The spirit of literary taste and rivalry which had inspired the accomplished society of the khalifate was not lost with the dismemberment of the empire. The capital of each principality became a centre of culture, of learning, of the arts. The rulers of these petty states, whose population still retained, amidst the turbulent scenes of civil discord and foreign encroachment, no small measure of that intelligence and taste which had so eminently distinguished their fathers, vied with each other in their encouragement of science and in their patronage of learned men. In this noble emulation, as well as in their own scholastic acquirements, the Moorish princes maintained the fame of their ancestors and the traditions of the monarchy. Every facility was afforded to the professors of experimental science. Political honors, salaries, pensions, attracted the scholars of distant countries. Religious intolerance had no place in a society whose cardinal principle was absolute liberty of thought, and which had long been accustomed to consider the untrammelled exercise of reason as an inherent and inalienable right. Al-Moktadir, King of Saragossa, was renowned for his erudition; his knowledge of philosophy, geometry, and astronomy was superior to that of any of the wise men of his court. Al-Modhaffer, King of Badajoz, compiled a great encyclopædia. The rulers of Almeria, Valencia, and Seville were not less distinguished for their profound scholarship and the protection they afforded to letters. The monarchs of the Abbadide dynasty, and especially Motamid II., were renowned for the harmony and pathos of their verses. The Almohade sovereign, Abd-al-Mumen, the nominal representative of the destroying principle of fanaticism, was the admiring patron of Ibn-Tofail, Ibn-Zohr, and Averroes, three of the greatest writers who ever embellished by their talents the literature of any age. The achievements of the Alhamares of Granada in the world of art and science, and the culture of their court--the last refuge of learning in mediæval Europe--form the most attractive episode in the annals of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.