text:  Yet though replete with gorgeous materials both for history and fiction and stored not only with the recondite lore of Asia and Egypt but with the borrowed treasures of ancient Greece (long known to Christendom only by versions through an Arabic medium ) the language and literature of this marvellous people and even their history except so far as it related to their never-ceasing warfare with their Christian foes remained up to the middle of the last century a sealed book to their Spanish successors