Be this as it may, it was all a new world to the Leila Ayesha, for the Moors of Spain during their many centuries of occupation, aggrandisement and decline, had adopted many ideas, many customs from their Christian neighbors, at one time their foes, at another in long intervals of truce, their neighbors and almost their friends.
Nor had the Spaniards failed in the same degree to profit by the vicinity of the intellectual, polished and industrious Moors, until the bigotry of these and the fanaticism of those had given way to more rational and intelligent principles, and the two nations met, whether in war or peace, on a common ground of mutual self-respect and decorum.
Thus the Moors had not only laid aside long since their fanatical war-cry of “The Koran or the Sword!” but had adopted many of the usages of chivalry, no longer holding the Christians as dogs, and slaughtering them without quarter given or taken, but setting them at honorable ransom, and even treating them while prisoners on parole as guests on terms of equality, entertaining them at their boards, and holding sacred to them all the rights of hospitality.
In no respect, however, had a wider change occurred in the habits of the nation than in the treatment of their women, who, although not certainly admitted to the full liberty of Christian ladies, were by no means immured, as in their native land, in the precincts of the Harem, “to blush unseen, and waste their sweetness on the desert air,” but were permitted, still under the guardianship of duennas, and with their trains of Indian eunuchs, and further protected by their veils from the contamination of unholy glances, to be present at festivals, at tournaments, nay! even at banquets, when none but the members of the family or guests of high consideration were expected to be present.
It is not, by the way, a little singular that almost in exact proportion as the Moors enlarged the liberty of their women, by the example of the Spaniards, did the Spaniards contract that of their own bright-eyed ladies, by the example of the Moors; and for many years the rigor of the Spanish duenna was scarcely inferior to that of the Raid of a Moorish harem, or the ladies under charge of the one much more obvious to the gaze of the profane, than the beautiful slaves of the latter.