city, which are at present but imperfectly explored; dungeons have also been discovered where the Society buried its criminals alive. If any one wishes to become acquainted with monuments of the Middle Ages, and to examine into the power and the constitution of that celebrated religious order above referred to, Cordova is the place where one of its greatest central establishments was situated.
In every square of that compact city stands a superb convent, a monastery, or a house for unprofessional nuns, or for the performance of specific religious exercises. In former times every family included a priest, a monk, a nun, or a chorister; the poorer classes contenting themselves with having among them a hermit, a lay brother, a sacristan, or an acolyte.
Each convent or monastery possessed a set of adjoining out-buildings, where lived and multiplied eight hundred slaves of the Order, negroes, zamboes, mulattoes, and quadroons, with blue eyes, fair and waving hair, limbs as polished as marble, genuine Circassians adorned with every grace, but showing their African origin by their teeth, serving for bait to the passions of man, all for the greater honor and profit of the convent to which these houris belonged.[1]
Here is also the celebrated University of Cordova, founded as long ago as the year 1613, and in whose gloomy cloisters eight generations of medicine and divinity, both branches of law, illustrious writers, commentators, and scholars have passed their youth. Let us hear the description given by the celebrated Dean Funes of the course of instruction and the spirit
- ↑ A similar order of things exists to this day in the city of Havana.
