In vain we ask ourselves how much all this fighting and plundering left standing of the institutions of the country, and how far it destroyed them. Later we find the cities governed by elected magistrates under the name of “consuls,” while similar magistrates in the French towns outside of Languedoc go by other titles. At first blush this seems to suggest that the Roman municipal organization had been kept up. But whether or not this is true, we cannot tell. The weighty opinion of Brutails is against the idea of continuity. He makes the point that in Roussillon no title deed reposing on any right of ownership before the Mohammedan invasion has come down to us. He reminds us that Charlemagne’s father and grandfather when driving out the Saracen pillaged the country quite as heartily as any misbeliever. Still, the Roussillon of which he writes was the last foothold of the Saracen in Gaul, whereas Toulouse, as we have seen, was never theirs. Therefore the question remains doubtful. The sudden eleventh century rise out of the sleepy Dark Ages into the true Middle Ages shows us the Counts of Toulouse among the greatest lords in Europe. The office had become hereditary around the middle of the ninth century, about the same time as did so many of the imperial offices. Count Raymond IV, sixth in descent from the first Count who had handed down Toulouse to his son, was the richest of the chiefs that took the Cross for the First Crusade. Already, between the “Provençal” southerners and the North French who were still called simply “French,” there was bad feeling, at least on the part of the latter. A “French” chronicler seems to lump Burgundians, Auvergnats, Gascons, and “Goths” (that is, men from the Rhône-Pyrenees coast plain) all together under the name of “Provençals,” and says that they excelled in nosing out foodstuffs, and were accordingly very useful in times of famine, but had little stomach for fighting. The antagonism is significant. Whether it was justified or not is another matter; the accusation of cowardice does not clearly appear in the records of the fighting, and does not seem to have affected Raymond’s position. One fancies that, in such an age, his riches would not have kept him among the half-dozen leaders of the Crusade had his eleventh century Provençals been really notorious cowards. Certainly the North Frenchman’s prejudice against the “meridional” as a soldier remains to this day. Even before the Counts of Toulouse appear as one of the richest families in Europe, we can trace the beginning of the troubadour poetry. It is probably the most distinctive contribution by the lands, now Southern France, to the world’s history. The word troubadour to-day means a poet of lyric love. The twelfth century was its golden age, although we can just hear its notes beginning in the eleventh, and dying away in the thirteenth.