Ibn Said

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Ibn Said was the most important collector of Andalusian poetry in the 12th and 13th centuries. Ibn Said was born at Alcalá la Real near Granada. His Banners of the Champions, published in 1243 and also translated as the Pennants of the Champions, is his best known anthology.

In the Pennants of the Champions, poetry is arranged according to home and occupation of the writer. Lyrics come from all over the Andalusian world: Alcalá, Córdoba, Granada, Lisbon, Murcia, Saragossa, Seville, Toledo, and Valencia. Authors include bureaucrats, gentlemen, kings, ministers, and scholars; the book is evidence of how important love poetry was to the educated of al-Andalus. It is also one of the few historical remains of love between men from the period.

An excerpt from a poem of the Pennants:

His work stool (as if it were a horse)

carries him proudly (as if he were a hero).

But this hero of mine is armed only with a needle,

long like his eyelashes and like them shining.

Watching it stitch up the seams of a cloak

I think of the falling star trailed by a silken thread of light.

He twists the thread and the thread twists about my heart.

O that my heart could follow him, close like the thread behind the needle!

Poetry such as this would have a huge influence on the chivalric ideas of medieval Europe, although European chivalry was very strictly limited to love between men and women.

[edit] Source

Homosexuality and Civilization by Louis Crompton