Furthermore, the appearance of the troubadour poetry in Southern Gaul is still another fact proving that the Dark Ages were not a murder but a sleep. The foolish historians of the last generation who attributed the vigour and the chivalric romance of the Middle Ages to an infusion of “Teutonic” blood, got a hard knock when Belloc[7] noted that after the Dark Ages a comparatively high civilization expressing itself in poetry full of the “romantic” idealization of woman arose in precisely one of the districts least affected by the handfuls of barbarian auxiliary troops of the fifth and sixth century. The soul of Europe was not moulded anew by the barbarians of the northern forests. That soul fell asleep, as it were, from weariness, and then having slept, it awoke and sang. The courtly fashion set by the troubadours overspread Christendom. Indeed, it became a characteristic of the later twelfth century, as we saw in the last chapter. Treitschke has a lively passage on the “chivalrous, polished” time of the Hohenstaufen in Germany, “the age of gallantry and the Minnesingers, quite distinctly feminine in its universal attempt to adorn itself with womanly graces,”[8] in contrast to the harsher time which had preceded it. But the fact that the new fashion so quickly became European must not blind us to the fact that it began in Languedoc. The troubadour poetry is already fully developed in William Count of Poitiers and Duke of Aquitaine, who was born in 1071. The first Hohenstaufen king did not reign over Germany until 1138, and it was Count William’s granddaughter Eleanor, Queen to Henry II, who first brought the cultivation of Provence to England about the middle of the twelfth century. Even in the troubadours, however, the near savagery of the Dark Ages had been merely overlaid and not destroyed. Vivid memories of a time at once feeble and gross swelled up in them sometimes. One poet, that Sordello whose name Dante and Browning have combined to keep alive, when singing the death of a brave knight, amiably suggests that a long list of coward princes would do well to eat of the dead man’s heart to better their courage! The idea was familiar to our Red Indians.