathers, were free and honored amongst the Moors. The liberality,
if not license, which had soon replaced the early fanaticism at
Damascus, was sufficiently adopted in Spain to secure the position
of woman. The harsh Mohammedan attitude toward her with which we
are familiar was not assumed until a later date. Women at the
Cordova court helped to shape the counsels of the Khalifs, were the
friends of scholars and literary men, or were, if of a different
temperament, easily able to pursue their amours with the artists
and minstrels of the court. Education was freely extended to them,
and many took a keen interest in the astronomy, philosophy, and
medical science of the time. Women wore the veil in public, but
they were respected, and in the home they were honored and
esteemed.

     Of refinement, courtesy, gentlemanliness, it is needless to
speak, since it is the Moors who indelibly stamped upon the Spanish
people that personal dignity and courtesy which still lends a
peculiar attractiveness even to the artisan and the peasant. A far
more important distinction of the Moors was their religious
tolerance. In the beginning there had naturally been "martyrs";
though there was nothing to compare with the later Spanish butchery
of the descendants of the Moors. But in the settled Moorish
kingdom, apart from rebellious bodies like the Christians of
Toledo, who constantly looked northward for deliverance, all
religions were tolerated.

     Jews and Christians paid a small special tax, and were granted
the full protection of the laws. So numerous were they that the
yield of the tax was high, and the Khalifs discouraged a
proselytism that might reduce it. The Christians at Cordova were
permitted to keep their cathedral, which was eventually bought from
them at a very high price, and they were then permitted to build a
number of churches. At Toledo they had six churches, and they
maintained a friendly intercourse with their neighbors until
priests stirred them to religious hatred. The Jews, who then
enjoyed their real golden age, rose to high distinction in science
and the State service under the Moors.

     This general sketch of the Moorish civilization will receive
more color and detail when we describe the life of Cordova and
Granada. Already the reader will have amply perceived the
extraordinary superiority of this "pagan" civilization and what it
must have meant to the life of semi-barbarous Europe. There is not


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in any single historian the least hesitation. They do not compare
the Moors and the Christians. It would be like comparing Bostonians
with the Eskimo. It is a question of sharp contrast. Stanley Lane-
Poole says of the Spanish Christians who occupied the north of
Spain (p. 119):

          The forays of the Christians were a terrible curse to
     their victims; they were rude, unlettered people, and few of
     them could even read; their manners were on a par with their
     education; and their fanaticism and cruelty were what might be
     expected from such uncouth barbarians.

Later he contrasts these representatives of medieval chivalry with
the Moors (p. 189):

          The Christians of the north formed the most striking
     possible contrast to the Moorish rivals. The Arabs, rough
     tribesmen as they had been at their first arrival, had
     softened into a highly civilized people, delighting in poetry
     and elegant literature, devoted to the pursuit of learning,
     and, above all, determined to enjoy life to the utmost. Their
     intellectual tastes were unusually fine and delicate. ...
     Music, oratory, as well as the severer pursuits of science,
     seemed to come naturally to this brilliant people; and they
     possessed in a high degree that quality of critical perception
     and delicate appreciation of the finer shades of expression
     which in the present day we associate with the French nation.
          The Christians of the north were as unlike this as can
     well be conceived. They were rude and uncultivated. ... They
     had no idea of the high standard of chivalrous conduct which
     poets afterwards infused into their histories. Their poverty
     made them any man's servants; they sold their valor to him who
     paid them best; they fought to get a livelihood.

He shows that the famous Cid, who still figures in uncritical
literature as a flower of Christian chivalry, was "treacherous,
cruel, a violator of altars and a breaker of his own good faith."
He sold his sword and his passions to both Moslem and Christian.

     Miss Charlotte Yonge, who had the courage to tell the truth
about Moors and Christians fifty years ago, can find only one
consolation to her faith. Islam, she says, reached its highest
inspiration in the Moorish civilizations, and was then exhausted;
but Christianity had "infinite possibilities in the future."

     There is in this a double fallacy. The Moorish civilization
was not inspired by Islam, and it did not die; and the progressive
civilization of modern times is not Christian.

     I must refer the reader to many pages of Scott's valuable work
for the evidence that the Moors set up their high culture rather in
defiance of the Koran. Their philanthropy was, it is true, directly
enjoined by the Koran, though it had its chief source in refinement
and chivalry. Their toleration of Jew and Christian again was, some
may be surprised to know, based upon the Koran (as Miss Yonge
quotes one of their leaders as saying). But they were a very
liberal and largely a skeptical race. Andalusia had miles of


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vineyards, though the Koran strictly forbade wine, and carved
images and pictures are found in their palaces. Damascus, from
which their culture was originally derived, was full of atheism and
blasphemy within a hundred and fifty years of the death of
Mohammed. This ridiculing of religion was, Scott says, distasteful
to the polished society" of the Moors, but "education and
skepticism were almost equally diffused throughout the peninsula,"
and the Moors had no illusion about the divine origin of the Koran.

     And now we begin to see that Christianity no more inspired the
civilization of Europe than Islam inspired the civilization of the
Moors. Christendom did not begin to be civilized until the eleventh
or twelfth century. Even then its great art was associated with
appallingly barbaric features of moral, social, and political life,
and ninety-nine percent of its people remained ignorant. A very
high proportion of this barbarity lasted until the nineteenth
century, and the really high and progressive civilization of our
own time has nothing to do with Christianity.

     But the beginning of civilization in Europe in the eleventh
and twelfth centuries has a great deal to do with the Moors. The
light which blazed in Spain could not but penetrate into the
darkness of Europe. The Christian Spaniards, who gradually overran
the northern half of the country as the Moors became luxurious and
confined themselves to Andalusia, could not remain entirely
insensible to the refinement of their neighbors. Christian visitors
to the Moorish cities took away thrilling stories of their splendor
and learning. The Jews, especially, played an important part in
diffusing the new culture.

                   THE CITY OF LIGHT AND LOVE

     Today, eight and a half centuries after the Spaniards
reentered Toledo, a sluggish population of about thirty thousand
people crawls about its drowsy streets, living largely on visitors.
One thinks of the thousands of lizards which occupy the ruins of
Pompeii. When the Spaniards rode proudly in, headed by their
archbishop ... Well, civilization was kicked out. A superb
cathedral was built later, but otherwise the city sank to the
status of a large village. The fine bridge over the river was too
solid, and too useful, to be destroyed. The wonderful city-gate,
the Puerta del Sol, was spared, and today seems a melancholy
monument of a great past brooding in a slum. For the rest, the
wonderful old city might never have existed. You search diligently
for a few fragments of the former grandeur. All was destroyed. And
you wander disconsolately along the narrow main street, where the
luxurious life of a quarter of a million people once glittered, in
search of a decent place of refreshment, and must at length eat in
a dirty room amongst mule-drivers and farmers.

     The glory of the Moors went south: to Seville, Cordova,
Granada, Malaga, and Valencia. Toledo had been only an outpost. The
sunny south was the natural home of the Moors. Cordova was their
chief city; and it is singular how few people know, in spite of its
recent date, that it rivaled Babylon and Rome and Baghdad in
magnificence and importance.



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     I have said what a pitiable spectacle Cordova is today. I am
not, in these constant laments, merely exciting, or attempting to
excite, odium against the religion which inspired the Spaniards to
destroy a great civilization. I am more alive to the loss to the
human race than to the guilt of the culprits. Had Christendom built
on and further developed the superb work done by the Greeks in the
east, by the Romans in Italy, France, England and north Africa, and
by these Moors in Toledo, Cordova, Seville, and Granada. ... Where
should we be today? If the spirit and learning and refinement of
Cordova had spread over the whole of Europe, that continent would
have been highly civilized, and science well developed, by the
thirteenth century; America and the rest of the world would have
been discovered earlier, and more wisely exploited in the early
stages; and the whole race would be today in the condition of
wealth, comfort, refinement, freedom, and general intelligence in
which it will be about the year 2500.

     Was Cordova, then, so wonderful? Yes, for the tenth century,
for any age except ours, it was marvelous; and it could teach us
many lessons in the art of living.

     There remains only one monument of the Cordova of the Middle
Ages, the Mosque, which is now the cathedral. No one would travel
five miles to see modern Cordova if it were not for the Mosque --
as every child in Cordova still calls it -- but men go from all
parts of the world to see that. After St. Peter's it is the largest
place of worship in the world, and it is of a unique art and
architecture. Externally it is not overpowering. The Moors, living
so much in the shade, paid comparatively little attention to
exteriors. Internally it is a wonderland.

     You enter one of the nineteen doors, and you seem to have
strayed into a forest of marble trees. Eight hundred and sixty
slender shafts of marble, porphyry, and jasper support the roof;
and there were formerly one thousand and twelve columns. Nineteen
aisles lead between them to the nineteen doors. The comparatively
low timber roof was richly decorated with scarlet and gold, and on
the great festivals two hundred and eighty huge silver or brass
chandeliers, burning perfumed oil, shed the light of many thousands
of lamps over the scene. The largest chandelier was thirty-eight
feet in circumference and bore fourteen hundred and fifty-four
lamps. Fitted into its reflector, which increased the blaze nine
times, were thirty-six thousand plates of silver, riveted with gold
and decorated with jewels.

     The Mosque was built, in successive enlargements, in the
eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, and the Mihrab or praying-
place, the sanctuary of a Moorish mosque, the most richly decorated
part, was twice shifted. The final Mihrab, at the far end, is a
marble shell with an entrance that gleams like old gold or brocade
with its superb mosaics. Christian workmen from the Greek Church,
with which the Moors were quite friendly, came to Spain to
construct it.

     But for the wonders of the Mosque I must refer the reader to
manuals of art or guide-books. It is one relic of a city so superb
that none in the world can now compare with it. Abd-al-Rahman I,


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the founder of the dynasty, had modeled his new city, Cordova, on
Damascus, where his early life had been spent. It was he who began
the Mosque, and it is said by the Arab writers to have cost him and
his successors three hundred million dollars. But this was only the
last work of his life. He built superb palaces and many mosques,
and his successors, and the vast community which grew in their
capital, added yearly to the splendors of the city. Scott estimates
that in its best days Cordova must have had a population of one
million. Others say half a million, but the Arab writers tell us
that there were ten thousand palaces (ten of them royal), one
hundred and thirteen thousand houses, seven hundred mosques, nine
hundred public baths, forty-three hundred markets, and five
thousand mills along the river. Now, after all our "progress,"
Cordova is a poor and prosy town of about one hundred thousand very
unpicturesque mortals.

     The old city had ten miles of lighted streets, well paved (you
tread the Moorish pavement today in many of them) and efficiently
drained. Hundreds of the houses still remain, and you can picture
the life of the Moorish family. Through a large and beautiful iron
gate and a short dark passage you enter the patio, or central court
(as in South America), which was the heart of the home. Flowers and
myrtles, rich carpets and silks, cool mosaics and pretty
arabesques, and almost always a marble fountain in the center, made
it a delightful living room. Water was brought from the Sierra,
miles away, and distributed abundantly, through leaden pipes. The
Christians, when they conquered them, destroyed their baths.

     The gold, a river flowing annually through the ruler's
treasury, trickled down upon nobles, officers, literary men,
scholars, merchants, and so on, and magnificent mansions rose for
ten miles along the Guadalquivir. The bazaars were the richest in
the world: not a spice or perfume or costly stuff, not a manuscript
or carpet or musical instrument, could be heard of anywhere but it
must go to Cordova. What America is now in this respect to the old
world, Andalusia was then, and far more, to the whole of
civilization. The public pleasure gardens were feasts to the eye:
you get some idea of the Moorish love of gardens from that at the
Generalife at Granada and the large garden of the Alcazar at
Seville. In every detail of life the Moors sought beauty. Music was
forbidden, and profane poetry frowned upon, by the Koran; but
nowhere else in the world was there such a passion for songs and
poems. As to wine -- even the priests drank it. One Khalif tried to
enforce prohibition and destroy all the vineyards, but his Vizier
restrained him and the wine was merely drunk in private until he
died.

     The Moors themselves were exquisite workers in metal and
leather, made the finest silk and linen, carved the most beautiful
inlaid furniture, made wonderful mosaics, were skilled in the arts
of enameling and damascening, and carried the standard of internal
decoration of houses and palaces to a height unknown elsewhere in
the world. They had ample quarries of marble and alabaster, and
further imported the marbles of Italy, Greece, and Africa. Their
ships brought masses of cedar-wood, ivory, and ebony, and large
quantities of the finest spices and perfumes that the east
afforded, with gold, silver, jewels, mother of pearl, rock crystal,


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lapis lazuli, tortoise shell, and every known material of
embellishment. They introduced into Europe the fruits and
vegetables, the trees and flowers and scented shrubs, the incense
and erotic poetry and flowing white garments of the east. Their
financial resources were, as I said, so great for the age that they
could command the world.

     And they knew how to devote their resources to the art of
living as few people did. The palaces of the nobles, officials, and
scholars were only less luxurious and spacious than those of the
Khalif, and even the home of the shopkeeper had a beauty and
comfort which perished from Europe when the Spanish blight fell
upon Andalusia. Moreover, the hundreds of public baths, lined with
marble and mosaics, and the exquisite public gardens which
stretched along the banks of the Guadalquivir extended the luxury
of the Khalif to all classes. In every detail of their life they
evinced a richness and delicacy of sentiment of which we are
incapable. The twenty suburbs of the great city were not known as
Pottsville or Newton, but "The Vale of Paradise," "The Beautiful
Valley." "The Garden of Wonders," and so on; and garden cities they
really were, with the white homes gleaming amidst broad masses of
oranges, palms, and cypresses, with masses of flowers rising all
the year round by the ever-flowing channels of water. Lakes,
fountains, labyrinths, grottoes, colonnades -- every device of the
horticulturist or the artist was employed to brighten the eye and
the heart. Across the river, over the wonderful bridge (twelve
hundred feet long and ninety feet above the clear water of the
Guadalquivir) was another lovely garden suburb, almost an ideal
city in itself.

     When the day's work was over, Cordova was a riot of laughter
and song, of perfumed sin and ardent intellectual discussion, of
music from every instrument then known in the world. There were
plenty of pietists, for Cordova had the greatest Mohammedan
colleges and scholars in the world, and one devout Khalif enacted
that a mosque should be built with every twelve houses that were
built; but a light and healthy skepticism was the general attitude.
Most men complied with the ritual requirements of the religion of
the State, but not with its ascetic precepts and spirit. Neither
Damascus nor Baghdad, and not even Antioch in its greatest days,
was such a center of joy as Cordova was at the time when all the
rest of Europe shuddered in drab superstition. There has never been
in the world a happier and more generally beautiful and luxurious
life than that of Andalusia in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth
centuries.

     And possibly the highest tribute we can pay to the Moors is to
recall that with this passion for sensual enjoyment they united, in
equal proportion, a passion for intellectual entertainment and
exact knowledge which was more widely diffused than it had ever
been at Rome or Athens. Nowhere else in the world were, or even
are, scholars so honored and so richly rewarded. Nowhere else were
there such marvelous libraries, such busy schools and colleges, so
numerous and fine a body of writers, so general a taste for
intellectual discussion. The little circles of accomplished men and
women in Italy discussing art and letters in Renaissance days were
but feeble imitations of the life of the Moors.


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                 MOORISH SCIENCE AND LITERATURE

     It is the rare distinction of the Moors that they fully
perceived the richness and happiness of a life in which sense and
intellect were equally cultivated. Poetry was, naturally, the most
conspicuous outcome of this harmonious development. All classes,
from shopkeepers to the Khalifs, wrote and recited poems, and one
of the most common spectacles in the perfumed gardens on a summer's
night or in the beautiful central court of the house was the group
of men and women discussing poetry and amiably disputing about
their own rival productions. Music was cultivated with equal
passion. In those days, literally, Andalusia was the land of song
and love and flowers and perfumes.

     But this passion for poetry and music was blended with severer
intellectual pursuits in a way that we can scarcely understand.
Where in our world is there any figure in the least approaching
Ziryab of Cordova? Abd-al-Rahman awarded this man forty thousand
gold pieces a year. He knew the words and airs of ten thousand
songs. I do not know if that is beyond the accomplishments of our
singers, but it is only part of the story of Ziryab. He was just as
learned in the chief sciences of the time, in geography, medicine,
history, and philosophy. He invented new perfumes and cosmetics,
imported foods and drugs, prescribed more hygienic fashions of
clothing, corrected the methods of diplomacy, induced people to add
to the polish of social intercourse, and improved the sanitary
arrangements of the towns; and his wit and epigrams were quoted
throughout Andalusia.

     Where in the world even in modern times will one find a ruler
like Al Hakem II? Such was his passion for learning that he had
collectors of books all over Spain and Europe, and in the end his
private library contained at least four hundred thousand -- some
writers say six hundred thousand -- manuscript books. The poetry of
Arabia and Persia was supplemented by translations of the Greek and
Roman poets. Plato and Aristotle and Euclid and all the classic
writers were translated into Arabic. Prodigiously large works on
medicine, geography, philosophy, astronomy, chemistry and history
were written. And the contemporary historians would have us believe
that Al Hakem knew well the contents of the whole half million
books in his library! His commentaries were appreciated all over
the world. Nor was he aristocratic in his intellectual life. He
founded scores of new schools in Cordova and appointed his own
brother the "Minister of Education" to see that all his people had
opportunities for learning, Writers who ignore Al Hakem II and talk
about the occasional cruelty of Abd-al-Rahman I or the pederasty of
Abd-al-Rahman III deceive their readers.

     This zeal for general education was common to the Moorish
rulers, and their school system recalls that of pagan Rome and
anticipates that of modern times; it was the one oasis of general
education in the great desert of ignorance that stretches from the
fourth to the nineteenth century -- for, like the Christians of the
fifth century, the Christian Spaniards wrecked the schools of the
people.




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     Higher education was even more liberally supported than
elementary. There were eight hundred public schools in Cordova, and
pupils came from the ends of the earth to study in them. Inns were
maintained out of public funds to house and feed the poorer
students, and a little money was given, in addition, to each. There
was no concern, except amongst the zealots, about the bearing of
knowledge on religion. Indeed, Scott says that the universities and
provincial colleges were "essentially infidel." Jews and Christians
were as welcome in them as Mohammedans. A Moorish proverb ran: "The
world is divided into two classes of people -- one with wit and no
religion, the other with religion and no wit." So it was in the
beginning (of the present era), is now -- and will cease to be in
another century or so.

     Who has not at some time read of the wonderful school-life,
the founding of the early universities, which "Christianity
inspired" in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? And how many of
my readers, I wonder, have ever read that three hundred years
earlier there was in Mohammedan Spain a fervor for learning -- for
real knowledge, not the verbal gymnastics of the Scholastics --
which was, literally, a hundred times as extensive, and was the
real inspiration of the school-movement and the universities of the
Middle Ages? Thus is history still written, in the interest of
religion.

     And this fervor for learning was fostered, not merely by a
liberty of thought which was at least far superior to the condition
of Christendom, but by a respect for scholars which has not
returned to the world. The Khalifs not only paid large sums to
distinguished scholars and made personal friends of them, but they
were appointed to the highest offices of State and court. The
Moorish rulers had the quaint idea, which may yet return to
civilizations, that the men best fitted for planning and
administering are, not talkers or intriguers, but men of science
and proved intellectual capacity. Learned men in Spain did not live
in obscure studies and laboratories while the public gaze was
directed to nobles and soldiers and statesmen. They were amongst
the richest and most envied, and the envy related, not to their
princely mansions and superb retinues, but to their learning. This
stimulated the entire nation with literary and scientific ambition.
Nor were women excluded from the race. Many names of ladies of
scholarly distinction may be read in Scott's work, and we learn
that women competed with men in the public assemblies at which high
rewards were bestowed for the finest poem or essay.

     One must not pass to the opposite extreme and fancy that
learning in Spain meant merely the graceful parasitism of the
purely literary man, and that the successful word-spinner led a
life of luxurious indolence. The industry of the scholars was
prodigious. The most striking examples of precocious learning have
come down to us, and the list of the works of the more famous
scholars seems incredible; though Scott tells us that the Moorish
writers, while florid and imaginative in description, are generally
sound in statement of fact. They credit Ibn-al-Khatil with no less
than eleven hundred books on philosophy, history and medicine. Ibn-
Hasen wrote four hundred and fifty volumes on philosophy and law.
Several encyclopedias of the time ran to more than fifty volumes,


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and the chroniclers are said to have numbered more than a thousand.
A priceless literature perished in the flames lit by monkish hands
when the Spaniards "drove the infidel out of Europe," as the
teachers say.

     Aristotle, who resented the pretty verbiage which is called
the spiritualist philosophy of Plato, was the most realistic and
scientific of the classical philosophers known to the Arabs, and it
enhances our regard for their genius that this nation of poets and
lovers of beauty should have idolized him as they did. The
philosopher Avicenna was distinguished for his learning at the age
of sixteen and was Grand Vizier at the age of thirty. The
philosopher Averroes (really Ibn-Roschid), who wrote the most
famous commentary on Aristotle (mentioned by Dante in his
"Inferno,") and whom even the monk Savonarola called "that man of
divine genius, was said to have been so assiduous in study that
there were only two nights in his life -- his wedding night and the
night on which his father died -- which he did not spend in study.
To him all "revealed" religions were impostures, and the famous
medieval production "The Three Impostors" (Moses, Christ and
Mohammed) was probably inspired by the saying of this early
Voltaire that the Jewish religion was fit only for children, the
Christian religion a tissue of impossibilities, and the Mohammedan
religion fit only for swine.

     Aristotle, it is increasingly realized, was -- or would have
been if Greece had consistently developed its early science -- a
great scientist as well as a metaphysician, and Moorish
philosophers like Ibn-Roschid, who was physician to the Emir and
chief judge of Cordova, cultivated science as well as philosophy.
It was, however, the specialists in science who rendered the
greatest service to the world. The entire space of a chapter like
this would not suffice even to summarize what the Moors did for
science, especially mathematics, astronomy, chemistry and medicine.
The lengthy twenty-eighth chapter of Scott's work is itself only a
summary of their intellectual achievements, and an ample volume
would be required to do them justice.

     Astronomy was one of the most esteemed and most widely
cultivated of the sciences. The astronomers of Baghdad had
inherited the lore of Babylon and of Alexandria, and they passed it
on to Spain. There, as in ancient Babylonia, the places of worship
were used for observation. It was from the elevated platforms of
the minarets that the movements of the heavenly bodies were chiefly
observed. The Chaldaic astronomers had found all that can, perhaps,
be discovered with the naked eye, but the Moorish astronomers had
instruments of precision, which were kept at the summits of the
minarets. Telescopes, of course, they had not; though they laid the
foundations of the science of optics, and Roger Bacon owes more to
them than his Catholic admirers imagine. They had ten different
kinds of quadrants and several other early instruments, besides
terrestrial and celestial globes. They discovered that the "thunder
bolt," as the rest of Europe called the shooting star, was a cosmic
mass entering the earth's atmosphere; they had a fair idea of the
height of the atmosphere and its decreasing density; they tabulated
the movements of the stars, made the first accurate determination
of the length of the year, and found the eccentricity of the
earth's orbit and the figures of the precession of the equinoxes.

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     "Alchemy" is an Arabic word, and, like algebra and so many
other words, it reminds us of our scientific debt to the
Mohammedans. From their colleagues in Cairo and Damascus,
particularly, the Moors derived the principles of chemistry, and,
had their civilization been spared or their culture developed, we
should today live in a more wonderful world than we do. It was the
Arabs, not the Chinese, as is generally said, who invented
gunpowder -- I mention it, not as a beneficent gift, but as a sign
of the fertility of their science -- and first made artillery. It
is true that alchemy, the first form of chemistry, meant a
prodigious waste of time in the pursuit of illusions, but,
apparently, science had to pass through that stage before it could
disentangle the elements of the material complex.

     In physics they, being excellent mathematicians, did equally
useful pioneer work. They drew up tables of specific gravities and
guessed the nature of capillary attraction. They were the real
inventors of the compass. The Chinese seem simply to have passed on
to the Arabs a knowledge of the prolderties of the magnetic needle,
and it was the Moors who mounted it on a pivot and provided the
navigator with his invaluable instrument. They invented the
pendulum clock and the balance. They substituted the Arab (really
Hindu) numerals for the more cumbrous Roman numerals. They evolved
the principles of optics which Roger Bacon developed, and the
principles of electricity which Gerbert discussed. They even worked
at the foundations of geology, observing the phenomenon of erosion
and studying the nature of rocks.

     "Mineralogy was cultivated in the tenth century by Arabian
sages," says Dr. Woodward in his "History of Geology," "among whom
Avicenna, a physician, wrote on the formation and classification of
minerals." "Meanwhile the Moors were leaders of science in the
west," says Professor Forbes in his "History of Astronomy," "and
Arzachel of Toledo improved the solar tables very much." "By the
thirteenth century," says Professor Miall, speaking of science
generally in his "History of Biology," "the rate of progress had
become rapid." "Under the rule of the caliphs," says Sir Edward
Thorpe in his "History of Chemistry," the study of chemistry made
considerable progress." There is, in fact. hardly a science that is
not greatly indebted to the Mohammedans of the east and of Spain;
and the greatest debt of all is that we owe to them the restoration
of the scientific spirit, the determination to find the laws and
the exact phenomena of nature, which, though thwarted for a few
centuries by the Church, could not again be expelled from the mind
of man.

     The strong humanitarian spirit of the Moors persuaded them to
lay special stress on medical science. Chemistry was to them, at
first, only an auxiliary science to medicine, the science of drugs.
In this direction, it is true, the Moors were hampered by the
zealots of their creed -- religion again! -- for the Mohammedan
religion would not permit the dissection of human bodies. The
"soul" was believed to remain in the body some time after death.
Surgery was, therefore, little advanced, and it long remained in
the hands of the barber. But we can have little doubt that the
great Moorish and Jewish teachers of medicine dissected animals,



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possibly human bodies in secret. At all events, the practical
service of the physicians was raised above the appallingly low
level to which it had sunk in the rest of Europe. Most of the great
scholars were masters of medicine, whatever else they were; and it
is recorded that the doors of even the richest physician were open
to the poor at any time. Many new drugs were introduced into
Europe.

     History was no less zealously cultivated than science and
philosophy and poetry. Geography was materially improved, for the
Moors were the most skillful and daring navigators of the time, and
their travels were as extensive as their curiosity was keen. Botany
is not less indebted to them, for the Khalifs sent out scholars to
observe closely the native vegetation of Spain, and their gardens
were "botanical gardens" of all the treasures of east and west.
They had also zoological collections and they made observations in
natural history which were very different from the crude traditions
of other countries.

     These very brief statements must suffice to show the reader
how the Moors inaugurated modern civilization in its most important
respect, and how true it is that the destruction of their culture,
which is so glibly represented as an "expulsion of the infidel,"
suspended for a time the development of the race. Their science,
however, could not be wholly extinguished, and it is to them, and
to the ancient Greeks through them, that such Christian pioneers as
Gerbert, Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, and Grossetests owe their
knowledge.

     Take, for instance, the story of Gerbert. Born in the south of
France in the tenth century, be studied at Barcelona and then at
Cordova University. Every particle of his remarkable knowledge came
from the Moors. He opened a school in Italy, the monks incited the
mob to burn it, smash his instruments and disperse his scholars.
Lay rulers, however, could not but esteem their one Christian
scholar. He became a bishop and, by a freak of history, a Pope
(Sylvester II) in the most degraded age of the Papacy. He died
under strong suspicion of poison, in four years, and the Church
(which now boasts of him) execrated his memory.

     But the realistic scientific spirit of the Moors could not be
killed. Slowly the glamour of their civilization pierced through
the mists of superstition and ignorance, and begot some sense of
decency, some stirring of intellectual ambition, in Europe. It was
in the eleventh century (following upon the golden age of Cordova)
that Europe began to emerge from its barbarism. This was largely
due to the political development which in turn permitted an
economic development. Villages grew to towns and towns to cities.
Laymen got knowledge, and bodies of burghers got ambition. Upon
this awakening intellect of Christendom the brilliant civilization
of the Moors was bound to make an impression.

                     THE MINISTRY OF THE JEW

     The Jews, who are said to have numbered about one hundred
thousand in Spain when the Moors arrived in the eighth century, had
been almost as badly treated under the Visigothic kings as they
were in other Christian countries. The common people, goaded by the

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story of the gospel and the pulpit, treated them with contempt and
brutality. The rulers of Church and State robbed and exploited them
without scruple. The founders of Christianity had become the helots
of Christendom.

     But the Jews of Spain -- they had migrated thither in large
numbers in the days of its Roman civilization -- quickened with
interest when they heard that a new religion and new policy had
risen in the east which treated their brethren humanely. It was
only in a later age that the Mohammedans developed the hostility to
the Jew which one finds in the east today. The very liberal
Mohammedans of Damascus were incapable of religious hatred, and the
Jews were freely tolerated. These enlightened folk, the Spanish
Jews now heard, had come as far as Morocco, and were turning their
eyes toward the Spanish Peninsula. In short, when the Moors did at
length cross the Straits and overrun Spain, they found useful
allies in the Jews of every city.

     The Moors had come to plunder, but they soon set about the
organization of a new polity, and in that polity the Jews had an
important and honorable place. Like the Christians they paid a
special tax, and they wore a special costume and lived in their own
wards or suburbs. But they soon proved their irrepressible genius,
and rose to the highest positions in the schools and the State.
Christians had the same liberty, but not the same talent; and there
was far less in the monotheistic religion of the Jews to shock the
keen intellectual taste of the Arab than in the fantastic story,
the crudely disguised polytheism, and the tissue of legends which
an Arab would see in the Christian creed and practice. Both Arabs
and Jews were Semites, moreover, and Mohammed had been far nearer
to Judaism than to what he regarded as its debased progeny.

     Already in the east the Jews had helped in the early
cultivation of the Arabs. Scott tells us that the first book
written in Arabic was written by a Jew. He, in fact, sums up their
services in these words (ii, 165): "The Jews were, in turn, the
teachers, the pupils, and the coadjutors of the Moors; the legatees
and the distributors of the precious stores of Moorish wisdom." The
knowledge of their privileged position in Spain spread through
Europe, and from the horrors of Christendom the stricken children
of Abraham endeavored to reach this new land of milk and honey.
From the tenth to the twelfth century they formed a nation within
the Moorish nation, yet without prejudice on either side. Jewish
merchants, who had in other lands to hide their laboriously
acquired wealth, lived in the most princely of mansions in Cordova
and belonged to the highest social group. Jews rose to the most
important offices of State, and they left a most honorable
proportion of distinguished names in the long list of Moorish
scholars. Of the four thousand notable medieval Jews in the
catalogue of Barthoccius the vast majority belonged to Spain.

     There was no branch of the very extensive learning of the time
in which they did not excel. The Alfonsine Tables, which were
regarded as the greatest astronomical achievement of the Middle
Ages, were mainly compiled by Jewish astronomers. They were so
assiduous in the cultivation of philosophy that there are said to
have been more copies of the "Commentary" of Averroes in Hebrew
than there were in Arabic. The Moorish and all other Arab treatises

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were translated into Hebrew, and the young Jews threw themselves
with ardor into poetry, music, history, geography, natural
philosophy, and chemistry as well as mathematics and metaphysics.

     They were particularly eminent as physicians, and their more
distinguished physicians imitated the greater Moors in absorbing
the whole of culture. Moses-ben-Maimon, famous throughout
Christendom and even in modern history under the name of
Maimonides, was their highest representative in the field of
science. A native of Cordova, educated at Cordova University, he
was by profession a medical man, but a master also of philosophy
and science. At the age of thirty he was already esteemed a scholar
of the first rank. His family had emigrated to Cairo, where he
became physician to the Sultan. Profoundly learned both in the
Aristotelic philosophy and in Jewish theology, be attempted to
rationalize the Jewish religion, and his vast and convincing works
caused him to be known to his race as "the Light of the World." As
one biographer says of him: "The importance of Maimonides for the
religion and science of Judaism, and his influence upon their
development, is so gigantic, that he has been rightly placed second
to Moses, the great lawgiver himself." Ben-Ezra was second only to
Ben-Maimon in his broad command of literature, astronomy, and
medicine. It was, in fact, a catastrophe to the Jewish race in
particular, quite apart from the brutality inflicted on it when the
golden opportunity afforded by the Moors was snatched away by the
Christian Spaniards. The narrow orthodoxy of the rabbis would
otherwise have disappeared long ago under the influence of these
Moorish-Jewish philosophers, and the race would have reached a
happier condition.

     The peculiar position of the Jews as a race without a country
made them particularly useful in conveying the new culture beyond
the frontiers of the Moorish kingdom; for the Moors themselves,
naturally, rarely visited the semi-barbaric lands of Christendom,
while the Jews had co-religionists and trade-connections
everywhere. Spanish and Portuguese courts were scarcely established
when we find Jews in high positions in them. Pedro the Cruel -- and
he deserved his name -- refrained from cruelty only to the Jews,
and they were, except when the priests goaded the people, quite
happy in his kingdom. A Jew was his physician: another Jew the head
of his financial department. Alfonso VIII entrusted the political
administration of the kingdom of Castile and Leon to a Jewish
physician. Alfonso IX had a pretty Jewess for his mistress; and
such mistresses are more powerful than statesmen. Alfonso X, the
patron of astronomy and of the Alfonsine Tables, the most learned
Christian monarch of the age, used the Jews considerably to import
the astronomy, medicine, and philosophy of the Moors into his
dominions. Spain and Portugal advanced upon the Moors only at long
intervals, and in the meantime they were absorbing the elements of
civilization from them.

     It was chiefly the Jews who took the Moorish culture beyond
the Pyreness and across the sea to Italy. The brilliant and
tolerant civilization of the Moors was so well known at Paris in
the twelfth century that Peter Abelard thought of seeking refuge
there to pursue his studies in peace. Jewish doctors, trained at
Seville or Cordova, were in demand everywhere, and it was largely


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               THE STORY OF RELIGIOUS CONTROVERSY

these who conveyed the Arab culture. As Scott says (iii, 149): "The
Jews were the principal medium through which Moorish civilization
was permanently impressed upon Europe." But the Jewish merchant,
risking his property and even his life everywhere, had a large
share in distributing the manuscripts, as well as the drugs and
perfumes, the silks and linens, the fine metal and leather work,
the superb jewelry and inlaid ware, which told all the world that
there was some inspiration, some genius, in Spain that Christendom
lacked.

     Even when the Moorish culture was trodden in the mud by the
Spaniards, as their Vandal and Visigoth ancestors had trodden the
Roman civilization, even when the Jews were exiled and scattered by
one of the most brutal blows of the Inquisition, the members of the
race bore with them everywhere the lore of the Mohammedans. Whole
regions of Spain were destitute of physicians when the Jews were
expelled; and other regions of the earth were correspondingly
enriched. They had already in large numbers reached the south of
France, where the earliest Christian medical schools arose, and the
north of Italy, where we find them active in the early history of
Venice, Genoa, Florence, and the new commonwealths. Christendom
despised and maltreated them; and it learned from them the human
inspiration which would raise it out of the morass into which its
supposedly superior religion had plunged it.



































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                  Box 926, Louisville, KY 40201
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