MEDIEVAL LITERATURE 405 were literary artists; they also were clever if narrow think- ers, and they possessed no slight power of psychological analysis of character and motive. We find in them further a feeling for the beauty in nature. The poetry of the troubadours developed early and ma- tured rapidly. Guilhem or William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1086-1127), was the first known troubadour. Date and He sang of love, war, and many other topics in a p^eJJcaT manner gay and light-hearted, humorous and literature sarcastic, sensual and licentious. "He knew well how to sing and make verses, and for a long time he roamed all through the land to deceive ladies," says the Provencal biography of him. He went on the crusade, but when he returned from Palestine, after having his army destroyed by the Turks in Asia Minor, he recounted his varied adventures in bur- lesque verse. The twelfth century was the flowering time of Provencal poetry : the bitter struggle against heresy and the cruel Albigensian Crusade were disastrous to the southern feudal courts and to the troubadours, and the history of Provencal literature ends with the thirteenth century. But the troubadours themselves and their verse, methods, and ideals spread to other lands, and almost every litera- ture in a modern European language has been Proven al affected by them. The poets of other countries influence on learned from the troubadours many lessons in literary form; their refining influence upon manners was also widely felt and their attitude toward woman was gen- erally adopted. Provencal literature continued in Catalonia, Navarre, Aragon, and Valencia after it had disappeared in southern France. Through the thirteenth century Italian poetry was being shaped under the influence of the trouba- dours; they were paralleled in northern France by the trouveres, who were already in existence by the twelfth century, and in Germany in the thirteenth century by the minnesingers or "love-poets." The trouveres set up love- courts with most elaborate and artificial codes of gallantry and sentiment, but seem inferior to the southern trouba- dours in grace anci naturalness, Among the German minne*
