V

MEDERSAS, BAZAARS AND AN OASIS

Fez, for two centuries and more, was in a double sense the capital of
Morocco: the centre of its trade as well as of its culture.

Culture, in fact, came to northwest Africa chiefly through the Merinid
princes. The Almohads had erected great monuments from Rabat to
Marrakech, and had fortified Fez, but their "mighty wasteful empire"
fell apart like those that had preceded it. Stability had to come from
the west; it was not till the Arabs had learned it through the Moors
that Morocco produced a dynasty strong and enlightened enough to carry
out the dream of its founders.

Whichever way the discussion sways as to the priority of eastern or
western influences on Moroccan art--whether it came to her from Syria,
and was thence passed on to Spain, or was first formed in Spain, and
afterward modified by the Moroccan imagination--there can at least be no
doubt that Fazi art and culture, in their prime, are partly the
reflection of European civilization.

Fugitives from Spain came to the new city when Moulay Idriss founded it.
One part of the town was given to them, and the river divided the Elbali
of the Almohads into the two quarters of Kairouiyin and Andalous, which
still retain their old names. But the full intellectual and artistic
flowering of Fez was delayed till the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. It seems as though the seeds of the new springtime of art,
blown across the sea from reawakening Europe, had at last given the
weltering tribes of the desert the force to create their own type of