In music alone the Heart of Europe has done more, and at different times, than any similar area. While the troubadours of the twelfth century came into existence in the sunny lands of Languedoc, it was in Aquitaine, Champagne, and Flanders that the trouvères developed the norm of the troubadours “into something rich and strange,” and under the Countess Marie of Champagne created that beautiful and potent fiction of “courteous love,” which had issue in so many exquisite phases of human character and made possible a great school of romantic poets. They, under the leadership of Chretien de Troyes, made for the Countess Marie, out of the rude elements that had come from England and Wales through Brittany, the great poems and romances of King Arthur and his knights. The greatest of the trouvères was Adam de la Hâle and he was born in Arras in the year 1240. Long before him, however, Gottfried of Strasbourg, a contemporary of Chretien de Troyes, had made of the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere one of the deathless poems of the world, as Wolfram von Essenbach of Bavaria was to create its great counterpart from the story of Parsifal. Very slowly in the meantime music had been working out its wonderful growth from the classical models of SS. Ambrose and Gregory intermingled with the instinctive folk-music of the south, and in the fourteenth century the leadership fell full into the hands of Flanders, where monks and laymen set themselves to the congenial task of building up a new and richer music on polyphonic lines. Brother Hairouet, who was at work about 1420; Binchois, born near Mons and died in 1460; Dufay, born in Hainault and trained in the cathedral at Cambrai, were all, together with the English Dunstable, potent leaders in the great work, laying well the foundations on which a few centuries later was to be erected the vast and magnificent superstructure of Bach and his successors. In the second period, that of the close of the fifteenth century, Antwerp became the centre, Jean de Okeghem, of Termonde, the leader in the intellectualising of music and the establishing it on methodical lines, while in the third period, of the end of the fifteenth and the beginning of the following century, Josquin des Pres led the course back toward a purer beauty, though through modes that were increasingly clever in their elaborate virtuosity. After this the lead passed across the Rhine, with memorable results a century later, when the great cycle, from Bach to Brahms, rounded itself into a perfect ring.