Ok, I am talking off the top of my head now (with many many posts to view!! Do you guys ever work or anything? )... but, without doing any research now, I believe the first university was in Toledo, Iberia, founded by Arabs. Spanish and Portuguese sport a lot of Saracen [ahem] words, many of which, as y'all have noted, filtered on in to English. Sugar is one of them, yes indeed. Isabella could have put some al-sucar into her bitter Ethiopian coffee and have had a much better time of things. But hers was a gesture, ¿sí? [shrug].