The fact that there existed in Pre-islamic times equal morality for both sexes--women also were freer than in Post-islamic times--gave rise to romantic love.
Arabic literature made the love or erotic note in its tender or chivalrous phase, fashionable. True, this note existed very sparingly among the Greeks and Romans in Sappho and Catullus, but the romantic note was singularly absent from European literature in the early medieval ages. Men loved then as they did before and after, but the personal romantic love note was not considered a proper theme for poetry. The religious and martial emotions held sway. Critics now admit that intense love poetry of the Troubadours appearing like an oasis in the barren literature of the medieval ages was influenced by the Arabs, the rhymes as well as the themes being taken from the east. The troubadours influence the German Minnesingers, and these two groups remain among the best composers of love poetry Europe has had.
The troubadours also entered England, influencing its poetry for nearly two centuries.[214:A]
The love element in the books of chivalry is due to Arabic influence. Cervantes attributed his _Don Quixote_ to a Moorish author because the Moors wrote so many romances. Early Italian poetry owed much to the love poetry of Sicily which was impregnated with the Arabic spirit. Wyatt and Surrey, who traveled in Italy, greatly influenced English literature. Thus Arabic poetry somewhat influenced English poetry. Similarly the Spanish _Cid_ shows traces in marked degree of the Arabic invasion of Spain. No one has more enthusiastically and effectively pointed out the Arabic influences in European poetry than Sismondi in his history of the literature of the South of Europe. He begins the work with, after the introduction, a chapter on Arabic literature, and he especially recognizes that the tenderness of the love sentiment and the chivalric attitude towards women came from the Arabs. The most sympathetic and exhaustive account of the great influence of Mohammedan influence upon Europe is in Samuel P. Scott's _History of the Moorish Empire in Spain_.
It is said that even the French poem, the _Chanson de Roland_, shows Arabic traces since the Arab invasion had reached into France.