They were beginning to discourage laymen from reading the Old Testament and finally, during the twelfth century, promulgated that famous order by which all clergymen were henceforth condemned to a state of celibacy. Not to forget the deep impression which these Persian ideals of abstinence were soon to make upon one of the greatest leaders of spiritual reform, causing that most lovable of men, good Francis of Assisi, to establish a new monastic order of such strict Manichaean purity that it rightly earned him the title of the Buddha of the West. But when these high and noble ideals of voluntary poverty and humility of soul began to filter down to the common people, at the very moment when the world was filled with the din of yet another war between emperor and pope, when foreign mercenaries, bearing the banners of the cross and the eagle, were fighting each other for the most valuable bits of territory along the Mediterranean shores, when hordes of Crusaders were rushing home with the ill-gotten plunder they had taken from friend and enemy alike, when abbots lived in luxurious palaces and maintained a staff of courtiers, when priests galloped through the morning’s mass that they might hurry to the hunting breakfast, then indeed something very unpleasant was bound to happen, and it did. Little wonder that the first symptoms of open discontent with the state of the Church made themselves felt in that part of France where the old Roman tradition of culture had survived longest and where civilization had never been quite absorbed by barbarism. You will find it on the map. It is called the Provence and consists of a small triangle situated between the Mediterranean, the Rhone and the Alps. Marseilles, a former colony of the Phoenicians, was and still is its most important harbor and it possessed no mean number of rich towns and villages. It had always been a very fertile land and it enjoyed an abundance of sunshine and rain. While the rest of medieval Europe still listened to the barbaric deeds of hairy Teuton heroes, the troubadours, the poets of the Provence, had already invented that new form of literature which in time was to give birth to our modern novel. Furthermore, the close commercial relations of these Provençals with their neighbors, the Mohammedans of Spain and Sicily, were making the people familiar with the latest publications in the field of science at a time when the number of such books in the northern part of Europe could be counted on the fingers of two hands. In this country, the back-to-early-Christianity movement had begun to make itself manifest as early as the first decade of the eleventh century.