the troubadours, the poets and minstrels of the _langue d’oc_, though the southern tongue of the court was not the Poitevins’ native speech. [Sidenote: Toulouse.] To the east of Aquitaine the county of Toulouse became the nucleus of a sort of monarchical centralisation that, by the beginning of the twelfth century, had brought the French lands beyond the Aquitanian border, the imperial lands between the Alps and the Rhone, and the old Spanish march between the Pyrenees and the Ebro, to look to Toulouse as the source of its intellectual and almost of its political life. The lands dependent on the counts of Toulouse became emphatically the Languedoc, the region where the Romance vernacular of southern Gaul was spoken with the greatest purity and force. While the subjects of the dukes of Aquitaine had the purity of their Gascon contaminated by the Basque of the Pyrenean valleys, and the northern idiom of the lands beyond the Gironde and Dordogne, the followers of the counts of Toulouse spoke the same tongue as the Burgundian vassals of the count of Provence, or the fierce marchers ruled by the counts of Barcelona. The tongue of Oc has as much claim to be regarded as a language distinct from northern French, as northern French has to be considered separate from Italian or Spanish. It was the first Romance tongue that boasted of a strong vernacular literature, and those who spoke it were the first Romance people to attain either the luxuries or corruptions of an advanced civilisation. Its spread over southern Gaul drew a deep dividing line between northern and southern France that has not yet been blotted out. It gave the subjects of the southern feudalists, like the counts of Toulouse and the dukes of Aquitaine, a solidarity that made them almost separate nations, like the Flemings or the Bretons. Its vast expansion between the Alps and the Ebro bade fair to overleap the boundaries set by the Treaty of Verdun, and set up in those regions a well-defined nationality strong and compact enough to be a makeweight against the growing concentration of the northern French under the Capetian kings. But the civilisation of Languedoc flowered too early to produce mature fruit. We shall see how in the thirteenth century it succumbed to the ruder spirit of the north. Raymond I., the first hereditary count of Toulouse, died in 864. His successors, with whom Raymond was ever the favourite name, continued to grow in power until they had united all Languedoc early in the twelfth century. Their hereditary hostility to the dukes of Aquitaine, no less than the centrifugal tendencies of southern feudalism, which they could at best but partially counteract, prevented their authority from attaining wider limits.