After the thirteenth century, the troubadours were heard no more, and the efforts of the counts of Provence, the magistrates of Toulouse, and the kings of Arragon to awaken, their genius by the Courts of Love and the Floral Games were vain. They themselves attributed their decline to the degradation into which the jongleurs, with whom at last they were confounded, had fallen. But their art contained within itself a more immediate principle of decay in the profound ignorance of its professors. They had no other models than the songs of the Arabians, which perverted their taste. They made no attempt at epic or dramatic poetry; they had no classical allusions, no mythology, nor even a romantic imagination, and, deprived of the riches of antiquity, they had few resources within themselves. The poetry of Provence was a beautiful flower springing up on a sterile soil, and no cultivation could avail in the absence of its natural nourishment. From the close of the twelfth century the language began to decline, and public events occurred which hastened its downfall, and reduced it to the condition of a provincial dialect. Among the numerous sects which sprang up in Christendom during the Middle Ages, there was one which, though bearing different names at different times, more or less resembled what is now known as Protestantism; in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was called the faith of the Albigenses, as it prevailed most widely in the district of Albi. It easily came to be identified with the Provençal language, as this was the chosen vehicle of its religious services. This sect was tolerated and protected by the Court of Toulouse. It augmented its numbers; it devoted itself to commerce and the arts, and added much to the prosperity which had long distinguished the south of France. The Albigenses had lived long and peaceably side by side with the Catholics in the cities and villages; but Innocent III. sent legates to Provence, who preached, discussed, and threatened, and met a freedom of thought and resistance to authority which Rome was not willing to brook. Bitter controversy was now substituted for the amiable frivolity of the _tensons_, and theological disputes superseded those on points of gallantry. The long struggle between the poetry of the troubadours and the preaching of the monks came to a crisis; the severe satires which the disorderly lives of the clergy called forth became severer still, and the songs of the troubadours wounded the power and pride of Rome more deeply than ever, while they stimulated the Albigenses to a valiant resistance or a glorious death. A crusade followed, and when the dreadful strife was over, Provençal poetry had received its death-blow. The language of Provence was destined to share the fate of its poetry; it became identified in the minds of the orthodox with heresy and rebellion. When Charles of Anjou acquired the kingdom of Naples, he drew thither the Provençal nobility, and thus drained the