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182 THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL EUROPE required interpretation, and so furnished a pretext for fur- ther discussion and writing. The courts of Damascus, Bag- dad, home of the Arabian Nights, Cairo, and Cordova were renowned each in turn for luxury, culture, and learning. The caliphs were in the main broad-minded and munifi- cent patrons of the arts and letters. Therefore, while in the Christian West civilization had sunk so low that actually monasteries, where men's thoughts were supposed to be centered on another world, were its mainstay, in the Mo- hammedan Orient and in Spain civilization was not merely preserved, but in some respects progressed. The Moors or Berbers in North Africa remained, on the other hand, in a state of barbarism, and there were backward races waiting in the East who would one day submerge both Byzantine and Bagdad culture. The Arabic language was spread widely through the ex- tensive Mohammedan conquests. In Spain by the ninth Language century even the Christians had become fasci- and liter- nated by Arabian literature. In 854, an ecclesi- astical writer complained bitterly that Latin was neglected, that no one read the church fathers or the Scrip- tures, or could even compose a respectable letter in Latin to a friend. On the contrary, Christians took delight in the poetry and romances of the Arabs, and even studied their philosophy and theology, not to refute their errors, but to imitate their eloquence and elegance of style. Christians collected libraries of Arabian works, and many were able to write verses as good as those of the Arabs themselves. Our language to-day shows in a number of words the influence of the Arabs upon our civilization; for example, "muslin" and "mattress," "cupola" and "alcove," "algebra" and "alchemy," "alcohol" and "almanac," are words of Ara- bian origin. The Arabs soon began to translate the chief works of the Greek philosophers and scientists into their own tongue, fcSnlr although these translations were often made from Syriac or Aramaic versions rather than directly from the Greek original. They then wrote com-