n to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and
afterward modified by the Moroccan imagination--there can at least be no
doubt that Fazi art and culture, in their prime, are partly the
reflection of European civilization.

Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it.
One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali
of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which
still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic
flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. It seems as though the seeds of the new springtime of art,
blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at last given the
weltering tribes of the desert the force to create their own type of
beauty.

Nine Medersas sprang up in Fez, six of them built by the princes who
were also creating the exquisite collegiate buildings of Sale, Rabat and
old Meknez, and the enchanting mosque and minaret of Chella. The power
of these rulers also was in perpetual flux, they were always at war with
the Sultans of Tlemcen, the Christians of Spain, the princes of
northern Algeria and Tunis. But during the fourteenth century they
established a rule wide and firm enough to permit of the great outburst
of art and learning which produced the Medersas of Fez.

Until a year or two ago these collegiate buildings were as inaccessible
as the mosques, but now that the French government has undertaken their
restoration strangers may visit them under the guidance of the Fine Arts
Department.

All are built on the same plan, the plan of Sale and Rabat, which (as M.
Tranchant de Lunel[A] has pointed out) became, with slight
modifications, that of the rich private houses of Morocco. But
interesting as they are in plan and the application of ornament, their
main beauty lies in their details, in the union of chiselled plaster
with the delicate mosaic work of niches and revetements, the web-like
arabesques of the upper walls and the bold, almost Gothic sculpture of
the cedar architraves and corbels supporting them. And when all these
details are enumerated, and also the fretted panels of cedar, the bronze
doors with their great shield-like bosses, and the honeycombings and
rufflings of the gilded ceilings, there still remains the general tinge
of dry disintegration, as though all were perishing of a desert
fever--that, and the final wonder of seeing before one, in such a
sett