Baghdad, and Cairo of the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, but to Pre-Islamic India and Persia. 10 There are, indeed, several medieval literary allusions to the Nights in Arabic writings of the ninth through the eleventh centuries and, to confirm definitively the work's high-medieval Arabic existence, a priceless ninth-century fragment of the Nights is extant in the library of the Oriental Institute in Chicago. 11

No Hispano-Arabic version or Hispano-Romance translation of the 1001 N or of any extensive portion of it has come down to us, to show that the work as a whole might have circulated in medieval Spain, but individual stories and entire works later absorbed into the Nights are indeed well represented in medieval Spanish literature. The famous story of Tawaddud (NN436-462), the brilliant and beauteous slave-girl, who, through her own knowledge and sharp wit, saves her master from bankruptcy, was translated into Spanish in the fifteenth century under the title of La doncella Teodor} 2 The Sendebar, known in Western Europe as the Seven Sages of Rome, was incorporated in its entirety into the Nights (NN578-606) and was well known in medieval Spain, where it was translated from the Arabic into Spanish in 1291. 13 The story of The Closed Chamber of Toledo, present in late versions of the legend of Spain's conquest by the Muslims, is also included in the 1001N (N272). 14 The famous strophic song of Las tres morillas en Jaén derives from an obscene 100 IN anecdote, Hārūn al-Rašīd and the Three Slave Girls (N387). 15 And the picaresque exemplum of The Weeping Bitch (De Canícula Lacrimante), which includes the essential rôle of an aged, devious woman go-between, occurs both in the Nights (NN584-585) and in the early twelfth-century Disciplina