To the Spaniards, thus defeated almost in their sleep, Cordova was a fallen city, disgraced by the presence of infidels; yet these same infidels were to make her luxury and brilliance rival the almost fabulous glories of Bagdad and to win for her culture the grudging admiration of Christian Europe. As we read of her ‘Palace of Pleasures’, ornamented with gold and precious stones, of her woods of pomegranate and sweet almond, of her gardens and perfumed fountains, of her luxurious rest-houses for travellers without the walls, we are back in the atmosphere of some Eastern fairy tale that clings also around the history of her Caliphs, tinging with romance their loves, their hatreds, and their rivalries. There are other aspects of Moorish Spain hardly less wonderful when contrasted with the haphazard national development of the rest of Europe. Here were agriculture and industry deliberately stimulated by a close and practical study of such branches of knowledge as science and botany, algebra and arithmetic. Arid soil, that under ordinary mediaeval neglect would have been left a desert, became through canals and irrigation a fertile plain, the garden of rice, sugar, cotton, or oranges. Mathematics applied to everyday needs produced the mariner’s compass; scientific brains and intelligent workmen the steel blades of Toledo and Seville, the woven silk fabrics of Granada, and the pottery and velvets of Valencia. Yet, though knowledge was consciously applied for commercial purposes, the Moors did not set up ‘Utility’ as an idol for their scholars and tell them that only information that brought material wealth in its train was worth having. Philosophy and literature, as well as science, had their lecture-halls: Greece and the East were searched by Caliphs’ orders for manuscripts to fill their libraries; and so world-famous became Cordovan professors that in the twelfth century Christian students hastened to sit at their feet; and the translations of Aristotle by the Arabic professor Averroës became one of the chief sources of authority for the most orthodox ‘schoolmen’. In their search after knowledge for its own sake, the Moors accorded toleration to the best brains of all races. Elsewhere in Europe the Jews were held accursed, protected by Christian rulers so long as their money-bags could be squeezed like a sponge, but exposed to insult, torture, and death whenever popular fury, aroused by a crusade or an epidemic, demanded an easy outlet for zeal in burning and pillaging houses.