and, it may be, never occurred at all. But as a
picture of mediaeval love, life and death, it is exact. If it did not
occur, it might have. Joy's fingers are ever at its lips bidding farewell.
It was in that attitude that its parliaments departed.

IV

THE DOCTORS OF THE GAY SCIENCE

Before joy and its parliaments had dispersed the general gloom, minstrels
went about singing distressed maidens, imprisoned women, jealous husbands,
the gamut of love and lore. Usually they sang to ears that were
indifferent or curious merely. But occasionally a knight errant overheard
and at once, lance in hand, he was off on his horse to the rescue. The
source of the minstrel's primal migration was Spain.

In the mediaeval night, Spain, or, more exactly Andalusia, was brilliant.
On the banks of the Great River, Al-Ouad-al-Kebyr, subsequently renamed
Guadalquivir, twelve hundred cities shimmered with mosques, with enamelled
pavilions, with tinted baths, alcazars, minarets. From three hundred
thousand filigree'd pulpits, the glory of Allah and of Muhammad his
prophet were daily proclaimed.

At Ez Zahara, the pavilion of the pleasures of the Caliphs of Cordova,
forty thousand workmen, working for forty years, had produced a stretch
of beauty unequalled then and unexceeded since, a palace of dream, of
gems, of red gold walls; a court of alabaster fountains that tossed
quick-silver in dazzling sheafs; a patio of jasper basins in which floated
silver swans; a residence ceiled with damasquinures, curtained with
Isfahan silks; an edifice filled with poets and peris, an establishment
that thirteen thousand people served.[47]

Ez Zahara, literally, The Fairest, a caliph had built to the memory of a
love. It was regal. The caliphs were also. The reigns of some of them were
so prodigal that they were called honeymoons. At Seville and Granada were
other palaces, homes as they were called, but homes of flowers, of
whispers, of lovers or of peace. Throughout the land generally there was a
chain of pavilions and cities through which minstrels passed, going up and
down the Great River, serenading the banks that sent floating back wreaths
of melody, the sound of clear voices, the tinkle of dulcimers and lutes.
But most beautiful was Cordova. Under the Moors it eclipsed Damascus,
surpassed Baghdad, outshone Byzance. It was the noblest place on earth.

Throughout Europe at that time, the Moors and the Byzantines alone had
the leisure and the