TROUBADOURS. 



683 



Spain, these provinces shared with that country all 

 the luxuriance of the south. Rich pastures, with 

 the finest productions, romantic valleys and hills in 

 the fertile Cevennes, a long extent of coast on the 

 Mediterranean sea, give loveliness to the country, 

 and a gay, pleasure-loving character to the inhabi- 

 tants. Their chivalry was naturally different from 

 that of Spain or of the north ; more gallant than 

 the latter, and softer and brighter than the former, 

 and was prone to show and festivity. The storms 

 which raged in France under the Merovingian and 

 Carlovingian races, till Hugh Capet, in 987, pos- 

 sessed himself of the throne, were scarcely felt in 

 the secluded south, and Burgundy alone served to 

 connect the Proveii9al regions with France in the 

 stricter sense. In Aquitaine, as well as in Langue- 

 doc, Provence, Burgundy, Auvergne, &c., the 

 power of the great barons, dukes and counts was 

 more and more developed, while the authority of 

 the king declined. They not only made their own 

 dignity hereditary, but encroached continually on 

 the royal territory. About 1071, the famous 

 Troubadour William IX., count of Poitou, cele- 

 brated by Tasso under the name of Raymond de 

 St Gilles, was duke of Aquitaine. In 1151, it fell 

 to Henry II. (Plantagenet) of England. In Lan- 

 guedoc, during the ninth century, the counts of 

 Toulouse and the counts of Provence reigned to- 

 gether, and, in the eleventh, Raymond de St Gilles 

 and Alfonso II. of Arragon. Provence made itself 

 independent under Louis the Stammerer. The 

 duke of Burgundy, Boso, was crowned, in 879, 

 king of Provence ; and this kingdom was called 

 the Arelat, from its capital, Aries. Lower Bur- 

 gundy, which is also highly important in the his- 

 tory of the Troubadours, enjoyed, for more than 

 two centuries, the greatest tranquillity. In the 

 eleventh century, reigned the celebrated count of 

 Barcelona, Raymond Berengarius, under whom the 

 Proven9al poetry was introduced into Barcelona 

 and Catalonia. Around these political stars of the 

 lirst magnitude was a multitude of smaller counts, 

 viscounts, and barons, dependent on the greater 

 merely in name, but in fact sovereigns. Of the 

 devastating wars of the rest of Europe, the south 

 of France felt but little. At times, the chivalrous 

 festivals of Provence were disturbed by the noise 

 of arms in some private feuds between powerful 

 barons, or were interrupted by the attacks of the 

 Normans or Moors ; but the inroads of these plun- 

 derers on this coast were neither frequent nor de- 

 structive. Sometimes the desire of adventures, or 

 the cry of war in foreign countries, summoned the 

 knights of Provence to the battles of the other 

 European nations. Thus, for instance, in the wars 

 of king Alfonso VI. of Castile with the Moors, 

 many knights of the South of France fought under 

 the Spanish Cid, and aided in conquering Toledo, 

 by which means they come into close connexion 

 with Arabian civilization. The Crusades, to which 

 the first impulse was given in the South of France, 

 at Clermont, in 1095, by pope Urban VII., and which 

 had so decisive an influence on the whole of Europe, 

 were also felt in Provence. A single war took 

 place upon the happy fields of Provence, which was 

 fatal to the prosperity of that country, and to the 

 poetry of the Troubadours, which never recovered 

 from the effects of it. This was the unfortunate 

 crusade against the Albigenses, in the beginning of 

 the thirteenth century, when the ancient family of 

 the counts of Toulouse was ruined, and the whole 

 land filled with scenes of cruelty and bloodshed. 



During this whole period, courteousness and gal. 

 lantry were no where so fully developed as in Pro- 

 vence ; and we need not be surprised, when we see 

 the emperor Frederic Barbarossa in Germany, and 

 king Richard Coeur de Lion in England, inviting 

 the Proven9al knights to their courts, to receive 

 instruction from them in the usages and ceremonies 

 of chivalry. Provence is the native land of the 

 courts of love ; and besides the inferior courts of 

 this kind, as numerous as the castles of the vis- 

 counts and barons, there were four stationary courts 

 of love at Pierrefeu, at Ramagny, at Aix, and at 

 Avignon. The royal court in Provence, at Aries, 

 was from the times of Boso I., for almost two cen- 

 turies, the theatre of the finest chivalry, the centre 

 of a romantic life. The assembly of knights and 

 Troubadours, of Jongleurs, with their Moorish 

 story-tellers and buffoons, of ladies acting as judges 

 or parties in matters of courtesy, exhibits a glitter- 

 ing picture of a mirthful, soft and luxurious life. 

 The knight of Provence devoted himself to the 

 service of his lady-love in true poetic earnest, and 

 made the dance and the sport of the tilt-yard the 

 great business of his life. Each baron, a sovereign 

 in his own territory, invited the neighbouring 

 knights to his castle to take parts in tournaments 

 and to contend in song, at a time when the knights 

 of Germany and Northern France were challenging 

 each other to deadly combat. There might be 

 seen the joyous companies of ladies and knights 

 under fragrant olive groves, upon the enamelled 

 meadows, sporting from one holiday to another ; 

 there the gallant knight broke his lance on the 

 shield of his manly antagonist ; there the princess 

 sat in the circle of ladies, listening seriously to the 

 songs of the knights contending in rhymes respect- 

 ing the laws of love, and, at the close of the con- 

 test, pronouncing her sentence (arret d'amour). 

 Thus the life of the Prove^als was lyrical in the 

 highest degree; and, if it degenerated, in later 

 times, to voluptuousness and licentiousness, this 

 was owing to the want of a strong moral principle. 

 Their poetry was necessarily lyrical, the expression 

 of their feelings and passions. Even deeds and 

 facts were represented merely through the medium 

 and in the form of feelings. Such a poetry could 

 never be more than a continual improvisatory effu- 

 sion. It was necessarily superficial: it could be of 

 value only with the accompaniment of music, and 

 was not suited to be preserved in writing. With 

 the Troubadour himself his songs lived and died. 

 Provence cultivated its Romance idiom earlier than 

 any other of the Romance countries. The foun- 

 dation of this was laid as early as the tenth cen- 

 tury, at the court of Aries. In the eleventh and 

 twelfth centuries, it had attained its highest bloom, 

 while the Castilian language, the Northern French 

 and the Italian, were but beginning to be developed. 

 It had spread into Spain and Lombardy, and even 

 German emperors (Frederic Barbarossa) and Eng- 

 lish kings (Richard Coeur de Lion) composed songs 

 in the Proven9al dialect. In the thirteenth cen- 

 tury, it had completed its course, and sunk with 

 the country into a state of dependence. This lan- 

 guage was peculiarly soft : no other has so many 

 onomatopoeias, so much indistinctness in the gender 

 of the words, so complete a system of diminutives 

 and augmentatives: nothing is wanting but energy. 

 With regard to rhyme and to the modern metres, 

 the Proven9als claim not only the merit of having 

 first made use of them, but also of having fixed the 

 form which rhyme and metre assumed in the re- 



