Our ancestors, the ancient
Germans, lived in a climate where the passions were extremely calm.
Their laws decided only in such cases where the injury was visible to
the eye, and went no further. And as they judged of the outrages done to
men from the greatness of the wound, they acted with no other delicacy
in respect to the injuries done to women. The law of the Alemans
[25]
on this subject is very extraordinary. If a person uncovers a woman's head,
he pays a fine of fifty sous; if he uncovers her leg up to the knee, he
pays the same; and double from the knee upwards. One would think that
the law measured the insults offered to women as we measure a figure in
geometry; it did not punish the crime of the imagination, but that of
the eye. But upon the migration of a German nation into Spain, the
climate soon found a necessity for different laws. The law of the
Visigoths inhibited the surgeons to bleed a free woman, except either
her father, mother, brother, son, or uncle was present. As the
imagination of the people grew warm, so did that of the legislators; the
law suspected everything when the people had become suspicious.
These laws had, therefore, a particular regard for the two sexes.
But in their punishments they seem rather to humour the revengeful
temper of private persons than to administer public justice. Thus, in
most cases, they reduced both the criminals to be slaves to the offended
relatives or to the injured husband; a free-born woman
[26]
who had yielded to the embraces of a married man was delivered up to his wife to
dispose of her as she pleased. They obliged the slaves,
[27]
if they found their master's wife in adultery, to bind her and carry her to her
husband; they even permitted her children
[28]
to be her accusers, and
her slaves to be tortured in order to convict her. Thus their laws were
far better adapted to refine, even to excess, a certain point of honour
than to form a good civil administration. We must not, therefore, be
surprised if Count Julian was of opinion that an affront of that kind
ought to be expiated by the ruin of his king and country: we must not be
surprised if the Moors, with such a conformity of manners, found it so
easy to settle and to maintain themselves in Spain, and to retard the
fall of their empire.
