almost exclusively that of the _trouvères_ of the North had not the more generous enthusiasm of Provence penetrated across the frontier into Spain. Trade was fairly active in the thirteenth century between Portugal and England, North France and Flanders. Many of the members of the religious orders--as the Cluny Benedictines--who occupied the territory of the Moors in Portugal were Frenchmen. With foreign colonists the new towns were systematically peopled. The number of French pilgrims was such that the road to Santiago became known as the ‘French Road’. The Crusades also brought men of many languages to Portugal.[70] The Court by descent and dynastic intermarriage was cosmopolitan; but indeed the life of the whole Peninsula was cosmopolitan to an extent which tallies ill with the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of isolation and darkness. The Portuguese had already begun to show their fondness for _novedades_. Yet it was they who imposed their, the Galician, language. As the Marqués de Santillana observed and the _Cancioneiros_ prove, lyric poets throughout the Peninsula used Galician.[71] Probably the oldest surviving instance of this language in verse by a foreigner is to be found (ten lines) in a _descort_ (_descordo_) written by Raimbaud de Vaqueiras (1158-1217) at the Court of Bonifazio II of Montferrat towards the end of the twelfth century. We cannot doubt that the character and conditions of the north-west of the Peninsula had permitted a thread of lyric poetry to continue there ever since Silius Italicus had heard the youth of Galicia wailing (_ululantem_) their native songs, and that both language and literature had the opportunity to develop earlier there than in the rest of Spain. The tide of Moorish victory only gradually ebbed southward, and the warriors in the sterner country of Castille, with its fiery sun and battles and epics, would look back to the green country of Galicia as the idyllic land of song, a refuge where sons of kings and nobles could spend their minority in comparative peace. When from the ninth century Galicia became a second Holy Land its attractions and central character were immeasurably increased. Pilgrims thither from every country would return to their native land with some words of the language, and those acquainted with Provençal might note the similarity and the musical softness of Galician.[72] It is not certain that the eldest of the ten children of San Fernando, ALFONSO X (1221?-84), _el Sabio_, King of Castille and Leon, Lord of Galicia, and brother-in-law of our Edward I, passed his boyhood in Galicia. But when he was compiling a volume of poems referring to many parts of the world besides Spain, to Canterbury and Rome, Paris and Alexandria, Lisbon, Cologne, Cesarea, Constantinople, he would naturally choose Galician not only, or indeed chiefly, because it was the more graceful and pliant medium for lyric verse but because it was the most widely