confronts God not with the customary humility, but as one power confronts the other.  “I will write a new poem, and on the day of the Last Judgment I will read it to Him who has created me from nothing.  If He should condemn me to everlasting damnation, I will say to Him:  Lord, have mercy on me, for I have always striven against the wicked world,” (the troubadour here alludes to his many polemic poems) “and save me from the torments of hell.  The heavenly host will marvel at my speech.  And I shall say to God that He sins against His creatures if he delivers them into the hands of the devil.  Rather let Him drive away the devils, for then He will win more souls and all the world will be blessed....  I will not despair of Thee and therefore Thou must forgive my sins and save my soul and my heart.  If I had not been born I should not have sinned.  It would be a great wrong and a sin if Thou didst condemn me to burn in hell everlastingly, for truly I may accuse Thee of having sent me a thousand evils for one blessing.”

Most terrible was the punishment inflicted upon Provence by Innocent III.  That highly intellectual pope realised that he was faced by a revival of the true religious instinct from which the authority of the Church had far more to fear than from all sultans and emirs put together.  The system of absolute, immutable values was threatened with destruction.  In the year 1208 the Spanish nobleman Dominicus Guzman founded the order of the Dominicans and the Inquisition, which invaded Provence together with the papal army supported by France for political reasons.  Half a million men were butchered in order to crush the spirit understood by a few hundreds at most; one stake was kindled by the other; in the memory of man no greater sacrifice to tradition and dogma had ever been made.  Simon de Montfort, the head of the expedition, sent the following laconic report to the pope:  “We spared neither sex nor age nor name, but slew all with the edge of the sword.”

The troubadours bewailed the desolate country, the beauty that was no more.  Montanhagol, although greatly intimidated by the Inquisition, wrote a long poem on the subject, and the otherwise unknown Bernard Sicard de Marvajols laments: 

     Oh!  Toulouse and Provence,
     And thou, land of Agence,
     Carcassonne and Beziers! 
     As once I beheld you—­as I behold you to-day!

Jacob of Vitry, a cultured French prelate, took a different view.  He inveighed against the “foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters.”  “Such vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge of idle talk.”  A reconciliation of the two worlds was impossible.