The whole of civilian Moslem architecture from Persia to Morocco is based on four unchanging conditions:  a hot climate, slavery, polygamy and the segregation of women.  The private house in Mahometan countries is in fact a fortress, a convent and a temple:  a temple of which the god (as in all ancient religions) frequently descends to visit his cloistered votaresses.  For where slavery and polygamy exist every house-master is necessarily a god, and the house he inhabits a shrine built about his divinity.

The first thought of the Moroccan chieftain was always defensive.  As soon as he pitched a camp or founded a city it had to be guarded against the hungry hordes who encompassed him on every side.  Each little centre of culture and luxury in Moghreb was an islet in a sea of perpetual storms.  The wonder is that, thus incessantly threatened from without and conspired against from within—­with the desert at their doors, and their slaves on the threshold—­these violent men managed to create about them an atmosphere of luxury and stability that astonished not only the obsequious native chronicler but travellers and captives from western Europe.

[Illustration:  From a photograph from the Service des Beaux-Arts au Maroc

Rabat—­gate of the Kasbah of the Oudayas]

The truth is, as has been often pointed out, that, even until the end of the seventeenth century, the refinements of civilization were in many respects no greater in France and England than in North Africa.  North Africa had long been in more direct communication with the old Empires of immemorial luxury, and was therefore farther advanced in the arts of living than the Spain and France of the Dark Ages; and this is why, in a country that to the average modern European seems as savage as Ashantee, one finds traces of a refinement of life and taste hardly to be matched by Carlovingian and early Capetian Europe.

III

The brief Almoravid dynasty left no monuments behind it.

Fez had already been founded by the Idrissites, and its first mosques (Kairouiyin and Les Andalous) existed.  Of the Almoravid Fez and Marrakech the chroniclers relate great things; but the wild Hilalian invasion and the subsequent descent of the Almohads from the High Atlas swept away whatever the first dynasties had created.

The Almohads were mighty builders, and their great monuments are all of stone.  The earliest known example of their architecture which has survived is the ruined mosque of Tinmel, in the High Atlas, discovered and photographed by M. Doutte.  This mosque was built by the inspired mystic, Ibn-Toumert, who founded the line.  Following him came the great palace-making Sultans whose walled cities of splendid mosques and towers have Romanesque qualities of mass and proportion, and, as M. Raymond Koechlin has pointed out, inevitably recall the “robust simplicity of the master builders who at the very same moment were beginning in France the construction of the first Gothic cathedrals and the noblest feudal castles.”