and discovered that the ineptity was wholly their
own. They had thought that there might be a few pretty women in the way,
only to find their own women falling in love with the foe. They had
thought Tours and Poictiers were to be repeated.

It was in those battles that Europe first encountered Islam. Had not the
defeat of the latter resulted, the world might have become Muhammadan, or,
as Gibbon declared, Oxford might to-day be expounding the Koran. But
though the Moors, who otherwise would have been masters of Europe,
retreated, it is possible that they left a manual of chivalry behind. Even
had the attention been overlooked, already from Andalusia the code was
filtering up through Provence. Devised by a people who of all others have
been most chivalrous in their worship of women it surprised and then
appealed. Adopted by the Church, it became the sacrament of the preux
chevalier who swore that everywhere and always he would be the champion of
women, of justice and of right.

The oath was taken at an hour when justice was not even in the
dictionaries--there were none--at an epoch when every man who was not
marauding was maimed or a monk. At that hour, the blackest of all, there
was proposed to the crapulous barons an ideal. Thereafter, little by
little, in lieu of the boor came the knight, occasionally the paladin of
whom Roland was the type.

Roland, a legend says, died of love before a cloister of nuns. Roland
himself was legendary. But in the _Chanson de Roland_ which is the right
legend, he died embracing his sole mistress, his sword. Afterward a girl
asked concerning him of Charlemagne, saying that she was to be his wife.
The emperor, after telling of his death, offered the girl his son. The
girl refused. She declined even to survive. In the story of Roland that
is the one occasion in which love appeared. It but came and vanished with
a hero whose name history has mentioned but once and then only in a
monkish screed,[37] yet whose prowess romance ceaselessly celebrated,
inverting chronology in his behalf, enlarging for his grandiose figure the
limits of time and space, lifting his epic memories to the skies.

What Jason had been in mythology, Roland became in legend, the first
Occidental custodian of chivalry's golden fleece, which, he gone, was
found reducible to just four words--Death rather than dishonor.

Dishonor meant to be last in the field and first in the retreat. Honor
meant courage and courtesy, th