Baghdad was their caliphate.

Before the latter and on through the Orient were strewn in profusion the
marvellous cities of the Thousand and One Nights, the enameled houses of
the Thousand and One Days. There, in courtyards curtained with cashmeres,
chimeras and hippogriffs crouched. The turbans of the merchants that
passed were heavy with sequins and secrets. The pale mouths of the
blue-bellied fish that rose from the sleeping waters were aglow with gems.
In the air was the odor of spices, the scent of the wines of Shiraz.
Occasionally was the spectacle of a faithless favorite sewn in a sack and
tossed by hurrying eunuchs into the indifferent sea.

The sight was rare. The charm of Scheherazade and Chain-of-Hearts
prevailed. The Muslim might dissever heads as carelessly as he plucked an
orange, they were those of unbelievers, not of girls. Among the peris of
his earthly paradise he was passionate and gallant. It is generally in
this aspect that he appears in the _Thousand and One Nights_, which, like
the _Thousand and One Days_, originally Persian in design, had been done
over into arabesques that, while intertwisting fable and fact, none the
less displayed the manners of a nation. Some of the stories are as
knightly as romaunts, others as delicate as lays; all were the
unconsidered trifles of a people who, when the Saxons were living in huts,
had developed the most poetic civilization the world has known, a social
order which, with religion and might for basis, had a superstructure of
art and of love.

It was this that louts in rusty mail went forth to destroy. But though
they could not conquer Islam, the chivalry of the Muslim taught them how
to conquer themselves. From the victory contemporaneous civilization
proceeds.

With the louts were women. An army of Amazons set out for the Cross where
they found liberty, new horizons, larger life, and, in contact with the
most gallant race on earth, found also theories of love unimagined. In the
second crusade Eleanor, then Queen of France, afterward Queen of England,
alternated between clashes and amours with emirs. The example of a lady so
exalted set a fashion which would have been adopted any way, so
irresistible were the Saracens.[36]

It was therefore first in Byzance and then in Islam that the Normans and
Anglo-Normans who in the initial crusade went forth to fight went
literally to school. They had gone on to sweep from existence inept bands
of pecculant Bedouins