Everywhere in Europe, during the period we have just gone over, the courts of the different sovereigns were the principal centres of refinement and civilization. From accidental circumstances, this was peculiarly the case in Spain, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the throne of Castile, or within its shadow, we have seen a succession of such poets and prose-writers as Alfonso the Wise, Sancho, his son, Don John Manuel, his nephew, and the Chancellor Ayala, to say nothing of Saint Ferdinand, who preceded them all, and who, perhaps, gave the first decisive impulse to letters in the centre of Spain and at the North.[164] [164] Alfonso el Sabio says of his father, St. Ferdinand: “And, moreover, he liked to have men about him who knew how to make verses (_trobar_) and sing, and Jongleurs, who knew how to play on instruments. For in such things he took great pleasure, and knew who was skilled in them and who was not.” (Setenario, Paleographía, pp. 80-83, and p. 76.) See, also, what is said hereafter, when we come to speak of Provençal literature in Spain, Chap. XVI. But the literature produced or encouraged by these and other distinguished men, or by the higher clergy, who, with them, were the leaders of the state, was by no means the only literature that then existed within the barrier of the Pyrenees. On the contrary, the spirit of poetry was, to an extraordinary degree, abroad throughout the whole Peninsula, so far as it had been rescued from the Moors, animating and elevating all classes of its Christian population. Their own romantic history, whose great events had been singularly the results of popular impulse, and bore everywhere the bold impress of the popular character, had breathed into the Spanish people this spirit; a spirit which, beginning with Pelayo, had been sustained by the appearance, from time to time, of such heroic forms as Fernan Gonzalez, Bernardo del Carpio, and the Cid. At the point of time, therefore, at which we are now arrived, a more popular literature, growing directly out of the enthusiasm which had so long pervaded the whole mass of the Spanish people, began naturally to appear in the country, and to assert for itself a place, which, in some of its forms, it has successfully maintained ever since.