Toulouse they never could take. Once they raided up the Rhône and Saône and burned Autun, but with Toulouse in Christian hands they could never hope to do much with the central Rhône valley. It was the successful defence of Toulouse, quite as much as the victory of Charles Martel, that checked their greatest effort in the familiar year 732. Coming over the west central Pyrenees, they turned north-east to attack Toulouse, compelled (like Wellington in 1814) to deal with such a centre of population and communications in order to secure their right flank for a move northward. So that when Toulouse held out, their stroke which took Bordeaux and failed against Charles Martel near Poitiers, was no longer a regular campaign, but merely a plundering raid on a great scale.
It is worth insisting on the resistance of Toulouse to the Mohammedan invasions in order to emphasize the importance of the town. But although the infidel could not take Toulouse, he held Narbonne, eighty miles away, for forty years. He was in Saragossa for just over four hundred years until 1119, and Saragossa, the great town and road centre south of the Pyrenees (corresponding to Toulouse to the north of them), is only 250 miles from Toulouse as the crow flies. Sometimes, from either city, the crest of the mountain chain can be seen. The two faced one another, Toulouse as the untaken pivot of the Christian defence, Saragossa as the bastion of the long, but finally unsuccessful, defence of Islam. For about the same length of time as that which separates Americans of 1920 from the death of Christopher Columbus, Saragossa stood for Asia in the face of Christian Europe.
Naturally, Languedoc felt the Moslem influence in every sort of way. The other two foes of the Dark Ages, the Viking and the Magyar, appear and ravage the country but leave no trace except ruins. Alone of the three the Mohammedan remained long close by, and he differed from the other two in that he knew that cities were meant to live in, as well as to burn, and in that he had ideas of a sort of his own. It was too much trouble to keep fighting him all the time, and, in the intervals of peace, his ideas sifted in through the intercourse, north and south, over the border. In his train, as it were, came also the Jew; already, in the early eighth century, an archbishop of Lyons was troubled by the “aggressive prosperity” of Jews in Southern Gaul.
In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell. The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity. He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen, was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful.
The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade. Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to lump Burgundians, Auvergnats, Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of “Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs, and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day.
Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love.
The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.
The language of the troubadour poetry was the “langue d’oc” (as opposed to the North French “langue d’oïl” or “langue d’oui”). It was spoken over a stretch of country far more extensive than was later the province of Languedoc. Thus there were troubadours in the central mountain mass of Auvergne and in the broad Atlantic coastal plain from the Pyrenees up to the Loire. Nevertheless, Toulouse remained its centre.
The first thing that strikes its readers is the familiarity of many of its rhythms. The Greek and Latin classic rhythms have to be learnt. The “Song of Roland,” with all its power, strikes uncouthly on the modern ear. But the troubadour poetry, after seven centuries, sings itself as if it had been written yesterday, in such stanzas as this of Bernard de Ventadour:—
“Quan la douss avra venta