Duarte Nunez de Leam in 1585 says of King Dinis that _extant hodie eius carmina_. Antonio de Vasconcellos in 1621 declares that time has carried them away: _obliviosa praeripuit vetustas_. A few vague allusions (as that of Sá de Miranda concerning the echoes of Provençal song) were all that was vouchsafed in Portugal to the _Cancioneiro_, although prominent Portuguese men of letters--as Sá de Miranda, André de Resende, Damião de Goes--travelled in Italy and met there Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who had probably owned the _Cancioneiros_ (copies by an Italian hand of a Portuguese original) acquired by Angelo Colocci; yet at this very time Colocci (†1549) was eagerly indexing and annotating the _Cancioneiros_ in Rome. It is this Portuguese neglect and indifference to the things of Portugal which explains the survival of the _cossantes_ only in Rome while the more solemn and less indigenous poems of the _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_ remained in the land of their birth. A fuller account of the Portuguese _Cancioneiros_, with the fascinating and complicated question of their descent and interrelations, will be found in the _Grundriss_ (pp. 199-202) and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos’ edition of the _Cancioneiro da Ajuda_ (vol. ii, pp. 180-288).[69] When the poetry of the troubadours flourished in Provence Portugal was scarcely a nation. The first Provençal poet, Guilhaume, Comte de Poitou (1087-1127), precedes by nearly a century Sancho I (1154-1211), second King of Portugal, who wrote poems and married the Princess Dulce of Aragon; and the Gascon Marcabrun, the first foreign poet to refer to Portugal, in his poems _Al prim comens del ivernaill_ and _Emperaire per mi mezeis_, in the middle of the twelfth century, spoke not of her poetry but of her warrior deeds: _la valor de Portegal_. Gavaudan similarly refers at the end of the twelfth century to the Galicians and Portuguese among other (Castille, &c.) barriers against the ‘black dogs’ (the Moors). It was in Spain that the Portuguese had opportunity of meeting Provençal poets. The Peninsula in the thirteenth century was, like Greece of old, divided into little States and Courts, each harbouring exiles and refugees from neighbouring States. Civil strife or the death of a king in Portugal would scatter abroad a certain number of noblemen on the losing side, who would thus come into contact with the troubadours as Provençal poetry spread to the Courts of Catalonia and Aragon, Navarre, Castille and Leon. The first King of Portugal, although a prince of the House of Burgundy, held his kingdom in fief to Leon, and all the early kings were in close touch with Leon and Castille. Fernando III, King of Castille and Leon (St. Ferdinand), was a devoted lover of poetry, and his son Alfonso X gathered at his _cort sen erguelh e sen vilania_ a galaxy of talented troubadours, Provençal and Galician. Portugal came into more direct touch with France in other ways, but the influence might have been