Note 131 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

The Provençal literature, further, was from the first influenced by the culture of the Saracens,131 who held Sicily and Calabria in the ninth and tenth centuries, and had held part of Languedoc itself for a few years in the eighth. On the passing of the duchy of Provence to Raymond Berenger, Count of Barcelona, at the end of the eleventh century, not only were the half-Saracenized Catalans mixed with the Provençals, but Raymond and his successors freely introduced the arts and science of the Saracens into their dominion.132 In the Norman kingdom of Sicily too the Saracen influence was great even before the time of Frederick II; and thence it reached afresh through Italy to Provence,133 carrying with it everywhere, by way of poetry, an element of anti-clerical and even of anti-Christian rationalism.134 Though this spirit was not that of the Cathari and Waldenses, yet the fact that the latter strongly condemned the Crusades135 was a point in common between them and the sympathizers with Saracen culture. And as the tolerant Saracen schools of Spain or the Christian schools of the same region, which copied their curriculum,136 were in that age resorted to by youth from each of the countries of western Europe for scientific teaching137—all the latest medical and most other scientific knowledge being in their hands—the influence of such culture must have been peculiarly strong in Provence.138