During these five centuries of almost uninterrupted warfare between the race of Moorish Arabs and the Christians of ancient European descent, both parties, notwithstanding that their reciprocal hostility was influenced by fanaticism, had unconsciously approximated in mind and in manners. The intervals of repose, which formed short links in the chain of their sanguinary conflicts, afforded them some opportunities for the interchange of the arts of peace, and they were soon taught to feel for each other that involuntary respect which the brave can never withhold from brave adversaries. Love adventures, in which the Moorish knight and Christian lady, or the Christian knight and Moorish lady, respectively participated, could not be of rare occurrence. The Arab, who, in his native deserts, had not been accustomed to impose on women half the despotic restraints to which the sex is subject in the harems of Mahometan cities, was soon disposed to imitate the gallantry of the descendants of the Goths; and still more readily did the imagination of the Christian knight, in a climate which was far from being ungenial, even to African invaders, acquire an oriental loftiness. Thus arose the spirit of Spanish knighthood, which was, in reality, only a particular form of the general chivalrous spirit then prevailing in most of the countries of Europe, but which, under that form, impressed in an equal degree, on the old European Spaniard an oriental, and on the Spanish Moor a European character.