The chief service of the Hohenstaufens to Germany lay in their direct and generous encouragement of art, learning and literature. They took up the work commenced by Charlemagne and so disastrously thwarted by his son Ludwig the Pious, and in the course of a hundred years they developed what might be called a golden age of architecture and epic poetry, so strongly does it contrast with the four centuries before and the three succeeding it. The immediate connection between Germany and Italy, where the most of Roman culture had survived and the higher forms of civilization were first restored, was in this single respect a great advantage to the former country. We cannot ascertain how many of the nobler characteristics of knighthood, in that age, sprang from the religious spirit which prompted the Crusades, and how many originated from intercourse with the refined and high-spirited Saracens; both elements, undoubtedly, tended to revive the almost forgotten love of poetry in the German race. [Sidenote: 1270. GERMAN EPIC POEMS.] When the knights of Provence and Italy became as proud of their songs as of their feats of arms; when minstrels accompanied the court of Frederick II. and the Emperor himself wrote poems in rivalry with them; when the Duke of Austria and the Landgrave Hermann of Thuringia invited the best poets of the time to visit them and received them as distinguished guests, and when wandering minstrels and story-tellers repeated their works in a simpler form to the people everywhere, it was not long before a new literature was created. Walter von der Vogelweide, who accompanied Frederick II. to Jerusalem, wrote not only songs of love and poems in praise of Nature, but satires against the Pope and the priesthood. Godfrey of Strasburg produced an epic poem describing the times of king Arthur of the Round Table, and Wolfram of Eschenbach, in his "Parcival," celebrated the search for the Holy Grail; while inferior poets related the histories of Alexander the Great, the Siege of Troy, or Charlemagne's knight, Roland. Among the people arose the story of Reynard the Fox, and a multitude of fables; and finally, during the thirteenth century, was produced the celebrated _Nibelungenlied_, or Song of the Nibelungen, wherein traditions of Siegfried of the Netherlands, Theodoric the Ostrogoth and Attila with his Huns are mixed together in a powerful story of love, rivalry and revenge. The most of these poems are written in a Suabian dialect, which is now called the "Middle (or Mediæval) High-German."