inclination to think. They alone read and alone
preserved the literature of the past. Together they supplied it to the
Renaissance. But from the Moors went poetry of their own. It was they who
invented rhyme.[48] Charmed with the novelty, they wrote everything in it,
challenges, contracts, treaties, diplomatic notes, and messages of love.
The composition of poetry was an occupation, usual in itself, which led to
unusual honors, to the dignity of office and high place. Ordinary
conversation not infrequently occurred in verse which was otherwise
facilitated by the extreme wealth of the language. Some of the
dictionaries known generally from their immensity as Oceans--which,
escaping later the unholy hand of the Holy Office,[49] the Escorial
preserved, were arranged not alphabetically but in sequence of rhyme. In
addition to the latter the Moors invented the serenade and for it the
dulcimer and guitar. They not only lived poetry and wrote it and talked it
but died of it. The unusual honors to which it led and which resulted in a
government of poets left them defenceless. Verse which was their glory was
also their destruction. Meanwhile it was from them that the world got
algebra and chivalry besides.

Chivalry has been derived from Germany. The Teutons invented the false
conception of honor--revenge for an affront, the duel and judgment by
arms. That is not chivalry or even bravery, it is bravado. Bravery itself,
perhaps the sole virtue of the early Teuton, was not the only one or even
the first that was required of the Moorish Rokh. To merit that title which
was equivalent to that of knight, many qualities were indispensable:
courtesy, courage, gentility, poetry, diction, strength, and address. But
courtesy came first. Then bravery, then gentility, in which was comprised
the elements that go to the making of the gentleman--loyalty,
consideration, the sense of justice, respect for women, protection of the
weak, honor in war and in love.[50]

These things the Teutons neither knew nor possessed. The Muslim did. Prior
to the first crusade, the male population of Christendom was composed of
men-at-arms, serfs, priests, monks. The knight was not there. But in
Sicily, at the court of the polished Norman kings where Saracens had
gone, particularly in Spain, and certainly at Poictiers, the knight had
appeared. The chivalry which he introduced was an insufficient gift to
barbarism. To it the Moors added perfumery and the language o