Dante’s debt to the troubadours, with whose literature he was well acquainted, is therefore the debt of Italian literature as a whole.  Had not the troubadours developed their theory of courtly love, with its influence upon human nature, we cannot say what course early Italian literature might have run.  Moreover, the troubadours provided Italy and other countries also with perfect models of poetical form.  The sonnet, the terza rima and any other form used by Dante are of Provencal origin.  And what is true of Dante and his Beatrice is no less true of Petrarch and his Laura and of many another who may be sought in histories specially devoted to this subject.

CHAPTER VIII [109]

THE TROUBADOURS IN SPAIN

The South of France had been connected with the North of Spain from a period long antecedent to the first appearance of troubadour poetry.  As early as the Visigoth period, Catalonia had been united to Southern France; in the case of this province the tie was further strengthened by community of language.  On the western side of the Pyrenees a steady stream of pilgrims entered the Spanish peninsula on their way to the shrine of St James of Compostella in Galicia; this road was, indeed, known in Spain as the “French road.”  Catalonia was again united with Provence by the marriage of Raimon Berengar III. with a Provencal heiress in 1112.  As the counts of Barcelona and the kings of Aragon held possessions in Southern France, communications between the two countries were naturally frequent.

We have already had occasion to refer to the visits of various troubadours to the courts of Spain.  The “reconquista,” the reconquest of Spain from the Moors, was in progress during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and various crusade poems were written by troubadours [110] summoning help to the Spaniards in their struggles.  Marcabrun was the author of one of the earliest of these, composed for the benefit of Alfonso VIII. of Castile and possibly referring to his expedition against the Moors in 1147, which was undertaken in conjunction with the kings of Navarre and Aragon.  The poem is interesting for its repetition of the word lavador or piscina, used as an emblem of the crusade in which the participants would be cleansed of their sins.[32]

  Pax in nomine Domini! 
  Fetz Marcabrus los motz e.l so. 
      Aujatz que di: 
  Cum nos a fait per sa doussor,
  Lo Seignorius celestiaus
  Probet de nos un lavador
  C’ane, fors outramar, no.n’ fon taus,
  En de lai deves Josaphas: 
  E d’aquest de sai vos conort.

“Pax, etc.,—–­Marcabrun composed the words and the air.  Hear what he says.  How, by his goodness, the Lord of Heaven, has made near us a piscina, such as there never was, except beyond the sea, there by Josaphat, and for this one near here do I exhort you.”