During the latter part of the period recorded by this Chronicle, a change was taking place in the literature of which it is an important part. The troubles and confusion that prevailed in Provence, from the time of the cruel persecution of the Albigenses and the encroaching spirit of the North, which, from the reign of Philip Augustus, was constantly pressing down towards the Mediterranean, were more than the genial, but not hardy, spirit of the Troubadours could resist. Many of them, therefore, fled; others yielded in despair; and all were discouraged. From the end of the thirteenth century, their songs are rarely heard on the soil that gave them birth three hundred years before. With the beginning of the fourteenth, the purity of their dialect disappears. A little later, the dialect itself ceases to be cultivated.[524]
As might be expected, the delicate plant, whose flower was not permitted to expand on its native soil, did not long continue to flourish in that to which it was transplanted. For a time, indeed, the exiled Troubadours, who resorted to the court of James the Conqueror and his father, gave to Saragossa and Barcelona something of the poetical grace that had been so attractive at Arles and Marseilles. But both these princes were obliged to protect themselves from the suspicion of sharing the heresy with which so many of the Troubadours they sheltered were infected; and James, in 1233, among other severe ordinances, forbade to the laity the Limousin Bible, which had been recently prepared for them, and the use of which would have tended so much to confirm their language and form their literature.[525] His successors, however, continued to favor the spirit of the minstrels of Provence. Peter the Third was numbered amongst them;[526] and if Alfonso the Third and James the Second were not themselves poets, a poetical spirit was found about their persons and in their court;[527] and when Alfonso the Fourth, the next in succession, was crowned at Saragossa in 1328, we are told that several poems of Peter, the king’s brother, were recited in honor of the occasion, one of which consisted of seven hundred verses.[528]
But these are among the later notices of Provençal literature in the northeastern part of Spain, where it began now to be displaced by one taking its hue rather from the more popular and peculiar dialect of the country. What this dialect was has already been intimated. It was commonly called the Catalan or Catalonian, from the name of the country, but probably, at the time of the conquest of Barcelona from the Moors in 985, differed very little from the Provençal spoken at Perpignan, on the other side of the Pyrenees.[529] As, however, the Provençal became more cultivated and gentle, the neglected Catalan grew stronger and ruder; and when the Christian power was extended, in 1118, to Saragossa, and in 1239 to Valencia, the modifications which the indigenous vocabularies underwent, in order to suit the character and condition of the people, tended rather to confirm the local dialects than to accommodate them to the more advanced language of the Troubadours.
Perhaps, if the Troubadours had maintained their ascendency in Provence, their influence would not easily have been overcome in Spain. At least, there are indications that it would not have disappeared so soon. Alfonso the Tenth of Castile, who had some of the more distinguished of them about him, imitated the Provençal poetry, if he did not write it; and even earlier, in the time of Alfonso the Ninth, who died in 1214, there are traces of its progress in the heart of the country, that are not to be mistaken.[530] But failing in its strength at home, it failed abroad. The engrafted fruit perished with the stock from which it was originally taken. After the opening of the fourteenth century we find no genuinely Provençal poetry in Castile, and after the middle of that century it begins to recede from Catalonia and Aragon, or rather to be corrupted by the harsher, but hardier, dialect spoken there by the mass of the people. Peter the Fourth, who reigned in Aragon from 1336 to 1387, shows the conflict and admixture of the two influences in such portions of his poetry as have been published, as well as in a letter he addressed to his son;[531]—a confusion, or transition, which we should probably be able to trace with some distinctness, if we had before us the curious dictionary of rhymes, still extant in its original manuscript, which was made at this king’s command, in 1371, by Jacme March, a member of the poetical family that was afterwards so much distinguished.[532] In any event, there can be no reasonable doubt, that, soon after the middle of the fourteenth century, if not earlier, the proper Catalan dialect began to be perceptible in the poetry and prose of its native country.[533]
CHAPTER XVII.
Endeavours to revive the Provençal Spirit. — Floral Games at Toulouse. — Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia at Barcelona. — Catalan and Valencian Poetry. — Ausias March. — Jaume Roig. — Decline of this Poetry. — Influence of Castile. — Poetical Contest at Valencia. — Valencian Poets who wrote in Castilian. — Prevalence of the Castilian.
The failure of the Provençal language, and especially the failure of the Provençal culture, were not looked upon with indifference in the countries on either side of the Pyrenees, where they had so long prevailed. On the contrary, efforts were made to restore both, first in France, and afterwards in Spain. At Toulouse, on the Garonne, not far from the foot of the mountains, the magistrates of the city determined, in 1323, to form a company or guild for this purpose; and, after some deliberation, constituted it under the name of the “Sobregaya Companhia dels Sept Trobadors de Tolosa,” or the Very Gay Company of the Seven Troubadours of Toulouse. This company immediately sent forth a letter, partly in prose and partly in verse, summoning all poets to come to Toulouse on the first day of May in 1324, and there “with joy of heart contend for the prize of a golden violet,” which should be adjudged to him who should offer the best poem, suited to the occasion. The concourse was great, and the first prize was given to a poem in honor of the Madonna by Ramon Vidal de Besalú, a Catalan gentleman, who seems to have been the author of the regulations for the festival, and to have been declared a doctor of the Gay Saber on the occasion. In 1355, this company formed for itself a more ample body of laws, partly in prose and partly in verse, under the title of “Ordenanzas dels Sept Senhors Mantenedors del Gay Saber,” or Ordinances of the Seven Lords Conservators of the Gay Saber, which, with the needful modifications, have been observed down to our own times, and still regulate the festival annually celebrated at Toulouse, on the first day of May, under the name of the Floral Games.[534]
Toulouse was separated from Aragon only by the picturesque range of the Pyrenees; and similarity of language and old political connections prevented even the mountains from being a serious obstacle to intercourse. What was done at Toulouse, therefore, was soon known at Barcelona, where the court of Aragon generally resided, and where circumstances soon favored a formal introduction of the poetical institutions of the Troubadours. John the First, who, in 1387, succeeded Peter the Fourth, was a prince of more gentle manners than were common in his time, and more given to festivity and shows than was, perhaps, consistent with the good of his kingdom, and certainly more than was suited to the fierce and turbulent spirit of his nobility.[535] Among his other attributes was a love of poetry; and in 1388, he despatched a solemn embassy, as if for an affair of state, to Charles the Sixth of France, praying him to cause certain poets of the company at Toulouse to visit Barcelona, in order that they might found there an institution like their own, for the Gay Saber. In consequence of this mission, two of the seven conservators of the Floral Games came to Barcelona in 1390, and established what was called a “Consistory of the Gaya Sciencia,” with laws and usages not unlike those of the institution they represented. Martin, who followed John on the throne, increased the privileges of the new Consistory, and added to its resources; but at his death, in 1409, it was removed to Tortosa, and its meetings were suspended by troubles that prevailed through the country, in consequence of a disputed succession.
At length, when Ferdinand the Just was declared king, their meetings were resumed. Enrique de Villena—whom we must speedily notice as a nobleman of the first rank in the state, nearly allied to the blood royal, both of Castile and Aragon—came with the new king to Barcelona in 1412, and, being a lover of poetry, busied himself while there in reëstablishing and reforming the Consistory, of which he became, for some time, the principal head and manager. This was, no doubt, the period of its greatest glory. The king himself frequently attended its meetings. Many poems were read by their authors before the judges appointed to examine them, and prizes and other distinctions were awarded to the successful competitors.[536] From this time, therefore, poetry in the native dialects of the country was held in honor in the capitals of Catalonia and Aragon. Public poetical contests were, from time to time, celebrated, and many poets called forth under their influence during the reign of Alfonso the Fifth and that of John the Second, which, ending in 1479, was followed by the consolidation of the whole Spanish monarchy, and the predominance of the Castilian power and language.[537]