Literature followed the direction of politics and law. The use of the vernacular tongue spread as, side by side with the Latinised culture of the clergy and the popular epics that had flourished at least since Barbarossa’s days, the lay nobles and knights developed a literary medium of their own. [Sidenote: The Minnesinger and the Romancers.] The early part of the thirteenth century was the great period of the Minnesinger, the knightly poets of love, whose polished and spontaneous lyrics, inspired by the Troubadours of the Langue d’oc, celebrated chivalrous devotion to beauty and romantic affection in terms that showed how far society had outgrown the rudeness of the Dark Ages. Side by side with them was the great school of romancers, influenced by North-French models, who told to German ears the romances of Charlemagne and Arthur. Lyrists like the Tyroler Walter von der Vogelweide, and epic poets like Wolfram of Eschenbach and Gottfried of Strassburg, found their best welcome at the courts of the more cultured princes, such as Frederick of Austria and, above all, Hermann of Thuringia, whose castle of the Wartburg, dominating his town of Eisenach, has an almost legendary celebrity in their history. Little as he was in their land, Frederick himself did not neglect to show his favour to the German poets. But the fact that the impulse that inspired so much of their work came from France showed that the Germany of the later Hohenstaufen was not only losing its primacy in politics, but failed even to gain the headship in thought and art. The German builders of Frederick’s age continued to construct their churches on Romanesque lines, and the ‘French style’ of Gothic only came in very slowly and partially. The fact that Germany possessed no university indicated her subordinate position in the world of thought. Though one of the strongest of the thirteenth century scholastics, Albert the Great, was a German, more of his work was accomplished at Paris than at Cologne. [Sidenote: The Expansion of Germany in the North and East.]