and profound thought of which the human mind is capable, were pressed into her service.  Independent thought was heresy, and the death of every heretic became a new fetter which bound the intellect of man.  But about the year 1100, when the mighty edifice was complete, and the pope and his bishops looked down upon kings and emperors and counted them their vassals, when the barbaric peoples which made up the population of Europe had been sufficiently schooled and educated in the new direction, a longing for something new, a yearning for art, for poetry, for beauty, began to stir the hearts of men and women.  It found expression in the ideal of chivalry, the Holy Sepulchre and the Holy Grail, and suddenly love, bursting out in a brilliant flame, shed its radiance on the sordid relationship which had hitherto existed between the sexes, and transfigured it.  Woman, the despised, to whom at the Council of Macon a soul had been denied, all at once became a queen, a goddess.  The drudge, the patiently suffering wife, were things of the past.  A new ideal had been set up and men worshipped it with bended knees.

     “She shines on us as God shines on his angels,”

sang Guinicelli.

It was in a small country in the South of France, in Provence, that the new spirit was born.  The troubadours, wandering from castle to castle, sang the praise of love, genuine love, the earlier ones without admixture either of speculation or metaphysic.  The dogma that pure love was its own reward inasmuch as it made men perfect, was framed later on.

     “I cannot sin when I am in her mind,”

wrote Guirot Riquier, and Dante, in the “Vita Nuova,” calls his beloved mistress “the destroyer of all evil and the queen of all virtues.”  The monk Matfre Ermengau, who wrote a text-book on love, says: 

     Love makes good men better,
     And the worst man good.

The later troubadours drew a much sharper distinction between spiritual and sensual love.  The latter was regarded as degrading and base (at least in principle) and woe to the man who held, or rather, avowed, another opinion.  His reward was the contempt of every man and woman of culture.  “I ask no more of my mistress than that she should suffer me to serve her,” protested Bernart de Ventadour.

It goes without saying that, in spite of this high ideal, sensuality flourished undiminished, and a troubadour who loudly sang the praise of chastity and blatantly professed his entire disinterestedness in the service of his mistress, did not see the least inconsequence in carrying on a dozen intrigues at the same time with other women.  Sordello, one of the best known poets of this period, was charged by a contemporary with having changed his mistress over a hundred times, and he himself, impudently bragging, proclaims that

     None can resist me; all the frowning husbands
     Shall not prevent me to embrace their wives,
     If I so wish....