The earliest troubadour known to us is William IX, Count of Poitiers (1071-1127) who led an army of thirty thousand men to the unfortunate crusade of 1101. He lived an adventurous and often an unedifying life, and seems to have been a jovial sensualist caring little what kind of reputation he might obtain in the eyes of the world about him. William of Malmesbury gives an account of him which is the reverse of respectable. His poems, of which twelve survive, are, to some extent, a reflection of this character, and present a mixture of coarseness and delicate sentiment which are in strangely discordant contrast. His versification is of an early type; the principle of tripartition, which became predominant in troubadour poetry at a later date, is hardly perceptible in his poems. The chief point of interest in them is the fact that their comparative perfection of form implies a long anterior course of development for troubadour poetry, while we also find him employing, though in undeveloped form, the chief ideas which afterwards became commonplaces among the troubadours. The half mystical exaltation inspired by love is already known to William IX. as _joi_, and he is [42] acquainted with the service of love under feudal conditions. The conventional attitudes of the lady and the lover are also taken for granted, the lady disdainful and unbending, the lover timid and relying upon his patience. The lady is praised for her outward qualities, her "kindly welcome, her gracious and pleasing look" and love for her is considered to be the inspiration of nobility in the lover. But these ideas are not carried to the extravagant lengths to which later poets pushed them; William's sensual leanings are enough to counterbalance any tendency to such exaggeration. The conventional opening of a love poem by a description of spring is also in evidence; in short, the commonplaces, the technical language and formulae of later Provençal lyrics were in existence during the age of this first troubadour. Next in point of time is the troubadour Cercamon, of whom we know very little; his poems, as we have them, seem to fall between the years 1137 and 1152; one of them is a lament upon the death of William X. of Aquitaine, the son of the notorious Count of Poitiers, and another alludes to the marriage of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the daughter of William X. According to the Provençal biography he was the instructor of a more interesting and original troubadour Marcabrun, whose active life [43] extended from 1150 to 1195. Many of his poems are extremely obscure; he was one of the first to affect the _trobar clus_. He was also the author of violent invectives against the passion of love-- Que anc non amet neguna Ni d'autra no fon amatz-- "Who never loved any woman nor was loved of any." This aversion to the main theme of troubadour poetry is Marcabrun's most striking characteristic.