At the terminus of the trans-Saharan trading routes that merchants from the north might use, or at least dispatch their local agents down, the cosmopolitan city came to embody a splendour that lay, for Europeans, tantalisingly out of reach.
The arms comprise: argent on a cross quadrate gules the arms of the City of Bristol between in pale and a sun in splendour (for Wills) and an open book proper, leaved and clasped or, and inscribed with the words Nisi quia Dominus, and in fesse to the sinister a dolphin embowed (for Colston), and to the dexter a horse courant (for Fry), both of the third.
The age of Gothic cathedrals and Scholastic theology was also an age of splendour for the French monarchy.
At the end, Bluebeard dresses Judith in Austro-Hungarian royal splendour for their gory congress.
The "splendour" for which the Byron festival is named presumably alludes to the music.
The trip was organised by the Northern Ireland Tourist Board and Northern Ireland Screen – the people who, in 2008, schmoozed HBO into using their castles and coastal splendour for the show's pilot.
The look she brought back in printed splendour for autumn is now proliferating, although the emphasis six months down the line is on innovative cut and proportion rather than colour or pattern.
For 62 years, Hugh Hefner's organ has shamelessly objectified the female body and offered its readership the spectacle of 700-odd "Playmates" arrayed in naked splendour for the furtive assessments of men.
It begins in conventional rococo splendour for the Marschallin's levee, with just enough parody of secessionist Vienna to undermine its seriousness and to justify the figure of Sigmund Freud sitting in on the Marschallin's musings about ageing and the passing of time.
But most of the punters interpreted the dress code literally, as though getting kitted out for a Splendour-themed costume party.
