All the world over the history of early literatures is identical. With the Greeks the minstrel attains at last an important post in the chieftain's train. Seated on a high chair inlaid with silver, he entertains the guests, or guards the wife of Agamemnon, his patron and his friend. Just so does Phemios sing amid the suitors of Penelope. It was not always thus. Bentley has told us in his pointed way that "poor Homer in those circumstances and early times had never such aspiring thoughts" as mankind and everlasting fame; and that "he wrote a sequel of songs and rhapsodies to be sung by himself for small earnings and good cheer, at festivals, and other days of merriment." This rise and fall occurred in Spain as elsewhere. For her early trovadores or juglares, as for Demodokos in the Odyssey, and as for Fergus MacIvor's sennachie, a cup of wine sufficed. "Dat nos del vino si non tenedes dinneros," says the juglar who sang the Cid's exploits: "Give us wine, if you have no money." Gonzalo de Berceo, the first Castilian writer whose name reaches us, is likewise the first Castilian to use the word trovador in his Loores de Nuestra Señora (The Praises of Our Lady):
"Aun merced te pido por el tu trobador."
(Thy favour I implore for this thy troubadour.)
But, though a priest and a trovador proud of his double office, Berceo claims his wages without a touch of false shame. In his Vida del glorioso Confesor Sancto Domingo de Silos he proves the overlapping of his functions by styling himself the saint's juglar; and in the opening of the same poem he vouches for it that his song "will be well worth, as I think, a glass of good wine":
"Bien valdrá, commo creo, un vaso de bon vino."
As popularity grew, modesty disappeared. The trovador, like the rest of the world, failed under the trials of prosperity. He became the curled darling of kings and nobles, and haggled over prices and salaries in the true spirit of "our eminent tenor." In a rich land like France he was given horses, castles, estates; in the poorer Spain he was fain to accept, with intermittent grumblings, embroidered robes, couches, ornaments—"muchos paños é sillas é guarnimientos nobres." He was spoon-fed, dandled, pampered, and sedulously ruined by the disastrous good-will of his ignorant betters. These could not leave Ephraim alone: they too must wed his idols. Alfonso the Learned enlisted in the corps of trovadores, as Alfonso II. of Aragón had done before him; and King Diniz of Portugal followed the example. To pose as a trovador became in certain great houses a family tradition. The famous Constable, Álvaro de Luna, composes because his uncle, Don Pedro, the Archbishop of Toledo, has preceded him in the school. Grouped round the commanding figure of the Marqués de Santillana stand the rivals of his own house-top: his grandfather, Pedro González de Mendoza; his father, the Admiral Diego Furtado de Mendoza, a picaroon poet, spiteful, brutal, and witty; his uncle, Pedro Vélez de Guevara, who turns you a song of roguery or devotion with equal indifference and mastery. Santillana's is "a numerous house, with many kinsmen gay"; still, in all save success, his case typifies a dominant fashion.
In the society of clerkly magnates the trovador's accomplishments developed; and the equipped artist was expected to be master of several instruments, to be pat with litanies of versified tales, and to have Virgil at his finger-tips. Schools were founded where aspirants were taught to trobar and fazer on classic principles, and the breed multiplied till trovador and juglar possessed the land. The world entire—tall, short, old, young, nobles, serfs—did nought but make or hear verses, as that trovador errant, Vidal de Besalu, records. It may be that Poggio's anecdote of a later time is literally true: that a poor man, absorbed in Hector's story, paid the spouter to adjourn the catastrophe from day to day till, his money being spent, he was forced to hear the end with tears.
Troubadouring became at last a pestilence no less mischievous than its successor knight-errantry, and its net was thrown more widely. Alfonso of Aragón led the way with a celebrated Provençal ballad, wherein he avers that "not snow, nor ice, nor summer, but God and love are the motives of my song":
"Mas al meu chan neus ni glatz
No m'ajuda, n'estaz,