Gallic Latin had already bifurcated into the _langue d'oui_ and the _langue d'oc_, though these names were not applied to the varieties till near the close of the twelfth century. Two hundred years before Roderic's overthrow a Spanish horde raided the south-west of France, and, in the corner south of the Adour, reimposed a tongue which Latin had almost entirely supplanted, and which lingered solely in the Basque Provinces and in Navarre. In the eighth century this Basque invasion was avenged. The Spaniards, concentrating in the north, vacated the eastern provinces, which were thereupon occupied by the Roussillonais, who, spreading as far south as Valencia, and as far east as the Balearic Islands, gave eastern Spain a new language. Deriving from the _langue d'oc_, Catalan divides into _plá Catalá_ and _Lemosí_—the common speech and the literary tongue. Vidal de Besalu calls his own Provençal language _limosina_ or _lemozi_, and the name, taken from his popular treatise _Dreita Maneira de Trobar_, was at first limited to literary Provençal; but endless confusion arises from the fact that when Catalans took to composing, their poems were likewise said to be written in _lengua lemosina_. The Galician, akin to Portuguese, though free from the nasal element grafted on the latter by Burgundians, is held by some for the oldest—though clearly not the most virile—form of Peninsular Romance. It was at least the first to ripen, and, under Provençal guidance, Galician verse acquired the flexibility needed for metrical effects long before Castilian; so that Castilian court-poets, ambitious of finer rhythmical results, were driven to use Galician, which is strongly represented in the _Cancionero de Baena_, and boasts an earlier masterpiece in Alfonso the Learned's _Cantigas de Santa María_, recently edited, as it deserved, after six centuries of waiting, by that admirable scholar the Marqués de Valmar. Galician, now little more than a simple dialect, is artificially kept alive by the efforts of patriotic minor poets; but its literary influence is extinct, and the distinguished figures of the province, as Doña Emilia Pardo Bazán, naturally seek a larger audience by writing in Castilian. So, too, _bable_ is but another dialect of little account, though a poet of considerable charm, Teodoro Cuesta (1829-95), has written in it verses which his own loyal people will not willingly let die. The classification of other characteristic sub-genera—Andalucían, Aragonese, Leonese—belongs to philology, and would be, in any event, out of place in the history of a literature to which, unlike Catalan and unlike Galician, they have added nothing of importance. What befell in Italy and France befell in Spain. Partly through political causes, partly by force of superior culture, the language of a single centre ousted its rivals. As France takes its speech from Paris and the Île de France, as Florence dominates Italy, so Castile dictates her language to all the Spains.