The "Arab influence" is to be sought elsewhere—in the diffusion of the Eastern apologue, morality, or maxim, deriving from the Sanskrit. M. Bédier argues with extraordinary force, ingenuity, and learning, against the universal Eastern descent of the French _fabliaux_. However that be, the immediate Arabic origin of such a collection as the _Disciplina Clericalis_ of Petrus Alfonsus (printed, in part, as the _Fables of Alfonce_, by Caxton, 1483, in _The Book of the subtyl Historyes and Fables of Esope_), is as undoubted as the source of the apologue grafted on Castilian by Don Juan Manuel, or as the derivation of the maxims of Rabbi Sem Tom of Carrión. To this extent, in common with the rest of Europe, Spain owes the Arabs a debt which her picaresque novels and comedies have more than paid; but here again the Arab acts as a mere middleman, taking the story of _Kalilah and Dimna_ from the Sanskrit through the Pehlevī version, and then passing it by way of Spain to the rest of the Continent. Nor should it be overlooked that Spaniards, disguised as Arabs, shared in the work of interpretation. It is less easy to determine the extent to which colloquial Arabic was used in Spain. Patriots would persuade you that the Arabs brought nothing to the stock of general culture, and the more thoroughgoing insist that the Spaniards lent more than they borrowed. But the point may be pressed too far. It must be admitted that Arabic had a vogue, though perhaps not a vogue as wide as might be gathered from the testimony of Paulus Alvarus Cordubiensis, whose _Indiculus Luminosus_, a work of the ninth century, taunts the writer's countrymen with neglecting their ancient tongue for Hebrew and Arabic technicalities. The ethnic influence of the Arabs is still obvious in Granada and other southern towns; and intermarriages, tending to strengthen the sway of the victor's speech, were common from the outset, when Roderic's widow, Egilona, wedded Abd al-Aziz, son of Musa, her dead husband's conqueror. An Alfonso of León espoused the daughter of Abd Allah, Emir of Toledo; and an Alfonso of Castile took to wife the daughter of an Emir of Seville. "The wedding, which displeased God," of Alfonso the Fifth's sister with an Arab (some say with al-Mansūr), is sung in a famous _romance_ inspired by the _Crónica General_.