is the obvious father of the
itinerant poets whom Barbarossa welcomed in Germany and from whom the
Minnesaenger came. In Italy, Provencal verse was the foundation of that of
Dante and Petrarch. From it in England Chaucer proceeds. In Aragon it
founded the _gaya cienca_--the gay science, which passing into Provence
overspread the world. The passing was effected by the troubadour, a title
derived from _trobar_, to compose, whence troubadour, a composer of verse.

Technically the troubadour was not only a composer but a knight and not
merely that but the representative of chivalry in its supreme expression.
Poetry was the attribute of his order as joy was the parure of the preux
chevalier. But though except in bearing and appearance the knight did not
have to be poetic, the troubadour had to be poetic and chivalrous as well.
The vocation therefore, which in addition to these characteristics
presupposed also rank and wealth, was such that while a troubadour might
disdain to be king, there were kings, Alfonso of Aragon and
Coeur-de-Lion among others, who were proud to be troubadours.

Rank was not essentially a prerequisite. Poetry, exalting and fastidious,
occasionally stooped, lifting from the commonality a man naturally though
not actually born for the sphere. The Muse aiding, Bernard de Ventadour, a
baker's son; was raised to the lips of the rather volatile Queen Eleanor.
But the process, hazardous in itself, was infrequent. Royals were not
necessarily on a footing with troubadours, but the latter, who were the
peers of kings, required, for the maintenance of their position, abundant
means. They held it becoming to be ceaselessly lavish, to play high and
long, to dazzle not only in the tensons but in the banquets and jousts.
Impoverishment supervening they went forth in the crusades to die, or,
less finely, dropped back among the jongleurs, minstrels, strollers and
mere poets with whom subsequently they were generally confused. These
latter, sometimes stipendiary, sometimes donatable like jesters and fools,
told in their verse of great ladies whom they had never seen, or in the
quality of handy man attached themselves to women of rank, to whom they
gave songs in return for graces which included largesse, acquiring in
their society a knowledge more or less incomplete of the niceties of love
and occasionally, if their verse were good, the title of Maestro d'Amor.
Even so, only in the embroidery of legend were they troubadou