Moorish Origin

THE theologians of Damascus discussed the abstruse question of “universals,” raised by a passage in the Isagogos of Porphyry, and developed a new system of dialectic derived from Aristotle a full century before the doctors of the University of Paris took up the debate in the same terms, using the same authorities and the same methods. About a century before the first troubadour song soared in Languedoc, the men of letters in Moorish Spain were engrossed in trying the merits of a new style of poetry, the spread of popularity of which amounted, for them, to a literary revolution.

“True to the tradition of their family, the Spanish Umayyads,” writes Professor Nicholson, “loved poetry, music and polite literature a great deal better than the Koran.”¹ In the earliest days of the Western Caliphate, the ancient Arabian poetry, devoted in general to the glorification of the tribe, the praise of battles and horses, continued to be cultivated by a number of poets, of whom Ibn Hani of Seville (d. 973) is named as the most noted. But that consecrated hieratic manner, in honor since the “days of ignorance” among the Arabs, gave place before long to another and very different poetical form. H.A.R. Gibb, paraphrasing Jan van Goeje, states, “. . . a galaxy of poets . . . released themselves from the old conventions and made their verse a vehicle of self expression . . . it was practically confined to erotic verse.”² The most interesting features of Spanish-Arabian poetry,” says Nicholson again, “are the tenderly romantic feeling which not infrequently appears in their love-songs, a feeling that sometimes anticipates the attitude of medieval chivalry, and in the second place, an almost modern sensibility to the beauties of nature. On account of those characteristics, the poems in question appeal to many European readers who do not easily enter into the spirit of [ancient Arabic poetry].”³ King Al-Mu’tamid of Seville and Ibn Zaidūn of Cordova were counted among the most eminent poets who lent luster to that new poetry. It celebrates love as the highest form of happiness and the noblest source of inspiration; it sings of the beloved’s beauty, the sorrow of the rejected lover and the cruelty of the lady. It introduces new fashions in composition, as in its hymns to Spring. Anticipating Provençal lyrics by close on two centuries, Hispano-Moorish poetry was the only one, in Europe, to cultivate those themes and to exhibit those characteristics. Nowhere else did a lyrical literature exist, popular or learned, offering a like resemblance to Provençal poetry. The prima facie implication of these facts is, without more ado, obvious.

No belief could be more uninformed than the notion, not infrequently entertained, that the Arabs knew nothing of love beyond its sensual aspect. Veneration for women and their idealization counted among the most ancient traditions of the race, and dated from further back than Islam. In earliest times, poetical competitions were held in the tents of cultivated women, themselves poets, who were the judges in those contests.⁴ When, therefore, in the tenth and eleventh centuries, a form of poetry characterized by a chivalrous spirit unknown to Greco-Roman tradition made its appearance in Spain, the ground had been prepared for that efflorescence by the traditions and disposition of Arabic poetry from the first. Licentious poetry is, to be sure, found in Arabic literature as in most others, and poets were not lacking who scoffed at the ethereal refinement of their colleagues. But far from being alien to the Islamic world, the puritan spirit, particularly during the period with which we are more immediately concerned, was one of its most prominent and widespread characteristics. Sects such as the Beni-Odra, or “Sons of Chastity,” and the Ikhwan as-Safā’, or “Brothers of Purity,” whose tents were disseminated in Spain by Maslem of Madrid towards the close of the tenth century, carried that tendency to the point of extravagance.

Most important, however, among the manifestations of Arabian mysticism was the Sufi doctrine, which arose in the second century of Islam and spread throughout all countries and all social classes of the Muslim world. It may, some think, have owed something to contact with the Cenobites of Sinai. Among the oldest documents of Sufism are cited the Sentences of an Islamic Saint Theresa, Rabi’a of Basra, who assimilated divine to profane love. Sufism adopted an erotic and even bacchic terminology in its highly colored symbolic language. In the intoxication produced by the wine of the true doctrine, God was revealed to the adept under the likeness of love and of the Mystic Vine. The whole imagery of Sufi idealism rests indeed on the conception of love. Love is, according to Yusuf u Zulaikha, the primary cause of creation. Divine love cannot be understood by him who has not experienced the transports of profane love.

The Sufis of eleventh-century Spain not only devoted themselves to the composition of love-poems, an exercise which they accounted almost prescriptive, but they furthermore discussed at length in the scholastic manner the metaphysics of the sentiments which inspired their lyrics. This peculiar erotic philosophy is, in fact, as closely connected with Hispano-Moorish love poetry as are the dialectics of “courtly love” with that of the troubadours. The piety of Sufi puritans had at any rate the merit of not being dismal; it was a manner of gai saper, of “gay science.” Poetry, song and dance were its current manifestations. Disseminated in innumerable forms and varieties throughout the Islamic world, the Sufi doctrine gathered force from the study of Plato and the neo-platonists. Several among the philosophers, including the illustrious Ibn Sina, whom the Rumi call Avicenna, transposed Sufi symbolism and drew their inspiration from passages in the Phaedrus and the Symposium, making profane love the subject of their writings and comparing it to love divine. There exists a whole series of such dissertations,⁵ curious products of the oriental mind, in which realism and mysticism are mingled. One of those works, the Kitāb az-Zahra of Abū Bakr Ibn Dawūd (868-909), head of the Zaharite school, of Bagdad, is permeated throughout with the theories of Plato. The Arabian author quotes in detail the Platonic conception of pre-established affinities, according to which souls that have been created by the bisection of the same sphere find themselves attracted to their complementary halves. He insists on “the submission of the lover to the beloved,” this being, he says “the mark of refined love,” and above all on purity, declaring that “he who is well born should be pure and chaste.”⁶

It was in Spain that these trends of thought reached the peak of their vogue and influence. ‘Ali Ibn Hazm of Cordova (994-1065), an author remarkably modern in his critical style—vir immensae doctrinae, as Dozy calls him⁷—and whose philosophical writings provide one of the most valuable bodies of evidence we possess on the history of Arabian thought, composed, among other treatises, one On Love, bearing the poetical title of Tauk al-Hamama, “The Dove’s Neck-Ring.”⁸ This work, which runs to thirty chapters, treats, among other subjects, “Of Love from Description,” “Of Love Messages,” “Of Hints from the Eyes,” “Of Loyalty,” “Of Fidelity,” “Of the Submissiveness due the Lover to his Lady,” “Of the Signs of Love,” etc. Ibn Hazm observes that “love often begins jestingly but its end may be very serious.”⁹ He reverts, in almost the same terms as Ibn Dawūd, to the theories of Plato. He has a chapter on “Slanderers,” another on the “Helping Friend”; he declares that lack of trust in loverelations is the mark of “a person of low birth and one devoid of refined feelings.”¹⁰ In one poem the lover declares himself satisfied with a look.¹¹ The author is above all devoted to the extolling “the excellence of Chastity.” “The union of the spirit,” he asserts, “is more beautiful than the union of the body, a thousand times.”¹² And he relates, in his chapter on love at first sight, how the poet Ibn Hārūn ar-Ramādī, well known in the literary annals of Moorish Spain, after having met his lady on a single occasion, near the Gate of the Druggists at Cordova, dedicated his love poems to her for the rest of his life.¹³ Some of Ibn Hazm’s anecdotes, which recall the romanticized biographies of the troubadours, relate to love for a “distant lady,” known only by hearsay.¹⁴ On descanting upon the various ways in which love comes to birth, he dwells on the impression of sight, “for love enters most often through the eyes, which are the gateways of the mind, and thence spreads throughout the whole soul,”¹⁵ a doctrine much in vogue among the troubadours. The Arab author of the eleventh century goes, in fact, much farther on the path of idealization than any troubadour. He is much closer in his ideas to the Italian poets of the fourteenth century.

Like the majority of Arab works, Ibn Hazm’s book is abundantly larded with verses. Sufi mysticism and its predilection for expressing itself in verse exercised in fact a profound and widespread influence on Hispano-Moorish poetry. As a sample we may cite from a poem of the tenth century by Ibn Darrach (d.976). After having drawn a picture of the seductive charms of his lady, “who sets wide the gates of passion,” the poet concludes:

That idealization of passion, though entirely absent from the Western amatory poetry of the following centuries, remained current in the Islamic world down to the thirteenth century and later. One of the most popular among the later poets, Umar Ibn al-Farīd (1185-1235), sings of his beloved in the following terms:

No Provençal poet of the twelfth century, it may be affirmed, ever approached the heights of spiritual sublimation which inspired Muslim poetry. The troubadours borrowed from the latter much of its terminology,¹⁸ but we should not be justified in regarding the principles whence derived the poetry of Moorish Spain and those on which rested the conventions of courtly love as identical. The feudal society of Languedoc and the Islamic world exhibited differences which could not fail to be reflected in the characters of their respective poetical inspirations.

The contrast between the two societies was, however, much less pronounced than we might be led to suppose. In the Middle Ages, Europe and the Islamic world resembled each other more closely than at any subsequent period. The setting and aspects of daily life in many a kasbah of the Atlas recall vividly, even to this day, those of a French medieval castle.¹⁹ The harem system was not, in the early days of Islam, what it subsequently became. Down to the present time, among the Berbers, women pay little heed to it, and the veil is seldom worn. The conquerors of Spain brought with them but a few female companions, and peopled their palaces with Spanish women. These retained a large measure of their independence of manner and were encouraged to do so. They were in general much more highly cultivated than their sisters in Christian lands; they received the same education as the men, and often in classes including both sexes. Learned women were even to be found who took to the study of philosophy and mathematics, and sometimes visited the East in order to attend the lectures of noted professors. Others, the wives and daughters of viziers and caliphs, occupied posts in government departments. The transcription of manuscripts was a feminine occupation; hundreds of women were, in one quarter of Cordova, employed on the fabrication of books. The manuscripts of a certain Fatima were renowned for their beauty.²⁰ A number of women are mentioned as distinguished for their poetical talents. The wives of emirs and viziers frequently took part in literary gatherings, and shed the inspiration of their wit and cultivated taste upon those assemblies. The princess Walhada, daughter of Muhammad II, (reigned 1008-1010) and Aisha bint-Ahmed are named with particular commendation as composers of verse and patronesses of the poets.²¹

While no sharp contrast existed in the Middle Ages between the West and the Orient, Christendom and Islam, as appears today, when the one world has become transformed by gigantic revolutions and the other has remained, but for the deterioration of profound decay, unchanged in essential character, it would be idle to ignore the differences between feudal Provence and Moorish Spain. The fact is on that account the more remarkable that so specific and intimate a manifestation as the poetical expression of passion should nevertheless have assumed, in the two, forms so closely similar, and lends added probability to the inference that this concordance is attributable to the influence exerted by the older upon the younger of those lyrical developments. So much at first sight. From those general grounds, let us now turn to the closer consideration of concrete facts.

The lyrical poetry of Moorish Spain contrasts by its form no less than by its contents with traditional Arabic poetry. The latter had fallen into a pedantry which would put academical purism to shame. Tied down to metrical rules and to a form of construction (ilm al-qāfiya) of incredible rigidity, it was moreover composed in a hieratic language (shi’r) that had ceased to be current even in Muhammad’s time, and was governed by a syntax and system of inflections that had long been discarded in current speech. Casting off the trammels of that traditional pedantry, the poets of Andalusia effected a remarkable transformation. This literary revolution rested upon one important circumstance: ancient Arabic poetry had not been sung, that of Moorish Spain was. It became, in the proper connotation of the term, lyrical.

The Koran discounted music. The Imam Malik, whose judgment in the matter was accounted authoritative, condemned melody and song as frivolities unbefitting the character of a true believer. “The Arabs,” says Ibn Khaldūn, “practiced at first no other art than that of verse.”²² However, the great vogue which music acquired overcame, though not without a struggle, the formalist tradition, and induced it to yield to the taste awakened by the new art. The Arabs improved upon the musical instruments which they had taken over in Iran, Syria and the Maghreb. They invented the bow, thereby transforming the stringed instruments of Persia into the rabab, the ancestor of the violin; they introduced innumerable modifications into the lute (al’ūd) and into the ganūn, a kind of psaltery.²³ Modern music is a result of the evolution of musical instruments. But for the harpsichord, which grew by slow stages out of the ganūn, the Cremona violins, perfected forms of the Arabian rabab, the genius of Bach and Mozart would have remained mute, and we should have remained deaf to the harmonies which delight us. Accustomed as is the modern ear to rich sonorous combinations, complex chords, and the magical effects of polyphony and counterpoint, we find it difficult to appreciate the thin rills of monodic melody which were the sole form of musical expression known to the Middle Ages. Our ears may, on the other hand, have lost something of the sure sense of rhythm which our forefathers possessed, as do likewise Orientals to the present day. Their simple and merely cadenced music, however, afforded as much pleasure to a world that had hitherto known nothing beyond the tinkling of the four strings of a primitive harp and the tootling notes of a flute, as we derive from our own music. It was in Spain, where since the time of Martial the women of Cadiz danced to the sound of Andalusian castanets,²⁴ that the music achieved its most notable advances and attained its most widespread popularity.

The adaptation of Arabic poetry to song was brought about by substituting short lines for the long lines in which were composed the traditional poems, the qaṣīdas, of the Arabs, and the couplets with which they were fond of enamelling their writings and speeches. Those lines, each of which formed a complete whole, were divided into two equal segments by a caesura, or middle pause, which was heavily stressed. The hands, even the feet, were used to mark the beat. With Oriental poetry, as with Oriental music, rhythm is everything. Quantities being only lightly marked, rhyme was used as a further means of stressing the cadence. The complicated rules of prosody in traditional Arabic poetry bear no relation to those governing Greek and Latin verse, in which accent was pronounced, and owing to the uniformity of inflections, rhyme would have produced a banal and monotonous effect. It was the Arabs who introduced rhyme into Europe. All the lines of their qaṣīdas, were built upon one rhyme, which never varied throughout the composition. The caesuras were also occasionally indicated by interior rhymes.²⁵

By dividing its lines into their constituent half-lines, a classical couplet yields a quatrain or strophe (baīt) which admits of being sung. But in order to stress the fall of the melodic phrase which likewise marks the close of the subject-matter of the strophe, the last line of the cad strophe was distinguished by a different rhyme, called asmat. This rhyme, repeated at the end of each strophe, thus produced the effect of a refrain, though Arabic poetry was not acquainted with the use of the true refrain. A couplet of short lines ending with this thematic rhyme usually introduced or concluded the song. In the former case it was called marqaz; in the latter, kharga. This form of strophe presents, then, the following schematic arrangement:

This ordonnance of rhymes—aa bbba ccca, etc.—is known among the Arabs as murabba’. It is by far the most prevalent structure in stanzic Arabic poetry, though it is susceptible of numerous variations.²⁶ In its literary form in the traditional tongue, the song composed on this model was known by the name of muwashshaha, from the expression denoting a particular form of girdle held in place by a shoulder-strap (wisha) which was worn by women. In the songs composed in current speech the same arrangement of rhymes was simply called a “song,” zajal (plural, azajal). Insofar as the structure of the strophe is concerned, there is no difference between the muwashshaha and the zajal.²⁷ Both were composed with a view to being sung to the accompaniment of instrumental music.²⁸

This strophic structure was fully developed in Spain as far back as the beginning of the tenth century. Its popular form goes back to an even remoter time.²⁹ In the eleventh century its vogue amongst all classes of the mixed population of Andalusia, Arabian, Mozarabian and Romance, was general, and extended as far as Egypt and the countries of the Near East.³⁰ The Sessions of the poet Harīrī (1054-1122), a work which, after the Koran, has had in the course of eight centuries, more readers than any others in the Muslim world, are lavishly spangled with murabba’ strophes. Harīrī’s German translator, Friederich Riickert, gives some excellent imitations of them, of which the following is an example:

And here is a zajal of Moorish Spain translated into Spanish by M. J. Valera, who also retains the meter and the distribution of rhyme of the original:

The transliteration of an Andalusian zajal, accompanied by a translation, is given in the notes.³³

With this metrical form of Hispano-Moorish song, let us now compare one or two of the very small number of extant examples of popular Provençal songs dating from the twelfth century:

And again:

The murabba’ form of the Andalusian zajal is invariably adhered to in the Provençal aubade or alba, a genre current among the people:

Even when a courtly troubadour composes in this manner, the form of the stanza, and the popular style of the song, are usually retained. The following example is probably by Gaucelm Faidit. It begins :

Cardinal Bembo, who had in his youth made a long sojourn in Provence, wrote in the sixteenth century: “This form was very commonly used by Provençal versifiers . . . in the ballads, so called because the song was accompanied, in these compositions, by a dance, the last rhyme of the two lines sung by the ‘crown,’ that is to say, by all the voices taking part together, was repeated in the last line of the solo part.”³⁸ The learned Venetian Cardinal, who had such a precise knowledge of the structure of the popular Provençal ballad, was doubtless in a better position than we are to estimate the wide range of its popularity. This anonymous poetry, designated as “popular,” was indubitably, in the main, the production of itinerant singers and jongleurs, whose business it was to enliven with such diversions the festivities and gatherings of all classes of the population.

Let us now pass on to a consideration of the poetry of the troubadours properly so-called. The oldest that we know, so far from being a man of the people, was the most powerful nobleman in France, Count Guilhem VII of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine, ninth of the name. The following strophes conclude one of his most pleasing songs:

As in the examples of popular Provençal poetry just quoted, the strophic structure and the distribution of rhymes will be seen to be punctually identical with those of the Andalusian zajal. The distich forming the marqaz in the latter is relegated, in the Provençal example, to the end of the composition, and forms a kharga, coda or envoy.

This rhyme pattern, aa, bbba, ccca or bbba, ccca, aa, is indeed unique. In its complete form, that is consisting of a crown, the rhyme of which is repeated after each monorhymed tercet, it is one of the rarest patterns known. It is rarely encountered in any of the European literatures outside of those of Spain and Provence, and when it is, Provençal poetry undoubtedly provided the model. In the trouvère poetry of northern France, which developed out of full-blown Provençal “courtly” poetry, it is not so prevalent as among the troubadours. In England, though the pattern is prominent in a whole class of lyrical poetry, it occurs but once in Chaucer, who drew his inspiration from French rather than directly from Provençal sources. There are two or three examples in Old English, dating from the twelfth century, which may be found in the Harleian collection.⁴⁰ The pattern is found in a piece doubtfully attributed to Sir Philip Sidney; it does not occur in Spenser and is only occasionally found scattered among the works of sixteenth-century poets. Shakespeare uses it in Bottom’s song in Midsummer Night’s Dream:

He also uses it in some short pieces expressly composed for music. This was generally regarded as the special province for the employment of that verse arrangement in English poetry.

But, on the other hand, numerous examples of the murabba’ form are found widely distributed in poetry of a popular character and whose derivation from the Provençal models stands above dispute. What was long regarded as the oldest extant specimen of verse in the Italian language, the “Contrasta” by d’Aleano (cited in note 38), follows that pattern. It occurs among the rare specimens of popular songs of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and even in narrative pieces in the style of the French chansons d’histoire, such as the fine account of the struggle between Guelfs and Ghibellines in Bologna:

But it is generally modified by a variation of the rhymes within the body of the strophe.

Under the head of popular poetry must be counted that of the Franciscan poets, whose close connection with popular Provençal poetry is well known. St. Francis, whose wayward years were spent in companies of young men particularly addicted to Provençal songs, excelled in this field, and at one time, it is said, had some thought of becoming a jongleur. He urged the practice of poetry upon his disciples. “We are,” he said, “the jongleurs of God. For, as servants of the Lord, are we not in truth jongleurs whose vocation is to uplift the hearts of men, and to lead them to spiritual joy?”⁴¹ With Jacopone da Todi (1250-1304), the best known and most copious of the Franciscan poets, the murabba’ form is by far the favorite and most abundantly employed. He used it not only in numerous short songs and carols,⁴² but also in canticles, running to thirty or forty stanzas, all in the murabba’ form such as a piece on the passion⁴³ or another on the curious theme of the advantages of ill health.⁴⁴

Towards the latter part of the thirteenth century the Church, which had hitherto cried anathema on the jongleurs and all their works, bethought herself of enrolling them in her service for the production of miracle plays and of religious carols expressly intended to appeal to the populace. Those compositions were accordingly in the popular style. Many were in the Provençal language, but they were also produced in French and likewise in English. Thus it happens that the lyrics of that period which have been preserved in English monasteries are composed in the popular Provençal style, and have no affinity to any popular poetry which may have existed in England. The greater number of those religious ditties and carols are in pure murabba’ form, as in the following examples from a manuscript in the Bodleian library:

Lyrics on amatory or other themes, as well as compositions of jongleurs attached to monasteries, commonly follow the popular Provençal pattern, e.g.:

Similar Church carols and canticles in rhymed Latin are far less ancient than was at one time supposed. Rhymed Latin tercets postdate troubadour poetry by about a century. Far from having served as a model to popular ditties, as has been suggested, they are much more likely derived from them.⁴⁸ According to Durandus de St. Porcain, the Salve Regina was composed in Spain by Pedro de Monsoro, bishop of Compostela.⁴⁹ The Stabat Mater was composed by the Provençalizing Franciscan, Jacopone da Todi, who was mentioned above.

The wide range in European poetry of a popular style indisputably derived from the Provençal, and conforming to the pattern which marks the popular and the most ancient poetry in Provence, again goes to show that that pattern was much more general there than the scanty fragments that have come down to us would warrant our supposing. But at the same time, that strophic form is scarcely found in European lyrical poetry produced independently of direct Provençal imitation. In view of this, its coincidence with that of popular Moorish poetry cannot with any probability be imputed to chance.

That the poetry of the troubadours was related to popular poetry is extremely probable, but we are unacquainted with any such poetry anterior to the age of the troubadours. A. Jeanroy has shown that no fragment of popular Provençal poetry known to us can be transferred to an earlier date than the end of the twelfth century.⁵⁰ He has made some ingenious conjectures on this subject. Starting from the hypothesis of “a lyrical poetry in the North of France anterior to its southern imitation,” he has searched the most ancient Italian, German and Portuguese poetry for traces of that conjectural French poetry, under the conviction, as he declares, “that everything coming from France enjoyed at that time superlative prestige,” and it is his opinion that we may, on the strength of that prestige, perceive in foreign poetical productions “the imitation of a type of French poetry at present lost.”⁵¹

With reference to the verses of the Count of Poitiers, Jeanroy writes: “They represent a variety of the strophic form in which the concluding line of the couplet is indicated by a different rhyme, the same throughout the poem, which takes the place of an ancient refrain.”⁵² But we know that in Hispano-Moorish poetry the asmat rhyme marked the end of a quatrain formed out of a distich, and does not represent a refrain, a device which the Arabs did not use. Nor is there any example of a refrain in the poetry of the troubadours, apart from the five or six stanzas of Marcabru where the recurrent line consists of a single word, a form also found in Moorish poetry. Jeanroy further advances the supposition that the refrains of popular French poetry are “relics of poems of which the greater part has been lost.” “They were at first,” he says, “no more than a series of meaningless syllables intended to stress the rhyme,” such as mironton, mironton, mirontaine, but some of them “appear to suggest situations which are left incompletely specified, and introduce characters which must have at one time played a more important and definite part.”⁵³

But the Arab author, Ibn Sanā’ al-Mūlk, speaking of the poetry of Moorish Spain, goes into the following particulars: “It is accounted an imperative rule that the poet, breaking off from the subject matter of the lyric, should pass on to the kharga (the nearest equivalent of the Romance refrain) without any transition, and that he should represent it as being uttered by characters who speak in their own names, or, if they remain silent, are connected with a theme other than that of the poem. The kharga is frequently couched in childish language or in a foreign tongue. In any case it is a customary convention that it should produce the effect of a meaningless jargon.”⁵⁴ “The Provençal poets,” M. Jeanroy states, “give the two lines of the refrain the same rhyme in order that they should form a complete whole.”⁵⁵ But it is not the Provençal poets who do this, for their codas are often equipped with different rhymes as in the example just quoted. It is the poets of Moorish Spain who almost invariably practice that usage, and did so for almost two centuries before ever a troubadour pricked his first song in Provence.

Out of eleven songs by Count Guilhem de Poitiers which we possess, six, the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th and 11th in Jeanroy’s edition, follow very closely the zajal model. Two others, the 9th and 10th, differ from it only by slight variations. “All the pieces except one, the 10th,” says Jeanroy, “are variations of the form aaab ab.”⁵⁶ And commenting on the prevalence of this rhymescheme in Provençal poetry, he observes that “it represents, no doubt, some traditional form to which it was obligatory to conform.”⁵⁷ The three remaining pieces, which, it is agreed, are the oldest, are cast in an entirely different mold. They consist of some twenty rhymes ending with the same rhyme. This is the regular form of the chanson de geste, chanson d’histoire, or chanson de toile. It is also the form of the ancient Arabic qaṣīda, and there is ground for thinking that, in its rhymed form, the chanson de geste derived originally from the Arabic qaṣīda. Be that as it may, it was current before the time of the Count of Poitiers and was sung in the gatherings of warrior nobles. Not only do those first songs of Guilhem de Poitiers bear no relation, in their structural form, to any of his subsequent productions, but their pattern does not occur in the works of any later Provençal troubadour (except in a sestina of Arnaud Daniel, where, so far from being derivative, it is a novelty and bravura). Apart from these three pieces, all the poems of Count Guilhem which we possess agree very closely in their form with the verse structures employed in current Hispano-Moorish poetry.

It is further to be noted that Count Guilhem is singular among the troubadours in the closeness and uniformity with which his productions follow the Hispano-Moorish song pattern. Cercamon and Marcabru, the nearest to him in date, also approach him more than do the later troubadours in this respect. One out of the six pieces which we have from Cercamon has the rhyme-scheme aaaab. The much more numerous surviving compositions of Marcabru—they comprise some forty pieces—include two, the 6th and the 23rd of Dejeanne’s edition, conforming exactly to the murabba’ pattern, and also the following variations: (I) aaabaaac, (II) aaaab ccccb, (XVIII) aaababa, (XXV) aabccccb, (XXIX) aaabaab, (XXX) aaaabbab, (XLIV) aaaabcbc, among many others which in their rhythm are even more closely related to the Moorish zajal model.⁵⁸ The form aaab occurs in the works of numerous troubadours. Thus Peire Vidal, notable for the variety of his rhymes, has a piece in the following form:

and Bernard de Ventadorn ends his stanzas with a murabba’:

Similar rhyme patterns are found in the poems of Gaucelm Faidit, Bertram de Born, Folquet de Romans, the Monk of Montauban, Peire Cardenal, Arnaud Plagues, Nicolet, Guilhem Rainols and Magrut.⁶¹ The only song by King Alfonso II of Aragon which we possess is couched in the murabba’ form:

But, speaking generally, the most ancient troubadour productions are those which show the closest and most constant adherence to the Andalusian model. Those of later date, while employing rhyme-schemes which have manifestly that pattern for their starting point, deviate from it by numerous technical variations.

Popular taste is far less keen to lust after new things than are courtly fashions. Popular poetry thus usually preserves its form almost unchanged. The correspondence of that form with that of the most ancient troubadour poetry proper, bears out the assumption of an original connection between the two. But the acceptance of that connection scarcely brings us any nearer to a final resolution of the matter, for we are still left confronted with the question of the origin of that popular poetry itself, and with the remarkable fact that it presented on both sides of the Pyrenees an identical structure which is not found elsewhere.

As already indicated, there existed since the tenth century in Moorish Spain, as later in Provence, two different trends in poetical composition, the one learned and literary, the other popular in character. The Muslims were at that period engaged in debating, like the Italians in the thirteenth century, whether the use of the vernacular tongue in poetry was legitimate. They were, in general, of the opinion that the hieratic tongue alone was beseeming the dignity of poetic diction. This view, however, did not prevent cultivated Moors from expressing the pleasure they derived from the vernacular songs which constituted the repertory of both court and street entertainers. They testify with a profusion of Oriental hyperbole to the raptures into which they are lifted by these songs: they are “the pearls of the universe; they are more exquisite than the perfumes of India.”⁶³

But despite that enthusiasm, the cultivated classes bowed before the pronouncement of their grammarians, who disallowed the claim of such compositions to being regarded as a literary art. Ibn Bassam (d. 1147), after telling us that Mūqadam Ibn Mū’afa al-Qabri composed azajal in the ninth and tenth centuries, states further:

He used in these compositions short lines similar to the hemistichs of the Arabic metrical system. These productions are however unstudied in their style and written without regard for the rules of Arabic prosody. They are couched in the vernacular and even in the agami (“foreign,” i.e., rūmi) idiom. The name given to the rūmi phrases introduced in them is marqaz. Being thus indited without any division into hemistichs, and in short lines, those compositions are lacking in scholarly and polished elegance.⁶⁴

And ‘Abd al-Walid al-Marrakishi, the historian of the Almohades, after bestowing high praise on the azajal composed in the vernacular by the noted physician Abu-Bakr Ibn Zuhr (Abenzoar, 1114-1224) delivers himself of the following curious and enlightening remark: “I should have liked to quote some of the strophes that occur to my recollection, were it not contrary to literary usage to cite such compositions in works of a serious character intended for the perusal of scholars.”⁶⁵ From as early as the tenth century, not a few men of letters indulged in the composition of vernacular azajal. Ibn ‘Abd Rabbihi (860-939), a poet attached to the court of the Caliph ‘Abd ar-Rahmān III, and Yūsuf Ibn Harūn ar-Ramādi, whom we hear of as having accompanied his master, Al-Manṣūr, to Barcelona in 996, are particularly mentioned for the pleasantness of their azajal. Nevertheless, in Moorish Spain as in the Christian world, poetry of a popular character was not considered worthy of being set down and preserved in writing.

About the first years of the twelfth century, however, a songbook of azajal was published by Abū Bakr Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd al-Malik Ibn Quzmān of Cordova (1078-1160), for some time vizier to Al-Mitabid, Aftiside Emir of Badajos.⁶⁶ The Diwān of Ibn Quzmān, which comprise 149 azajal, has come down to us and places at our disposal an invaluable document concerning the popular poetry of Moorish Spain.⁶⁷ Unfortunately, we have no equivalent of it with respect to the popular poetry of the same period in Christian Europe.

The Diwān is composed in the vernacular, and the author discusses in a preface the much debated question of language.⁶⁸ “As regards the grammatical conventions of the hieratic language,” he writes, “no greater mistake can be committed than to apply them to the composition of a song”; and he proceeds to cite strophes by poets who attempted “to clothe the tenor of everyday converse in the grammatical garb of a qaṣīda,” showing that the employment of the archaic inflections in short lines results in cacophony. “For that reason I have stripped my language of all inflections and archaic peculiarities of the shi’r.” He praises the poet Shaikh Ahtal Ibn Numāra for having followed the same practice. “My only hesitation in consigning this collection of azajal to writing,” Ibn Quzmān adds, “arises from the fact that I deprive myself by so doing, of the advantage I might have derived from the public delivery of these poems,” a remark which calls attention to an additional cause of the scarcity of popular songs in written records.

The subject matter of the songs of Ibn Quzmān offers considerable diversity, and the language varies according to the theme. Seven genres of zajal were recognized: (1) the lovepoem, or ghazal; (2) the spring-song, or neharye; (3) the drinking-song, or khamrye; (4) licentious verses, or baleik; (5) satires, or farki; (6) colloquies in slang speech, or mozeiledge; (7) moral and sententious pieces, or mokeffer.⁶⁹ Most of these types figure in the azajal of Ibn Quzmān’s Diwān. Thus, one piece begins, in the manner of the troubadours, by a reference to the spring: “The earth puts on the hues of greenery, the flowers of the camomile open out their petals; the whole world becomes decked with a carpet of flowers” (zajal 79). In another zajal, a pious alfaquis reproves the poet for his addiction to pleasure and exhorts him to penitence: “Listen to me and repent of your sins,” says the holy man. “I shall repent me,” replies the poet, “when the gardens shall have ceased to beam with smiles of joy, and when the breezes shall no longer be laden with the perfumes of musk” (zaj. 148). Another song recalls a Provençal aubade. Reference is made to the night watchman; the sky grows pale; the lovers grieve; they bid each other farewell in a last embrace (zaj. 141). The songs in which the love-theme predominates number about thirty. Several appear to be addressed to men, but it should be borne in mind that it is a current Arab usage to disguise references to a woman by the use of the masculine gender.⁷⁰

Ibn Quzmān refers with derision to those poets who affect to subtilize passion to an impalpable ideal, and who “will depart from this life without ever having enjoyed it.” His conception of love, like that of the troubadours, proceeds on the assumption that passion can attain its full impetuosity only in extra-marital relations (zaj. 123). “Love is a heavy burden,” he says. “What heart were stout enough to bear its load, did not beauty quicken the spirit and multiply its power? . . . The very victims of love are grateful for their sufferings and sing the praises of the power that anguishes them . . . Love takes its origin from sight. Let my eyes meet a pair of charming eyes that are replete with sorcery, and I am forthwith deprived of calm and reason. The shafts from those eyes hold at their mercy my pierced heart” (zaj. 117). “O joy of love! In thee is life, in thee is death! Since my eyes met thine, I am like to die, and no pang equals what I endure” (zaj. 115). “Mighty God! My love burns more ardently than a live ember . . . but the more bitter is my condition, the sweeter it is to me . . . My life ebbs, but my love does not pass away. The whole world ages from day to day; and my love does not age” (zaj. 132). A dozen azajal are wine-songs. “Life were intolerable to me without good wine; I shall beseech the Prophet to intercede for me with Allah, so that I may be allowed a due ration of good vintage” (zaj. 40). Elsewhere the poet expresses the wish that he might be buried in a vineyard, wrapped in twining shoots (zaj. 90).

Ibn Quzmān’s songs abound in personal and egotistic touches. He boasts unblushingly and, trumpeting his own work, proclaims that his songs are the most beautiful ever composed (azaj. 15, 61, 65, 71, 134). That ostentatious vainglory appears to have been a recognized pose, as with quack vendors of nostrum, among song-makers, both in Spain and in Provence. Rambaut d’Orange proclaims that “never was wrought so excellent a song by man or woman, in this age or the last.”⁷¹ Despite his many gibes at pious alfaquis, the mirthful Andalusian troubadour bethinks himself, as he feels the years creep on, of turning to care for the welfare of his soul. His whims of repentance and reform lead him to contemplate procuring the charge of imam in a mosque (zaj. 147). We learn from a piece, which calls to mind Villon, that the poet once got into serious trouble with the police (chorta); he was imprisoned and severely mishandled, until rescued by the intervention of one of his admirers, Siyar al-Mūhammad. The Diwān includes political sirventes. Zajal 47 refers to the battle of Frage, in which King Alfonso I of Aragon, a kinsman of Count Guilhem de Poitiers, fell at the hand of the Almoravid Emir, Ibn Ghania.

Like the oldest azajal, those of Ibn Quzmān are not only composed in the vernacular, but contain words and expressions belonging to the Romance idiom, with which he appears to have been quite familiar.⁷² Moorish Spain was, in fact, bilingual. In addition to the official Arabic, a Romance dialect was widely spoken. In the streets and in the harems, peopled largely with Spanish women, Romance, more or less larded with Arabic, was current. Cadis and other officials were expected to be conversant with both languages so as to be able to communicate with all classes of the mixed population, and to take down the depositions of witnesses. The Romance tongue spoken in the Christian kingdoms differed in but trifling respects from the speech of Catalonia and Provence. When, later, Castile expanded southward, the Arabo-Romance vernacular of Andalusia became the foundation of the Castilian tongue.⁷³

Of the 149 azajal of Ibn Quzmān, the greater number (ninetytwo) conform in all points to the murabba’ pattern. The remainder present common variations. The most frequent consists in a reduplication of the tercet strophe (aaabbbc). In twentyseven instances the two rhymes of the marqaz are repeated after the tercet (aa bbaa cccaa). The forms aaa bbb aaa ccc (azaj. 77, 149); abc ddd (azaj. 32, 57); and ab ccc (zaj. 58) also occur.

The Diwān of Ibn Quzmān introduced no innovation into Moorish lyrical poetry, and its publication did not bring about any notable extension of the favor and popularity which the songs had enjoyed for over two centuries among all classes. The only effect it produced was to break the obduracy of certain circles of grammarians and to bring about, in their despite, the lifting of the interdict they had pronounced against vernacular poetry. Men of letters felt freer than before to apply themselves, without loss of dignity, to the composition of azajal. In Aragon, Abū-Bakr Ibn Malik distinguished himself particularly in this lyrical form, which came to replace almost entirely the muwashshaha couched in the traditional language.⁷⁴ Those details concern the history of Arabic literature; they do not bear on the latter’s influence on Romance poetry. It is indeed quite unlikely that this influence worked along literary lines. Songs do not circulate through the medium of books, and those who sang them troubled themselves little about the disputes of pedagogues.

The importance for us of the Diwān of Ibn Quzmān lies in the advantage it has procured for us of laying open to our examination the popular songs of Moorish Spain in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The learned Ribera can scarcely be taxed with overstatement when he declares: “The key to the mystery which has hitherto surrounded the origins of the lyrical structural forms of the civilized world has been given to us by the Andalusian song as we have learned to know it thanks to the song-book of Ibn Quzmān.”⁷⁵

It is of particular interest to enquire into the working of that influence upon the poetry of Count Guilhem de Poitiers, the oldest troubadour, specimens of whose productions have survived. It has generally been assumed that he was not the first. Indeed it seems improbable that this war-like prince, who led an active and checkered life, should have played the part of an almost revolutionary innovator in literature. His ripe technique, firmly established in its characteristic traits and showing no sign of experimental groping, indicates moreover that we have to do with a mature poetic tradition of long standing. Those considerations have caused all historians to place the beginning of troubadour poetry at least as far back as the closing years of the eleventh century, although we possess no evidence of the existence of such a poetry in Provence before the first decades of the twelfth century. It may be, nevertheless, that the Count de Poitiers is much more closely connected with the inception of troubadour poetry than has been generally supposed, and that he was indeed, in a very definite sense, the first troubadour. Dante expressly asserts that “many years have not passed since the introduction of this vernacular poetry . . . We find, in fact, no poetical composition in the langue d’oc dating farther back than a hundred and fifty years.”⁷⁶ Since Dante wrote those words about the year 1292, they prove that he did not know any more than we do, either directly or through the tradition of his time, of any Provençal poetry anterior in date to that of Guilhem de Poitiers.

Not only are we unacquainted with any predecessor of Guilhem de Poitiers, but he has neither a known contemporary nor an immediate successor. Between the date of his death and that of the literary activity of the jongleurs Cercamon and Marcabru, a lacuna of at least eight years is interposed. The position occupied by Count Guilhem as a poet is, then, a singularly isolated one. Even when the penury of documentary evidence dating from the eleventh century is allowed for, it is hard to believe that no hint whatsoever, no illusion, no legend having any reference to predecessors or contemporaries, if any existed, should have reached subsequent generations. And since, on the other hand, it remains wholly inadmissible to attribute the Athenic birth of an entirely new poetical form, furbished at all points, to the unaided invention of a warlike dilettante, it can only be concluded that the development and adoption of that style is to be assigned to persons too obscure, and addressing themselves to audiences too unwitting in such matters, to have attracted general attention.

That poetical form must therefore have been current in Languedoc or in Spain, or both, among the numerous itinerant songmakers who frequented both countries. This anonymous lyrical poetry fell upon the ears of audiences who, however greatly they might enjoy it, were nowise interested in its cultivation. The nobles, even though they dabbled in the recital of songs, were habituated to martial and Bacchic descants, for the most part unrhymed and of quite another cast. The French clerks looked upon profane and frivolous songs with contempt and condemnation, and would no more have thought of indulging in such pastimes than of consigning those futilities to precious parchment fit to serve for the transcription of lives of saints. The Count of Poitiers, Duke of Aquitaine, a prince more powerful than the King of France, and sufficiently aristocratic in his superiority to opinion to be democratic in his tastes, may well have been the first person of importance to lend the luster of his name to these trifles, and to call attention to them in the circles of the nobility of Aquitaine and Languedoc.⁷⁷

Guilhem de Poitiers, moreover, was placed in a singularly favorable position to appreciate the fact that what in Languedoc passed for inconsiderable popular diversions fit only for the entertainment of hinds and churls, was elsewhere an art held in the highest esteem among persons of choice and cultivated taste, and was accounted one of the chief ornaments of princely courts and gatherings. He was throughout his life in close relation with Spain. His father, Guilhem (Guy-Geoffroy) VI of Poitiers and VIII of Aquitaine, is chiefly known for the expedition which he undertook in 1064, in alliance with King Sancho-Ramiro of Aragon, and which was brought to a successful conclusion by the capture of the rich Moorish alcazar of Barbastro, an exploit which was extremely remunerative in booty and captives. An Arab author mentions that the latter included many accomplished Moorish female singers.⁷⁸ Guilhem the younger was only fifteen when he succeeded his father who, according to his own desire, was buried in Spain, at Santiago da Compostela. When Sancho-Ramiro was killed in 1094, before Huesca, Guilhem IX married Philippa, the Aragonese king’s young widow. He went to fetch her himself, and spent at least the summer and autumn of that year in Spain.⁷⁹

The family of the Count of Poitiers was already connected with the Spanish kingdoms by marriage; one of the Count’s sisters had married Pedro of Aragon, another had married Alfonso VI of Castile, the conqueror of Toledo. At the time of this last expedition Guilhem was too young to join the many gentlemen of Limousin, including his most intimate friend, Hugues de Lusignan, who took part in it; but later on he missed no opportunity of associating with his Spanish brother-in-law. After spending some years in Toulouse (of which he gained possession in 1098) during the absence of Raimon de Saint-Gilles in the Holy Land, and again in 1114, during the minority of Count Alphonse-Jourdain, Guilhem de Poitiers went in 1115 to Spain. He took part in a raid by King Alfonso I of Aragon in Andalusia, carrying a daring thrust as far as Granada and the neighborhood of Cordova, and bringing back with him to Aragon several thousands of Mozarabian families. He again took the road to Spain in 1119 as an ally of the King of Aragon.

There is general consensus that Guilhem’s literary activities should be assigned to the first years of the twelfth century. According to Ordericus Vitalis, Count Guilhem, on his return in 1102 from the crusade, “sang before the princes and the great assemblies of the Christians, of the miseries of his captivity among the Saracens, using rhymed verse jovially modulated.”⁸⁰ Whatever interpretation we may place on the evidence, it brings to mind songs which differ considerably from the poems we know of the Count of Poitiers with the exception of the three oldest, but which, like the latter, are in the style of the chansons de geste or chansons d’histoire current in the circles of warlike princes. “Most of the warriors,” as Gaston Paris remarks, “were themselves able to recite rude verse.”⁸¹ The Count de Poitiers, then, having been in the habit of composing such songs, changed his style completely and abruptly. Discarding the chanson de geste form, he thereafter struck out a new and entirely different verse form and one which from his first using of it was completely defined in every particular of its technical structure. That change is so remarkable and pronounced that it calls for an explanation, but it has not received a satisfactory one.

The facts noted above allow us to conjecture with a certain amount of precision the circumstances which brought about that modification in Guilhem de Poitiers’ poetical style, and at the same time they throw light on the origin of troubadour poetry. That poetry was, as the Romance school maintains, in a large measure a development of popular poetry, but its evolution to maturity did not take place in Gascony or in Provence, but in Spain, under the dominant influence of Andalusian poetry. By long usage it had already been brought to a high degree of technical development by the time that it came to be diffused in Provence in a popular style. Mainly, or perhaps solely, in consequence of the example set by the Count of Poitiers, that poetical form, from being popular, became adopted in princely circles and displaced entirely in those circles the rude songs they had been wont to use. The new model, once erected to the rank of courtly poetry, was trimmed by the jongleurs and troubadours to the intent of their changed audience, who gave themselves to bringing their songs in tune with courtly taste and to embroidering upon them at pleasure. They are fully entitled to the merit of having made this poetry, whose inspiration and technique had been supplied by the Hispano-Mauresque songs, into the model which was to exercise a permanent influence on the lyrical literature of Europe.

Later in the thirteenth century, and more particularly at the time of Alfonso the Wise, the Spanish poets set themselves to imitate the technical virtuosity of the Provençals. The influence of those styles, the one upon the other, thus came to operate reciprocally, Provençal poetry, which had owed its original inspiration to the poetry of Andalusia and Aragon, contributing in turn to the rise of Castilian verse. It is worth noting, however, that the original form of the Moorish zajal persisted in Spain after it had disappeared or become transformed almost everywhere else in cultivated poetry. Thus, Juan Ruiz, generally known under the designation of Archpriest of Hita, the most distinguished versifier of medieval Spain, composed pure azajal as late as the fourteenth century. The following is a sample:

This form is still found in popular songs. It is interesting to note that Calderon, in the seventeenth century, introduces a perfect zajal in his play, Amar despues de la muerte.

Calderon, moreover, places this Andalusian zajal in the mouths of a Moor and a Moorish chorus, implying that he was well aware of the Moorish origin of this particular form of versification.

To ask by what paths the song of Moorish Spain made its way into Languedoc is to overlook the political geography of these regions at the time. The native lands of the troubadours were not, in the twelfth century, either in a political or cultural sense a part of France, but a part of Spain. The Provençal lords, each fighting for his own hand, had striven above all, during the ninth and tenth centuries to efface the last traces of the nominal suzerainty which the Carolingian dynasty had attempted to establish over them. They brought far more ardor to this task than to that of getting rid of the roving Saracen bands, remnants of two centuries of Muslim occupation and invasion, which, from the security of their kasrs in the Monte des Maures and from the coastal coves, held up the trade with Italy. The rulers of Catalonia and Aragon were little attracted for their part to adventures in Moorish Spain and were much more concerned with extending their domains north of the Pyrenees. The House of Toulouse, founded by a certain Boson, had been supreme in Languedoc ever since the beginning of the tenth century. These Counts, who had a genius for contracting advantageous marriages, absorbed successively Velay, Gevauden, Vizarais and the diocese of Uzès into their territories. Through the marriage of Raimon Bérenger, cousin of the King of Aragon, to Douce, heiress to Gilbert de Milhau, these domains, much more extensive than those of the King of France, passed in 1112 to the Catalan dynasty of the Bérenger family. Catalonia itself, together with its dependencies, was reunited in 1137 to the Crown of Aragon, through the marriage of Raimon Bérenger IV to his cousin Petronilla. Alfonso II, son of Raimon, the great patron of the troubadours, assumed the titles of King of Aragon, Count of Provence and of Roussillon, his father having exercised the prerogatives of the countships as Prince of Aragon.

Even before the formal confirmation of this amalgamation, all the Provençal lords, by their interests opposed to France, had recognized the suzerainty of Spain. In 1134 Raimon Bérenger; Roger, Count of Foix, who had married the sister of the Queen of Castile; Alphonse-Jourdain, Count of Toulouse and of Saint-Gilles, brother of King Alfonso; Armegol, Count of Urgel; Mir, Count of Pallas and a number of other lords, travelled to Saragossa with a view to bringing about a settlement of the dispute between the King of Aragon and the King of Castile, who claimed certain of the former’s rights. “All these princes and lords,” says Prudencio de Sandoval, “acknowledged the king as their feudal lord and swore obedience to him. The King of Castile,” the chronicler goes on, “proceeded to treat them with great liberality. To the Count of Barcelona he gave the town of Saragossa and various lordships, as well as a gold vase weighing thirty marks; to the Count of Toulouse he presented several valuable horses and a quantity of precious jewelry; to all the great lords of Gascony, of the lands as far as the Rhone, and to Guillaume de Montpelier he gave articles of gold and silver and also horses.”⁸⁴ Alfonso II of Aragon performed personally the duties and exercised the rights of his sovereignty over the county of Toulouse, before he delegated them to his brothers and sons. The domains of Provence remained an appanage of the kingdom of Aragon until the annexation of Languedoc to France in 1229, after the Albigensian crusade.

On the eve of this consummation, a troubadour sent his jongleur to the king: “Hie thee, Hugonet,” he tells him, “strately and with all despatch unto the noble King of Aragon and sing unto him a new sirventes. Tell him that the sufferance he shows while the French do him great wrong and occupy his lands calls upon him much dispraise.”

Writing from the heart of what we now call Provence, Folquet de Marseille says: “Our King of Aragon will never deceive, I ween, the hope that every gallant heart places in him.”

The Provençal war-cry was “Reial!” (Realm!)⁸⁷

There was no kind of boundary separating Provence and Aragon. It might be said far more truly than in the time of Louis XIV that the Pyrenees did not exist. Language and literature were in every respect identical in both regions. “The new style of poetry was cultivated in the valley of the Ebro just as it was on the banks of the Durance and the Rhone.”⁸⁸ Practically all the troubadours frequented the Spanish courts with as much assiduity as they did those of Provence. Consequently, to propose a discussion of the connection between Provençal and Spanish poetry would be almost as though one were to enquire into the influences of French literature on the Provençal writers, André Chénier or Alphonse Daudet.

In Spain itself no boundaries existed. Under the Caliphate, the Christian principalities were part of the Muslim dominions, and acknowledged their dependence on the suzerain, whom they furnished with mercenary troops. The name Frontera was later given to the plain stretching from Cordova and Seville to Jaen,⁸⁹ a sort of vague intermediate land where Christians and Muslims met on their errands. Nor did a barrier of irreducible hostility exist between races and religions, such as we are in the habit of imagining. A profoundly erroneous idea has arisen, in consequence of the fictions related at a later period, in regard to the relations between Christians and Moors in the peninsula. Has not the expedition undertaken by Charlemagne at the request of Suleiman al-Arabi against the Basques and Aragonese, and celebrated at the time of St. Bernard in the famous song of Roland, been represented as an epic struggle between the Cross and the Crescent? Religious legend even managed to transform Diez de Bivar, the condottiere or brigand who fought for seven whole years at the head of his Muslim bands on behalf of the Emirs Beni-Hūd of Saragossa, pillaging churches and mosques indiscriminately, into a hero of the faith. The Spaniards commemorate to this day the mythical battle of Cavadonga, which is supposed to have taken place at a time when the half-legendary King Pelayo was apparently enjoying at Cordova the hospitality of the Emir of the Faithful. The fanaticism introduced into Spain by foreigners is antedated by the adoption of these colorful stories.

Alfonso VI (1065-1109), an ambitious prince, married Constance, daughter of Duke Robert of Burgundy. Her retinue comprised a multitude of Cistercian monks. Bernard of Cluny concluded a treaty with the Pope after having become the first Archbishop of Toledo and settling his monks in the bishoprics of Burgos, Salamanca and Segovia. Up to that time, the Spanish Christians, who had been for the most part Arians under the Visigoths, had followed the Mozarabian ritual. Isidore of Seville, the father of the Spanish Church, whose connections with Rome were of the slenderest, used towards the Muslims, under whose rule he lived, the same tolerance that they showed to the Christians. The French monks were determined to change all that. The Spaniards rose up in revolt. Alfonso “the Battler” deposed Archbishop Bernard, attempted to eject the Cistercians from the country and broke off relations with the Pope. Those measures aroused the fury of his wife, Urraca, also a Burgundian, and her frenzy ran so high that she raised an army and waged a long war against her own husband. Women and Burgundians have been, down to the time of Isabel the Catholic and later, the promoters and mainstay of the Catholic Church in Spain.

Nothing of that fanaticism existed in the course of the three centuries during which the two peoples, Christian and Muslim, lived side by side. The question of religion did not enter into the policy of the Spanish rulers; they made no claim to be defenders of the faith. “No instance is known to us before the twelfth century,” says Altamira, “of an expedition undertaken by the Christians against the Muslims exclusively.” Even after the Christian kingdoms had begun to expand, the Christian kings were nowise concerned to expel the Moors from the peninsula. The most to which their ambition aspired was to extend their power “over the two religions.” Thus the more they fought against the Emirs, as they fought among themselves, in order to enlarge their dominions, the more sedulous were they of cultivating the good will of the Muslim population. Peire Vidal reflects this manner of thinking when he dreams of imperial power over li rei e l’amiran, “the kings and the emirs.”⁹⁰

It was, as a rule, at the request of the Emirs and often with the assistance of Saracen troops that the Spanish princes conducted their campaigns. Thus, Ramiro of Aragon attacked Navarre at the head of a Muslim army furnished by the Emirs of Saragossa, Huesca and Tudela.⁹¹ Al’Mutamid of Seville offered Raimon Bérenger II the sum of 10,000 dinars in return for assistance against Abū ‘Abd ar-Rahmān Ibn Tāhir, king of Murcia. The Aragonese tendered regularly their services to the Emirs as mercenaries. Al-Mansur, who used Christian armies to win his most resounding victories, pillaged the shrine of Compostela with the aid of Aragonese troops. Numerous other instances of this type could be given. The victories gained were usually mutually recognized by treaties which set up a nominal suzerainty and exacted the payment of tribute. As masters of the fertile lands of Andalusia, the caliphs were not greatly interested in occupying the stony regions of Asturia and Castile. The Christian kingdoms, which had long paid them tribute and furnished them with mercenaries, were regarded by their Muslim suzerains with benevolent indulgence.

When, during the first days of the reconquista, the situation became reversed, the Emirs who owed feudal allegiance to the kings sat in the Cortes of Castile (established in 1020). Occasionally, disputes over territory would be decided by the results of chess games. Hospitality was regularly exchanged; on all ceremonial occasions the Emirs travelled to the Spanish courts attended by their retinues. Bonds of friendship commonly united them with the Christian princes. Alfonso VI, being persecuted by his brother, took refuge for a long period with Al-Ma’mūn, Emir of Toledo, and their mutual regard led to the conclusion of a pact of non-aggression which was faithfully observed until the deaths of the Muslim prince and his successor. Al-Ma’mūn lent King Alfonso the assistance of his troops in order to restore him to his throne; ‘Abd ar-Raḥmān rendered similar aid to Sancho I of Leon, to enable him to regain possession of his estates. Sancho, Queen Theuda and her son travelled to Andalusia in order to consult the great physicians of Cordova.⁹² A Christian prince would entrust the education of his sons to learned Muslims and would send the former to an Emir’s court.⁹³ Mixed marriages were of regular occurrence in all classes, whether plebeian, noble or royal.⁹⁴

The twelfth century, the period when Provençal poetry flourished, was also the century of the reconquista. That reconquest owed, indeed, a good deal more to the decline of Muslim power and the discussions among the Emirs than to the zeal and energy of the Christian potentates. The latter, engrossed in their disputes over the possession of their petty kingdoms—Leon, Castile, Navarre, Aragon, “the Spains,” as they were called—by turns reunited under the power of one of their number and again divided, in accordance with the disastrous feudal custom then prevalent; they had no notion of attacking the Moors. After the fall of the Western Caliphate at the end of the tenth century the Muslim Emirs who had carved principalities, or taїfas, for themselves out of the ruins, turned, like the Christian princes, against each other. Enjoying in their alcazars the luxury with which the caliphs had surrounded themselves and giving themselves up, above all, to poetry, according to the historians, they nevertheless lived in the dread of losing all. The most powerful of them, Mūhammad Ibn Abad al-Mu’tamid, king of Seville, in alliance with the Emirs of Granada and Badajoz, being faced with the threat of invasion by the taїfas of the north, who owed feudal allegiance to the Christians, called in to their assistance hordes of Berber tribes which had just founded the empire and city of Marrakech in Africa. These warriors of the Sahara had in the first instance come from distant Senegal. Black blood ran in their veins. They fought with their faces veiled and used long notched shields. Filled with fanaticism by a religious reformer, they advanced to the conquest of a new empire to the sound of Sudanese drums. They called themselves the “Saints,” Al-Murābiḷūn, a name which was distorted in the Spanish dialect into “Almoravides.” Under their Emir, Yūsuf Ibn Tāshfīn, they inflicted a bloody defeat on the Christians at Zalaca in 1086. But glutted with pillage, enervated by luxury and orgy, and detested by all, the Almoravides were unable to maintain their power.

The Christian princes, acceding, not without a good deal of asking, to the solicitations of the revolted Mozarabians, took advantage of the anarchy to enlarge their dominions at the expense of the taїfas, without, however, laying aside their domestic quarrels. Alfonso I of Aragon (1104-1134), surnamed the “Battler,” scoured the peninsula with his roving bands. But lacking the means of consolidating his successes, and hard pressed by a coalition of Emirs, he was obliged to seek alliances. It was at this juncture that the battler called in the aid of the Count of Poitiers. The latter was the hero, in 1115, of an expedition which carried the Limousinian and Aragonese bands to the outskirts of Cordova and Granada, causing such anxiety in Andalusia that the “Prayer of Fear” was recited in all the mosques. The ten thousand Mozarabians who returned with the Count of Poitiers helped to populate the wastes of Aragon.⁹⁵ The alliance with the King of Aragon was renewed in 1118; Bernard-Aton, Viscount of Béziers, the most powerful vassal of the Count of Toulouse, and several other lords of Provence joined Guilhem de Poitiers in the expedition which resulted in the capture of Saragossa.⁹⁶

Rather than submit to the yoke of the barbarous Almoravides, the Emirs of Andalusia, at whose call the invaders had come, sought alliance with the Christians. But the latter, by reason of their disputes and jealousies, were almost as powerless as the Emirs.

The troubadours bewail the painful situation. Peire Vidal vents his dismay:

The four kings of Spain stand in ill straits, / since peace among themselves they cannot keep. / Right valorous lords, and just, / courteous and forthright are they there withal.

Marcabru similarly deplores that the conduct of the princes beyond the mountains encouraged the Almoravides:

And he offers up pious wishes for union among the kings:

With the aid of doughty Portugal, and the King of Navarre as well, if the Count of Barcelona will bend his view toward the erstwhile metropolis, Toledo, so might we thereunto win and storm its walls to the outcry of ‘Realm!’ and be done with the Pagan kind. Were not the streams in swell, the Almoravides would be in dire straits. But if their leisure dwell to take the field unto summer-tide and the King of Castile come, it might well hap that we contrive, and so do that they of Cordova might needs draws in their belts.

Meanwhile a new Berber wave broke over the Maghreb, and the invading host, invited, like the Almoravides before them, by the Emirs, crossed the straits. The Al-Mūwahhidi or “Unitarians,” whom the Spaniards called the Almohades, were Masmuda tribes from the Higher Atlas, and had for centuries been in relation with the Kharijite capital of Sijilmassa. They were not savages like the Almoravide nomads; but inflamed by the preaching of their Mahdi, Mūhammad Ibn Tūmart, they were fraught with religious zeal. The flower of the chivalry of Calatrava and Santiago fell on the battle-field of Alarcos (1176), and King Alfonso VIII barely escaped with his life.

‘Abd al Mu’min, the Almohad Emir, proved himself generous. He granted the Spanish king a truce of ten years and set thousands of knights at liberty unransomed. This did not, however, prevent Jewish traders from selling Christian slaves in every market of Andalusia on the morrow of the battle.¹⁰⁰ It may be added that, to judge from the conduct of other Emirs on similar occasions, the lot of the war captives was not particularly hard. Al-Maqqari, referring to the reign of Al-Hakim II, speaks of hundreds of slaves “dressed after the Provençal fashion,” who were employed in the avocations they had been wont to exercise at home. Some served their masters in the capacities of secretaries and librarians, others even filled administrative posts, and all were treated on a footing of trust and amity.¹⁰¹ It was at this period that the slave Habid composed poetry which was held in high esteem,¹⁰² and there would be nothing improbable in Provençal prisoners of war having followed his example.

The triumph of Islam drew lamentations from Peire d’Auvergne. “The Almohades have the better of us”—Almohades nos superan—he moans. But the contentions between the Christians knew no lull even in the hour of defeat. With the Almohades at their heels, Aragonese and Castilians fought among themselves. The poet from Auvergne gives voice to the bitterness and impotent aspirations of the vanquished: “Could we but contrive accord, we might hurl them back to Morocco”—tro a Maroc faran lai. “But by the Christians’ own fault, we are held up to the jeers of the Masmuda”—par las christians faillis, quar Masmut nos fan sobranas.¹⁰³ And Gavaudan the Elder delivers himself in the same strain: “The Moroccans and their marabouts blatter yonder and cast scorn at us, crying: ‘Franks, make way! Provence is ours and all the land as far as the heart of Puy!’ ”

The Almohades succumbed in their turn to the luxury and civilization of Andalusia. Within a bare few years they had waxed corrupt to the point that they produced poets and patrons of artists and philosophers. The very victor of Alarcos commemorated his triumph by the construction of the exquisite Giralda tower at Seville, twin sister to the Kutabia of Marrakech. His son, Abū Ya’qub Yūsuf, was given to book learning and chose his friends among the scholars and poets. Ibn Tufaïl, a renowned philosopher, presented to him a brilliant student of Aristotle, named Ibn Roschd, belonging to a wealthy family of jurists. In the course of their conversation, the Almohad prince expressed a wish that a commentary might be composed to elucidate the works of the Stagirite. Thus did a Berber from the Higher Atlas endow medieval Europe with Averroes.¹⁰⁵

The flow of tribute and booty, of luxury and culture, as well as the accession of numerous Arab and Mozarabian subjects after the capture of Toledo and Saragossa, produced much the same effect on the Spanish rulers as the conquest of Andalusia on the Berber invaders. The Beni-Alfonso—thus do the Arab historians designate the Spanish princes—had been, before the epoch of the reconquest, even ruder than the barons on the other side of the Pyrenees. They had no coinage; they could not read; they called the clerks’ gospel a library; for the least calculation or measurement of land they had to have recourse to an Arab.¹⁰⁶ But no sooner had the Spanish princes crossed the Tagus and extended their power over the Muslim lands than they blossomed out into oriental splendor. The Courts of Castile and Aragon were thereafter accounted the most brilliant in Christendom. They were the Mecca of the poets. According to the jongleur-troubadour Cercamon, the Court of Alfonso VII (1126-1157) was the meeting place of courtly youth, for “he had conquered joy”—Anfons qu’a joi conquis.¹⁰⁷ Peire Vidal expresses himself in almost identical terms—“N’ Anfons per cui Jovens es Joies.”¹⁰⁸ Perdigon exalts the magnificence of the Court.¹⁰⁹ According to the author of the Libro de Alixandre, “a whole nation of jongleresses,” that is, female dancers and musicians, was to be found there, as well as “Jongleurs of all countries and of diverse sorts.”¹¹⁰ The Moorish Emirs did not fail to honor with their presence the festivities to which the Spanish monarchs were addicted.¹¹¹

Alfonso of Castile, having reunited the crowns of Castile and Leon, revived an old Visigoth usage, and arrogated to himself the egregious title of Imperator totius Hispaniae. The coronation was celebrated amid much pomp, in the cathedral of Santa Maria de Regla at Leon, in the presence of a brilliant gathering which included the King of Navarre, the Counts of Barcelona, Toulouse, Foix and Commiges, the Lord of Montpelier and the Emir of Rueda, Al-Motansir Jafar-Abdullah, the last scion of the Saragossa dynasty of the Ibn Hūd and King Alfonso’s friend and faithful ally. “All these lords,” says Sandoval, “did him homage for their dominions. . . . They took part in many great festivities and pleasant diversions.”¹¹² On making his solemn entry into Toledo in 1139, the “emperor” was received by “the entire population of the town, Christians as well as Saracens and Jews, to the sound of drums, viols and rotas and all manner of musicians who sang, each in his own language, the praises of the emperor.”¹¹³

Those splendors were renewed on the occasion of the visit of the King of France. Louis VII, after divorcing Aliénor of Aquitaine, who could not endure the King’s sanctimonious disposition and meanness, had just married Constance, the daughter of Alfonso of Castile. The latter went to meet his son-in-law at Burgos at the head of a brilliant company of lords, and received him “with such pomp and magnificence that the King of France was passing amazed at the spectacle of so much glory.” After a visit to the sanctuary of Compostela, the Court repaired to Toledo, where “festivities took place at which all the lords, both Christian and Arab, who were vassals of the emperor were present, and the King of France, when he had admired the splendor of this noble court, said in the hearing of all that the like magnificence was not to be found in all the world, and that he had never seen a display equal to it.”¹¹⁴ Señor Menéndez Pidal thinks that the troubadours Marcabru and Alégret attended those festivities in the train of the Court of Toulouse, brother of Queen Berengela.¹¹⁵

Father Mariana, who has a bent for scandal, says that the real reason for King Louis’s journey was his desire to investigate the rumor which had reached him to the effect that Princess Constance was illegitimate.¹¹⁶ Whether or not the imputation was founded, it is a far from improbable one, in view of the standard obtaining at the Spanish Court during this period. The troubadour Arnaud de Marsan boasts of having gained the love of another of the daughters of King Alfonso:

The King-Emperor set the example of oriental polygamy. In addition to six more or less legitimate wives, one of whom, Princess Zaïda, was the daughter of the poet-king Al-Mu’tamid of Seville, and had brought him as her dowry the provinces of Ciudad Real and Cuenca, his harem included a number of concubines and a “multitude” of female singers and dancers. The historians, it can cause no surprise, are agreed in declaring the Spanish Courts to be more than half Moorish. They owed, in fact, everything they had to Muslim civilization.

The reconquista, at least in the first stages, so far from breaking off or embittering the relations between the two peoples, actually extended them and made them more intimate. The Spanish kings encouraged the Muslim population to remain within the newly conquered territories and guaranteed to all classes the continued enjoyment of their lands and goods. We possess the texts of the capitulations. Justice was administered by the Muslims’ own cadis and order was maintained by their alguazils; they attended without let to their trades and avocations, and were allowed to keep special butchers’ shops that they might observe their customs. The new subjects of the kings were free to practice their religion, and the muezzin’s call to prayer from the heights of the minarets of Toledo and Saragossa mingled with the sound of the Christian bells. Such were the privileges accorded to Muslims in the Christian kingdoms at this date that numbers of them migrated from the Almohad taïfas and placed themselves under the protection of the kings.¹¹⁸ The “emperor” prided himself on making no distinction between his Christian subjects and those of Islamic faith, and his favorite title was that of “king of the men of both religions.”

In Aragon the Muslims enjoyed even more privileges than in Castile and were consequently to be found in larger numbers. Alfonso II (1162-1198), son-in-law of the King-Emperor, rivalled him in oriental magnificence. Moreover, the King of Aragon, whose grandfather had not been able to sign his name except in Arabic, was not only the most lavish among the patrons of the troubadours, but was himself a poet. The chronicles distinguish him from the other “Beni-Alfonsos” by the description “el que trobo,” and his courtiers pushed flattery to the extent of declaring that he was the best troubadour of the age, an exaggeration which is scarcely supported by his only surviving poem, a love-song of somewhat mediocre quality. But he was certainly a munificent patron of literature. Arnaud Daniel says: “I have never, for my own part, left the Court of Aragon without wishing, the next day, to return with a single bound”:

King Alfonso, moreover, was not lacking in taste and discernment. Peire Vidal was his favorite poet,¹²⁰ and he considered that the songs of his friend, Guiraut de Bornelh, “were fit to be married to the sirventes of Bertram de Born”—donet per molhers los chansons d’En Giraud de Bornelh a sos sirventes.¹²¹ Guiraut had occasion to compare the courtly manners of the Arabized Courts of Castile and Aragon with those of Navarre, which had kept clear of influences arising from the reconquista and was “destitute of all courtesy”—cort corta de tota cortesia.¹²²

He had just left the good King Alfonso of Castile, who had made him a present of a superb grey palfrey and many other gifts . . . But the King of Navarre got wind of Guiraut’s good fortune and stripped him of all when the minstrel passed through his lands. Guiraut was relieved of all his money, and the King appropriated the grey palfrey for himself.¹²³

As for Bertram de Born, who had at first stood in great favor with the King of Aragon, he quarrelled with the latter in the end, suspecting the King of having given Henry II of England assistance when that monarch was besieging Bertram’s own castle of Hautefort. In two sirventes, the quick-tempered knight broke into abuse of the King of Aragon. The latter had also a bone to pick with Gaucelm Faidit concerning a lady for whose favors the troubadour was his rival.¹²⁴ The morals of the Aragonese Court were in fact no less frivolous than those of the Court of Castile. Guilhem de Bergadan gives us a picture of the King as a very Don Juan: he was continually coveting his neighbors’ wives.¹²⁵ Guiraut de Luc accuses him of having violated nuns—las monjas qu’empreignetz a Valbona.¹²⁶

A list of the troubadours who visited the Spanish Courts would comprise all the most famous names we know. Such were: Count Guilhem de Poitiers; the first jongleurs-troubadours, Cercamon, Marcabru and Alégret, Guiraut de Calanson¹²⁷; Peire d’Auvergne, also regarded as one of the founders of Provençal poetry; Guiraut de Bornelh, the “master troubadour,” who seems to have spent a great part of his life in Spain; Guilhem de Cabestanh;¹²⁸ the Rabelaisian monk, Peire de Vic, better known under the designation of the Monk of Montauban, to whom the King of Aragon presented the priory of Villefranche de Conflans; Arnaud Daniel; Peire Vidal, who in the opinion of many is Arnaud’s rival for the first place among the troubadours; Peire Roger, Canon of Clermont; Arnaud de Mareulh, whose intrigue with the Countess of Béziers, Lady of the Manor of Burlatz, was given a favorable turn by the intercession of King Alfonso II; Gaucelm Faidit, the lover of Marie de Ventadorn; Rambaut de Vaqueiras (Vaucluse), the “Noble Knight.” I omit the troubadours of a later epoch, such as Guiraut Riquier, Peire Cardenal, Folquet de Marseille, Raimon de Miraval, Uc de Saint-Cir, Bertram d’Alamanon, Aimeric de Pegulh and all those who fled in a body before the Inquisition and found refuge in Spain.

Several of the troubadours known to us were, indeed, Spaniards. Guiraut de Cabrera, friend of the Viscount Eble de Ventadorn, one of the first to protect troubadours, was a Spaniard; he quoted Guillaume de Poitiers, Marcabru and Rudel. He was, therefore, associated with the beginnings of Provençal poetry. Guillaume de Bergadan belongs to the same period; Guillaume de Tudèle, the chief author of the Song of the Crusade, was from Navarre. Arnaud the Catalan and Guilhem Cercera were Spanish knights. Hugo de Mataplana was a member of one of the most illustrious families of Catalonia. He fought beside Guilhem de Cabestanh, Raimon Vidal and many Provençal lords at the battle of Las Navas de Tolosa, which broke Muslim power in Spain forever. A year later, in 1213, he died of wounds received at the battle of Muret, which put an end to Provençal civilization.¹²⁹ Thus perished, almost at the same moment, the culture of Moorish Spain and that of Provence, to which it had given birth.

It was not, obviously, by troubadours already versed in their art that its diffusion from Spain was effected. Even the oldest, the Count of Poitiers, and the courtly jongleurs, Cercamon, Marcabru, Alégret, had forerunners. In fact, the Spanish courts, before they became the meeting-place of the troubadours, had been frequented by a more ancient and no less nomadic class of songsters. From as early as the sixth century, every Gothic court was the resort of minstrels, scôps, gleemen, or by whatever name they might be known. The kings of Spain had their court-singers; one of these, known as Pala, is repeatedly mentioned in the chronicles.¹³⁰ He certainly was not the first of his kind.

The term “jongleur” (Sp. and Prov. juglar), French in its usage, does not appear in Spain before the twelfth century, the first mention of it occurring in a chronicle of the year 1116 from Sahagun, a Burgundian foundation.¹³¹ Another term, Provençal in form, was current: segrier, segrer, or segrel.¹³² Guiraut Riquier, nettled at being referred to as a jongleur, as any mountebank, begs that he might be designated as a segrier, or trobador segrier.¹³³ The word has completely baffled lexicographers. Ribera suggested that it might be a contracted form of some such term as zegelero, which would mean “a singer of azajal.”¹³⁴ Since, in Romance languages, all words are syncopated, the internal syllables being omitted as often as not, Ribera’s suggestion would do no more than restitute the suppressed middle syllable in accordance with linguistic probability. In the Romance of Northern Italy, we come upon the forms jujar, juiar, zuiar, sublar, for jongleur. But as an occupational patronymic, in which capacity juglar was frequently used in Provence,¹³⁵ the form ziegler occurs, and, as it happens, applied to poets.¹³⁶ The use of the old Spanish term segrier, interpreted as “singer of azajal,” may thus have extended beyond the Alps, at the opposite extremity of the Provençal region.

Minstrels were more numerous in Moorish Spain and more highly regarded than in any other country. Popular minstrels, or ahdabi, abounded in towns and countryside, ruwahi, or courtpoets, in the alcazars. No prosperous citizen would bethink himself of entertaining friends without the concourse of singers. Tournaments of song were held at Seville, and the winner of the day was acclaimed as is a favorite torero in modern Spain.¹³⁷ The popularity of musical and poetical entertainers was scarcely less great in Christian than in Muslim Spain. No reference to festivities or to the splendor of the Spanish courts omits the mention of singers and musicians. These usually constituted companies of mixed composition. Thus a troop of 27 jongleurs at the Court of King Sancho IV comprised 13 Moorish singers, 12 Christians, and 2 Jews.¹³⁸ Moorish musicians and singers were employed in Spanish churches even as late as the fourteenth century.¹³⁹

Arab music is generally held to contain echos of Byzantine and Persian music, and Jewish music probably played a much more considerable part in its origin than is recognized. But accents are also to be caught in Moorish music and in that of the troubadour songs distinctly recalling Spanish music, that music which has at all periods exerted so capital an influence on the development of Western music. One of the most pleasant troubadour measures that we know is that of Marcabru’s song of the crusade: “Pax in nomine Domini! Fetz Marcabru los mots e.l so Aujatz!” The melody is, in Ribera’s opinion, a pure Aragonese jota.¹⁴⁰

The troubadours attached as much importance to the music of their songs as to the words. “A song without music is a mill without water,” says one of them.¹⁴¹ However much we may debate the relation of that music to that of Moorish Spain—both of which are far from well-known to us—the question did not present itself to contemporary poets; they frankly referred to the music of their songs as “Saracen.” In the tale of Galeran, a young woman is instructed in the musical art:

In Spain, and more particularly in Aragon, the words of the songs which accompanied the dances so much in favor, were composed in Gallician Romance, but were modelled on the songs of Andalusia, and regarded as Saracen. Similarly a large portion of the popular songs of Provence, known as ballads, rondels, virelays, were accompanied by dances. Those dances were known, as far away as England, as Moorish dances—morris-dances.

So widespread was the renown of Moorish musicians that we hear of their exercising their art as far away as Northern France and England.¹⁴³ Indeed it would seem that Moorish jongleurs, and particularly “jongleresses,” were quite commonly to be met with in Christian Europe. In a chanson d’histoire translated and edited in Venice, under the title Bove d’Ancona, the following incident is related. The beautiful and highly accomplished Druxiana, the wife of Bove d’Ancona, who had been absent for a long time at the wars, heard from “nobili contatori” and “zublar” that he was back. But as he still did not appear, she resolved to set out and seek him, disguised as a zublara, a “jongleresse.” In order the better to look the part, she rubbed herself with herbs till she appeared “dark as a Moorish woman.”

The pious Peire Cardenal exclaims: “Would that, while retaining the Christian faith, I could command the language of the Saracens; have both the law of Christ and the deft art of the pagans!”

He evidently was well aware of the source of the dig (words) no less than of the son (music) of the Provençal songs. Peire Cardenal was assuredly not alone in that respect; the casual manner of his reference to the art he envies implies a current and accepted recognition. That the Provençal song-makers, who designated their music, the instruments on which it was played, and the dances which frequently accompanied it, as Saracen or Moorish, should have at all times been similarly conscious of the source of the lyric contents of their art is more than probable. We are nowhere expressly told so. But then neither are we anywhere told by the Provençals a word as to sources of questions concerning the history of their art upon which we should have liked to have had their views. Literary history, so abundantly discussed in Moorish Spain, was not among the branches of literature cultivated in Provence. Silence on the subject is complete, and no negative conclusion can be drawn from it in any particular instance.

The art of the jongleur suddenly took on, in Provence, an enormous expansion during the closing years of the eleventh century and the early years of the twelfth. It is during the same period that the Spanish courts assumed, after the capture of Toledo in 1086 and of Saragossa in 1118, the splendor and sumptuous tastes for which they became famous. The coincidence is not fortuitous.

With the transformation of their art, the numbers of jongleurs multiplied manifold, and their activities became greatly extended. The author of an article in one of the older numbers of the Histoire littéraire de la France thus quaintly expresses his ideas on the beginnings of lyrical art in Provence: “The Provençal poets,” he says, “who had revived the art of the ancient Gallic bards, multiplied enormously in number, and discovered the secret of adding the charm of instrumental music to those of rhyme and cadence.”¹⁴⁵ Those naive words touch the truth at one point. The calling of the itinerant singer, who had existed from time immemorial, suddenly took on unprecedented numerical expansion and a new importance, as, equipped with the new rhyme and structural forms, and the musical instruments imported from Spain, his songs became truly lyrical.

The practitioners of the art flocked to where they found its most prodigal patronage: to the semi-Arabic courts of Spain. We find the mention of their names more often associated with the courts of Aragon and Castile than with those of Toulouse or Limoges. In a land which rang both day and night with music and song, the jongleurs from over the hills mingled with the heterogeneous and polyglot troops of their Spanish colleagues among whom Moorish singers appear to have predominated. A miniature in a manuscript at the Escorial pictures two jongleurs, the one a Moor, the other dressed “in the Provençal fashion,” singing together a duet or a tenson, affording thus a graphic illustration of the relations between the singers of the two nations.¹⁴⁶

In love, as he was, with his art, the jongleur neglected no opportunity of improving it and of adopting novelties. “He took over another people’s knowledge with avidity,” says Uc de SaintCyr, speaking of Marcabru, “and willingly imparted it to others.”¹⁴⁷ The troubadours were great imitators; plagiarism was in honor among them. Cercamon copies the Count of Poitiers, Marcabru imitates Cercamon and Peire d’Auvergne, and Arnaud Daniel helps himself to Marcabru. If in the polyglot gatherings of the courts of Spain, songs were at times worded in a tongue which the Provençals did not understand, bilingual Moorish minstrels, Mozarabians, Jews, Mudehars were at their elbows, ready to explain the words and themes, and eager to devise of professional matters with their Provençal colleagues.¹⁴⁸ These certainly did not lack facilities for benefiting from the greatly perfected form which their art had long since attained in Moorish Spain.

If there be a “legend” connected with the relation of Moorish to Provençal literary culture, it is the monkish legend of an “abyss” between the two, a legend charged with virus so fierce that it stultified the judgment and learning of Renan. Renan himself remarks that literature diffused in the Middle Ages with a rapidity which astonishes us and which we are not always able to account for. “Many a work composed in Morocco or in Cairo,” he observes, “became known in Paris or Cologne in less time than it takes today for an important German book to cross the Rhine.”¹⁴⁹ Songs are wafted on swifter wings and farther afield than books. But there is in this instance no occasion for wonder. The spread of songs in Aragon, from the Spanish to the Provençal portions of those domains, does not call for the invocation of a miracle. Aragon was particularly noted for the popularity there of Hispano-Mauresque lyrical poetry, and some of the favorite composers of azajal were Aragonese. The Moorish lyrical style with which the wandering jongleurs who trooped back and forth between the several parts of the kingdom became acquainted, completely renewed their uncouth original repertoire. It imposed itself in Languedoc on even the most popular forms of entertainment provided by the professional song-makers. However conservative, rude and uncultivated popular taste might be, it could not but yield to the charm of the new music.

Nor was it indeed necessary to cross the Pyrenees to become familiar with the Andalusian style. Singers, male and female, of Moorish songs were almost as common in Provence as Provençal jongleurs in Spain. Toulouse, where one brushed in the streets against traders from Seville and Valencia; Narbonne; Béziers where Spanish Jews were engaged in the diffusion of Moorish culture; Montpellier,¹⁵⁰ where there existed a whole Moorish colony of refugees from Almohavid misrule, echoed with the sound of Moorish song and music. There is no mystery about a process of diffusion which ascertainable facts show to have been inevitable. What indeed would require a great deal of explaining is that any Provençal jongleur should have remained unacquainted with the lyrical productions of Moorish Spain. With Count Guilhem of Poitiers, the cultivation of that poetry became extended to Provençal and Limousinian manorial circles. But prior to that aristocratic adoption, it had already for some time been spread by popular jongleurs among the people.