struggle the independent Christians had not been able to avoid feeling in a certain measure something of the influence of their neighbors, now their most civilized subjects. They translated into prose imitations of the tales such as those of the book of Patronis, borrowing from the general chronicles or in translations like the "Kalila and traditions, legendary or historic, as they found them in the Dimna," or the book of "The Ruses of Women," in verse.

In their oldest romances--for instance, that of the "Children of Sara,"⁴⁵ and in those to which they have given the name of romances fronterizos, or romances of the frontier--they give the facts of the war between the Mussulmans and the Christians.

But they gave the name of Mauresques to another and different class of romances, of which the heroes are chevaliers, who have nothing of the Mussulman but the name. The talent of certain littérateurs of the sixteenth century exercised itself in that class where the persons are all conventional, or the descriptions are all imaginative, and made a portrait of the Mussulman society so exact that the romances of Esplandian, Amadis de Gaul, and others, which evoked the delicious knight-errantry of Don Quixote, can present a picture of the veritable chivalry of the Middle Ages. We possess but few verses of the Mussulmans of Granada. Argot de Moll preserved them in Arabic, transcribed in Latin characters, one piece being attributed to Mouley Abou Abdallah:

  "The charming Alhambra and its palaces weep
  Over their loss, Muley Boabdil (Bon Abdallah),
  Bring me my horse and my white buckler,
  That I may fight to retake the Alhambra;
  Bring me my horse and my buckler blue,
  That I may go to fight to retake my children.
  "My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata;
  Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata.
  My children are at Guadia, my wife at Jolfata,
  Thou hast caused my ruin, O Setti Omm el Fata!"⁴⁶

As may be seen, these verses have no resemblance to those called Moorish. These are of a purely Spanish diction.⁴⁷

Some romances, but not of these last-named, have kept traces of the real legends of the Arabs. There is among them one which treats of the adventures of Don Rodrigues, the last king of the Visigoths--"The Closed House of Toledo."⁴⁸ "The Seduction of la Cava," "The Vengeance of Count Julien," "The Battle of Guadalete," are brought back in the same fashion by the historians and writers of Mussulman romances.

The romance on the construction of the Alhambra has preserved the character of an Arabic legend which dates from before the prophet.⁴⁹ There is also a romance on the conquest of Spain, attributed to an Arab writer, the same man whom Cervantes somewhat later feigned to present as the author of Don Quixote, the Moor, Cid Hamet ben Engels.⁵⁰

It is another style of writing, less seductive, perhaps, than that of the Moorish romances, in spite of their lack of vivacity and their bad taste. But why mark this as the expression of the Mussulman sentiment under Christian domination? Conquered by the Castilians, the Aragons, and the Portuguese, the Moors had lost the use of Arabic, but they had preserved the exterior sign-writing, just as their new converts retained their usages and their national costumes. We possess a complete literature composed in Spanish, but written in Arabic characters. They called it by the name of Aljaniado. Its chief characteristic is that it treats of the principal legends of the Mussulmans; those of Solomon and Moses, of Jesus; the birth, childhood, and the marriage of Mohammed; Temins ed Daria, the war of the king El Mohallal, the miracle of the moon, the ascension of Mohammed to heaven, the conversion of Omar, the battle of Yarmouk, the golden castle, the marvels that God showed to Abraham, Ali and the forty young girls, the anti-Christ and the day of judgment⁵¹ etc.; the legend of Joseph, son of Jacob; that of Alexander the Great,⁵² to which could be added the story of the princess Zoraida,⁵³ without speaking of the pious exhortations, magic formulas, conjurations, and charms.⁵⁴

The Moors held to these documents all the more that they were written in Arabic, and that the fury of the Inquisition was let loose upon them. To save them from the flames, their owners hid them with the greatest care, and but recently, at El Monacid, they found a whole library in Arabic and Aljamiado, hidden more than two centuries between the double walls of an old house.⁵⁵ The Mussulman proprietor of these books and his descendants were dead, or had emigrated to Africa, abandoning the treasure which was to see the light in a more tolerant epoch.

Political relations also existed between those of the Moors who remained in Spain as converts and such as had fled from persecution and carried to the populations of the north of Africa the hatred of the Spanish Christians. Thus we find among the popular literature of the Magreb the same legends, but edited in Arabic. Only a small number has been published.⁵⁶ Whether in one language or the other, editing does not offer anything remarkable. The stories have been developed, after the traditions of the Mussulmans, by the demi-littérateurs, and by that means they have become easier and more accessible to the multitude.

It is thus that a literature in Spain sadly ends which, during seven centuries, had counted historians and poets, philologists, philosophers and savants, and which the Christian literature replacing it can possibly equal in some points, but never surpass.⁵⁷

Rene Basset