Unfortunately, as events were to prove, their society which still kept something of the underlying spirit of the savage, was losing the spirit of the soldier. The statement needs qualification, especially in the case of one of the greatest troubadours, Bertran de Born, who was never happy without a fight unless he was rhyming about one. But, although a striking exception he was only an exception. Even if none of the troubadour poetry had survived, we could perhaps prove that the “Provençal” was less warlike than the North Frenchman, or even than most Christians of the time, by the fact that local wars had to be fought with a larger proportion of mercenaries than was the case elsewhere; so large indeed that their roving bands became a serious “social problem,” as we shall see. Even if we assume that the high proportion of mercenaries was due to the wealth of Languedoc, still it is hard for us to imagine any twelfth-century hero of song or story, outside of Provence, who would lose himself so deeply in day dreams of his beloved as to be captured by his enemies, like Aucassin in “Aucassin and Nicolette,” without so much as striking a blow in his own defence. The evidences of the wealth and refinement of this cultivated and unwarlike society are not confined to the written records of chroniclers and poets. Their buildings prove the same thing. For combined breadth of composition and elegance of detail the porches of such churches as St. Trophimus at Arles or the great church at St. Gilles, are equalled by nothing in the Romanesque. Often their detail is exactly that of the antique world to which they looked back over the intervening lowlands of the Dark Ages. Further, we have seen that the society for which the troubadours sang was close to the Moslem, and was moved by currents Asiatic in their origin both Moslem and Jew. Moslem coins circulated freely there. The fact is proved beyond reams of learned stuff by such unconscious evidence as that of one troubadour’s simile:— “... Like a child which a man makes stop crying with a ‘marabotin’ ...” The poet does not think it necessary to stop and explain that a marabotin was a Moorish penny, and being unconscious his testimony cannot be challenged. Of the Universities, while Bologna studied law and Paris theology, Languedoc in her greatest University, that of Montpellier, studied medicine. This fact again proves her intercourse with the “Paynim,” for it is a commonplace that the Arabs of Spain were the great physicians of the Middle Ages. Saracen slaves, and negroes brought from Africa by Saracens to be slaves, continued to be held there centuries after slavery was extinct everywhere else in Christendom. As for the Jews, they were so many and so prominent that some chroniclers called Languedoc “Judea secunda.”