Before entering upon that, it is necessary to say something of the conditions which the “new poetry” and the influence of the Renaissance found before them when they began to influence Spain. The fifteenth century had not been barren of literature. King John II. (1407-1454) had collected round him a school of Court poets whose chief was Juan de Mena. Although the last representatives of this school resisted the innovations of Boscan and Garcilaso as unpatriotic, it was itself entirely foreign in origin--being, in truth, little more than an echo of Provençal and early Italian poetry. Juan de Mena, the Prince of Poets of his time, wrote long allegorical poems in imitation of Dante, and was perhaps not uninfluenced by the French _rhétoriqueurs_. Indeed the earlier leaders of the school made no secret of their debt. The Marquis of Santillana, a contemporary of King John, candidly says, in a letter to the Constable of Portugal, that he sought the origin of poetry in the _Gai Saber_ of Provence. The troubadours, when driven from France, had found refuge in the dominions of Aragon, and had there given rise to a school of imitators. The connection of Aragon with Italy was close. Dante found translators, and Petrarch imitators, among the Catalan poets of Valencia, and from thence their influence spread to Castile. Juan del Encina, who in 1496 prefixed a brief _Ars Poetica_ to one of those collections of lyric verse called _Cancioneros_, and who was himself a poet of the Court school, confessed that he and his brother verse-writers had conveyed largely from the earlier Italians. Moreover, he made this the main ground of their claim to be considered poets. It was not till the next century, and until the last representatives of this school found themselves opposed by the Italian influence, that they began to claim to be essentially Spanish. [SN: _Spanish verse._]