Sordello, indeed, in an earlier couplet denounces St. Louis of France as "a fool"; but Sordello is a mere bilk and blackmailer with the gift of song.
Among French minstrels traversing Spain are Père Vidal, who vaunts the largesse of Alfonso VIII., and Guirauld de Calanson, who lickspittles the name of Pedro II. of Aragón. Upon them followed Guilhem Azémar, a déclassé noble, who sank to earning his bread as a common jongleur, and later on there comes a crowd of singing-quacks and booth-spouters. It is usual to lay stress upon the influx of French among the pilgrims of the Milky Way on the road to the shrine of the national St. James at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia; and it is a fact that the first to give us a record of this pious journey is Aimeric Picaud in the twelfth century, who unkindly remarks of the Basques, that "when they eat, you would take them for hogs, and when they speak, for dogs." This vogue was still undiminished three hundred years later when our own William Wey (once Fellow of Eton, and afterwards, as it seems, an Augustinian monk at Edyngdon Monastery in Wiltshire) wrote his Itinerary (1456). But though the pilgrimage to Santiago is noted as a peculiarly "French devotion" by Lope de Vega in his Francesilla (1620), it is by no means clear that the French pilgrims outnumbered those of other nations. Even if they did, this would not explain the literary predominance of France. This is not to be accounted for by the scampering flight of a horde of illiterate fakirs anxious only to save their souls and reach their homes: it is rather the natural result of a steady immigration of clerks in the suites of French bishops and princes, of French monks attracted by the spoil of Spanish monasteries, of French lords and knights and gentlemen who shared in the Crusades, and whose jongleurs, mimes, and tumblers came with them.
Explain it as we choose, the influence of France on Spain is puissant and enduring. One sees it best when the Spaniard, natural or naturalised, turns crusty. Roderic of Toledo (himself an archbishop of the Cluny clique) protests against those Spanish juglares who celebrate the fictitious victories of Charlemagne in Spain; and Alfonso the Learned bears him out by deriding the songs and fables on these mythic triumphs, since the Emperor "at most conquered somewhat in Cantabria." A passage in the Crónica General goes to show that some, at least, of the early French jongleurs sang to their audiences in French—clearly, as it seems, to a select, patrician circle. And this raises, obviously, a curious question. It seems natural to admit that in Spain (let us say in Navarre and Upper Aragón) poems were written by French trouvères and troubadours in a mixed hybrid jargon; and the very greatest of Spanish scholars, D. Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo, inclines to believe in their possible existence. There is, in L'Entrée en Espagne, a passage wherein the author declares that, besides the sham Chronicle of Turpin, his chief authorities are
"dous bons clerges Çan-gras et Gauteron,
Çan de Navaire et Gautier d'Arragon."
John of Navarre and Walter of Aragón may be, as Señor Menéndez y Pelayo suggests, two "worthy clerks" who once existed in the flesh, or they may be imaginings of the author's brain. More to the point is the fact that, unlike the typical chanson de geste, this Entrée en Espagne has two distinct types of rhythm (the Alexandrine and the twelve-syllable line), as in the Poema del Cid; and not less significant is the foreign savour of the language. All that can be safely said is that Señor Menéndez y Pelayo's theory is probable enough in itself, that it is presented with great ingenuity, that it is backed by the best authority that opinion can have, and that it is incapable of proof or disproof in the absence of texts.
But if Spain, unlike Italy, has no authentic poems in an intermediate tongue, proofs of French influence are not lacking in her earliest movements. Two of the most ancient Castilian lyrics—Razón feita d'Amor and the Disputa del Alma—are mere liftings from the French; the Book of Apolonius teems with Provençalisms, and the poem called the History of St. Mary of Egypt is so gallicised in idiom that Milá y Fontanals, a ripe scholar and a true-blue Spaniard, was half inclined to think it one of those intermediary productions which are sought in vain. At every point proofs of French guidance confront us. Anxious to buffet and outrage his father's old trovador, Pero da Ponte, Alfonso the Learned taunts him with illiteracy, seeing that he does not compose in the Provençal vein:—
"Vos non trovades como proençal."
And, for our purpose, we are justified in appealing to Portugal for testimony, remembering always that Portugal exaggerates the condition of things in Spain. King Diniz, Alfonso the Learned's nephew, plainly indicates his model when in the Vatican Cancioneiro (No. 123) he declares that he "would fain make a love-song in the Provençal manner":—
"Quer' eu, en maneyra de proençal,