I 1185-1325

§ 1 The Cossantes

Under the Moorish dominion we know that poetry was widely cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula, by high and low. At Silves in Algarve ‘almost every peasant could improvise’.[30] But the early Galician-Portuguese poetry has no relation with that of the Moors, despite certain characteristics which may seem to point to an Oriental origin. The indigenous poems of Galicia and Portugal, of which thirteenth-century examples have survived, are so remarkable, so unlike those of any other country, that they deserve to be studied apart from the Provençal imitations by the side of which they developed. Half buried in the Cancioneiros, themselves only recently discovered, these exquisite and in some ways astonishingly modern lyrics are even now not very widely known and escape the attention of many who go far afield in search of true poetry. The earliest poem dated (1189) by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos, in which Pay Soarez de Taveiroos, a nobleman of Galicia or North Portugal, addresses Maria Paez Ribeira, the lovely mistress of King Sancho I, mia sennor branca e vermelha, does not belong to these lyrics[31]; but the second earliest (1199), attributed to King Sancho I (1185-1211) himself, is one of them (C.C.B.348). This unique form of lyric requires a distinctive name, and if we adopt that used by the Marqués de Santillana’s father, Diego Furtado de Mendoza (†1404), we shall have a word well suited to convey an idea of their striking character.[32] His Spanish poem written in parallel distichs, A aquel arbol, is called a cossante.[33] In an age when all that seemed most Spanish, the Poema del Cid, for instance, or the Libro de Buen Amor, has been proved to derive in part from French sources, it is peculiarly pleasant to find a whole series of early poems which have their roots firmly planted in the soil of the Peninsula. The indigenous character of the cossantes is now well established, thanks chiefly to the skilful and untiring researches of D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos.[34] They are wild but deliciously scented single flowers which now reappear in all their freshness as though they had not lain pressed and dead for centuries in the library of the Vatican. One of the earliest is quoted by Airas Nunez (C. V. 454) and completed in Grundriss, p. 150:

What first strikes one in this is its Oriental immobility. The second distich adds nothing to the sense of the first, merely intensifying it by repetition. Neither the poetry of the trouvères of the North of France nor that of the Provençal troubadours presents any parallel. The scanty Basque literature contains nothing in this kind. But it is unnecessary to go for a parallel to China.[36] None more remarkable will be found than those contained in the books of that religion which came from the East and imposed its forms if not its spirit on the pagans of the Peninsula. Verses 8, 9 of Psalm 118 are very nearly a cossante but have no refrain. The resemblance in Psalm 136, verses 17, 18, is still more marked:

The relations between Church and people were very close if not always very friendly. The peasants maintained their ancient customs, and their pagan jollity kept overflowing into the churches to the scandal of the authorities. Innumerable ordinances later sought to check their delight in witchcraft and mummeries, feasts and funerals (the delight in the latter is still evident in Galicia as in Ireland and Wales). Men slept, ate, drank, danced, sang profane songs, and acted plays and parodies in the churches and pilgrimage shrines. The Church strove to turn their midsummer and May-day celebrations into Christian festivals, but the change was rather nominal than real. But if the priests and bishops remained spiritually, like modern politicians, shepherds without sheep, the religious services, the hymns,[37] the processions evidently affected the people. Especially was this the case in Galicia, since the great saint Santiago, who farther south (as later in India) rode into battle on a snow-white steed before the Christians, gave a more peaceful prosperity to the North-west. Pilgrims from all countries in the Middle Ages came to worship at his shrine at Santiago de Compostela. They came a motley company singing on the road,[38] criminals taking this opportunity to escape from justice, tradesmen and players, jugglers and poets making a livelihood out of the gathering throngs, as well as devout pilgrims who had ‘left alle gamys’ for their soul’s good, des pélerins qui vont chantant et des jongleurs. Thus the eyes of the whole province of Galicia as the eyes of Europe were directed towards the Church of Santiago in Jakobsland. The inhabitants of Galicia would naturally view their heaven-sent celebrity with pride and rejoice in the material gain. They would watch with eager interest the pilgrims passing along the camino francés or from the coast to Santiago, and would themselves flock to see and swell the crowds at the religious services. When we remember the frequent parodies of religious services in the Middle Ages and that the Galicians did not lag behind others in the art of mimicry,[39] we can well imagine that the Latin hymns sung in church or procession might easily form the germ of the profane cossante. A further characteristic of the cossante is that the i-sound of the first distich is followed by an a-sound in the second (ricercando ora il grave, ora l’acuto) and this too maybe traced to a religious source, two answering choirs of singers, treble and bass.[40] It is clear at least that these alternating sounds are echoes of music: one almost hears the clash of the adufe in the louçana (answering to garrida) or ramo (pinho). The words of these poems were, indeed, always accompanied by the son (= music). But if born in the Church, the cossante suffered a transformation when it went out into the world. The rhythm of many of the songs in the Cancioneiros is so obtrusive that they seem to dance out of the printed page. One would like to think that in the ears of the peasants the sound of the wheel mingled with the echo of a hymn and its refrain as they met at what was, even then, no doubt, a favourite gathering-place—the mill[41]—and thus a lyric poem became a dance-song. The cossante Solo ramo would thus proceed, sung by ‘the dancers dancing in tune’:

the first line of the third distich repeating the second line of the first (and in the same way the first line of the fifth the second line of the third), in leixa-pren (laisser prendre) corresponding evidently to the movements of the dance.[42] The love-lorn maidens danced together, the men forming a circle to look on. St. Augustine considered the dance to be a circle of which the Devil was the centre; in real life the Devil was often replaced by a tree (or by a mayo). The refrain was a notable feature of the cossante in all its phases as it went, a bailada (dance-song) from the terreiro, to become a serranilha on the hills, or at pilgrimage shrines a cantiga de romaria,[43] or a barcarola (boat-song) or alvorada (dawn-song). A marked and thoroughly popular characteristic of the cossante is its wistful sadness,[44] the soidade which is already mentioned more than once in the Cancioneiros,[45] and, born in Galicia, continued in Portugal, combined with a more garish tone under the hotter sun of the South. Thus we have the melancholy Celtic temperament, absorbed in Nature, acting on the forms suggested by an alien religion till they become vague cries to the sea, to the deer of the hills, the flower of the pine. The themes are as simple and monotonous—the monotony of snowdrops or daffodils—as the form in which they are sung. A girl in the gloom of the pine-trees mourning for her lover, the birds in the cool of the morning singing of love, the deer troubling the water of a mountain-stream, the boats at anchor, or bearing away meus amores, or gliding up the river a sabor. The amiga lingers at the fountain, she goes to wash clothes or to bathe her hair in the stream, she meets her lover and dances at the pilgrim shrine, she waits for him under the hazel-trees, she implores the waves for news of him, she watches for the boats pelo mar viir. The language is native to the soil, far more so, at least, than in the cantigas de amor and cantigas de amigo written under foreign influence. Their French or Provençal words and learned forms[46] are replaced in the cossante by forms Galician or Spanish. Despite its striking appearance to us now among sirventes senes sal in the Cancioneiro Colocci-Brancuti, it must be confessed that the early cossante of King Sancho has a somewhat meagre, vinegar aspect, and the genre could hardly have developed so successfully in the next half-century had it not been fixed in the country-side, ever ready to the hand of the poet in search of fresh inspiration. It is possible to exaggerate the effect of war on the life of the peasant. Portugal in the twelfth century was only gradually and by constant conflict winning its territory and independence. It had no fixed capital and Court at which the Provençal poets might gather. But while king and nobles and the members of the religious and military orders were engaged with the Moors to the exclusion of the Muses, so that they had no opportunity to introduce the new measures, the peasants in Galicia and Minho no doubt went on tilling the soil and singing their primitive songs. In the thirteenth century Provençal poetry flourished in Portugal, but so monotonously that it failed to kill the older lyrics, and they reacted on the imported poetry. In the trite conventions with which the latter became clothed the cossante had a new opportunity of life. Trobadores wearied by their own monotony, jograes wishing to please a patron with a novidade, had recourse to the cossante. The jogral wandering from house to house and town to town necessarily came into close touch with the peasants. Talented men among them, prompted by patrons of good taste, no doubt exercised the third requisite of a good jogral (doair’ e uoz e aprenderdes ben, C. C. B. 388)—a good memory—not only in learning his patron’s verses to recite at other houses but in remembering the songs that he caught in passing from the lips of the peasants, songs of village mirth and dance, of workers in the fields and shepherds on the hills. These, developed and adorned according to his talent, he would introduce to the Court among his motz recreamens e prazers. When Joan de Guilhade in the middle of the thirteenth century complained that os trobadores ja van para mal (C. V. 370), he might almost be referring to the fact that the stereotyped poems of the Portuguese trobadores could no longer compete with the fresh charm of the cossante. Alfonso X reproached Pero da Ponte for not singing like a Provençal but, rather, like Bernaldo de Bonaval (first half 13th c.). King Dinis in the second half of the century viewed the cossante with such favour that he wrote or collected some of the most curious and delightful that we possess. But although King Dinis set his name to a handful of the finest cossantes, most of the cossante-writers belonged to an earlier period and were men of humble birth. Of Nuno Fernandez Torneol[47] (first half 13th c.), poet and soldier, besides conventional cantigas de amor we have eight simple cossantes of which the alvorada (C. V. 242), the barcarola (C. V. 246), and C. V. 245 with its dance rhythm are especially beautiful. Pedr’ Anez Solaz[48] (early 13th c.) wrote a cossante (C. V. 415) celebrated for its refrain, lelia doura, leli leli par deus leli, in which some have seen a vestige of Basque (il = dead). Of Meendinho (first half 13th c.) we have only one poem, a cantiga de romaria (C. V. 438), but its beauty has brought him fame;[49] and another jogral, Fernand’ Esguio[50] (second half 13th c.), is remembered in the same way chiefly for C. V. 902: Vayamos, irmana. Bernaldo de Bonaval, one of the earliest Galician poets, and the jograes Pero de Veer, Joan Servando, Airas Carpancho,[51] Martin de Ginzo,[52] Lopo and Lourenço, composed some charming pilgrimage songs in the second third of the thirteenth century. This was a popular theme, but the two poets who seem to have felt most keenly the attraction of the popular poetry and to have cultivated it most successfully are Joan Zorro (fl. 1250) and Pero Meogo (fl. 1250). The cossantes of Zorro, one of the most talented of all these singers, tell of Lisbon and the king’s ships and the sea. In this series of barcarolas (C. V. 751-60) and in his delightful bailada (C. V. 761)[53] he evidently sought his inspiration in popular sources, as with equal felicity a little later did Pero Meogo,[54] whose cossantes (C. V. 789-97), each with its biblical reference to the deer of the hills (cervos do monte), are as singular as they are beautiful. Martin Codax at about the same time was singing graceful songs of the ondas do mar of Vigo (C. V. 884-90). But the real poet of the sea was the Admiral of Castille, Pay Gomez Chariño[55] (†1295). He belonged to an ancient family of Galicia, was prominent at the Courts of Alfonso X (between whose character and the sea he draws an elaborate parallel in C. A. 256) and of his son Sancho IV, played an important part in the troubled history of the time, and fought by land and sea in Andalucía, at Jaen in 1246 and Seville in 1247. On the lips of his amiga he places a touching cantiga de amigo (C. V. 424: she expresses her relief that her amigo has ceased to be almirante do mar; no longer will she listen in sadness to the wind, now her heart may sleep and not tremble at the coming of a messenger) and the two sea cossantes C. V. 401, with its plaining refrain:

—one can imagine it sung as a chanty[56]—and C. V. 429, in which she prays Santiago to bring him safely home: ‘Now in this hour Over the sea He is coming to me, Love is in flower.’ Beauty of expression and a loyal sincerity are conspicuous in his poems, as well as a certain individuality and vigour. He escaped the perils of the sea, the mui gran coita do mar (C. A. 251), but to fall by the hand of an assassin on shore. His sea lyrics are only excelled by the enchanting melody of the poem (C. V. 488) of his contemporary and fellow-countryman Roy Fernandez (second half 13th c.), who was apparently a professor at Salamanca University, Canon of Santiago, and Chaplain to Alfonso the Learned. Of the later poets Estevam Coelho, perhaps father of one of the assassins of Inés (†1355), wrote a cossante of haunting beauty (C. V. 321):

and D. Afonso Sanchez (c. 1285-1329) in C. V. 368 (Dizia la fremosinha—Ay Deus val) proved that he had inherited part of his father King Dinis’ genius and instinct for popular poetry. King Dinis, having thrown wide his palace doors to these thyme-scented lyrics, would turn again to the now musty chamber of Provençal song (C. V. 123):

The cossantes had become so familiar that Airas Nunez, of Santiago, could string them together, as it were, by the head, without troubling himself to give more than the first lines, precisely as Gil Vicente treated romances three centuries later. The reader or listener would easily complete them. His pastorela (C. V. 454) would be an ordinary imitation of a pastourelle of the trouvères[57] were it not for the five cossante fragments inserted. Riding along a stream he hears a solitary shepherdess singing and stays to listen. First she sang Solo ramo verde frolido,[58] then—as if to prove that she is a shepherdess of Arcady, not of real life—

an impassioned cry of the heart only comparable with

or that wonderful line of a wonderful poem:

Next she sang the first lines of a cossante by Nuno Fernandez Torneol (C. V. 245) with its dance refrain E pousarei solo avelanal. The refrain is identical in C. V. 245 and C. V. 454, but the distich has variations which seem to imply that Airas Nunez was not quoting Fernandez, rather that both drew from a popular source. The fourth cossante we also have complete, a lovely barcarola by Joan Zorro (C. V. 757):

Lastly she (or he), as he rides on his way, sings:

i.e. este cantar which is familiar in the villancico (Por una gentil floresta) by the Marqués de Santillana (1398-1458):

Very few, if any, of the cossantes were anonymous, which only means that modern folk-lore was unknown; it was not the fashion to collect songs from the lips of the people without ulterior purpose. A variety known as cantiga de vilãos existed, but it was deliberately composed by the trobadores and jograes.[61] A specimen is given in C. V. 1043:

No drawing-room lyric, evidently: more likely to be sung in taverns; composed perhaps by a knight like him of C. V. 965, whose songs were not fremosos e rimados. Like the Provençal poet Guilherme Figueira who mout se fetz grazir ... als ostes et als taverniers, this knight’s songs pleased ‘tailors, furriers and millers’; they had not the good taste of the tailor’s wife in Gil Vicente who sings the beautiful cantiga

The cantiga de vilãos was no such simple popular lyric, but rather a drinkers’ song, picaresquely allusive, sung by a jogral who non fo hom que saubes caber entre ‘ls baros ni entre la bona gen but sang vilmen et en gens bassas, entre gens bassas per pauc d’aver (Riquier), cantares de que la gente baja e de servil condicion se alegra (Santillana). The cossante, on the contrary, came straight from field and hill into palace and song-book. Probably many of them were composed, as they were sung, and sung dancing, by the women. The women of Galicia have always been noted for their poetical and musical talent. We read of the choreas psallentium mulierum, like Miriam, the sister of Moses, at Santiago in 1116,[63] and there is a cloud of similar witnesses. But whether any of the cossantes that we have in the Cancioneiros is strictly of the people or not, their traditional indigenous character is no longer doubtful. It would surely be a most astounding fact had the Galician-Portuguese Court poets, who in their cantigas de amor reduced Provençal poetry to a colourless insipidity, succeeded so much better with the cossantes that, while the originals from which they copied have vanished, the imitations stand out in the Portuguese Cancioneiros like crimson poppies among corn. It is remarkable, too, that of the three kinds of poem in the old Cancioneiros, satire, love song, and cossante, the first two remain in the Cancioneiro de Resende (1516), but the third has totally disappeared. The explanation is that as Court and people drew apart and the literary influence of Castille grew, the poems based on songs of the people were no longer in favour. But they continued, like the Guadiana, underground, and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has traced their occasional reappearances in poets of popular leanings, like Gil Vicente and Cristobal de Castillejo, from the thirteenth century to the present day,[64] while Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos has discovered whole cossantes sung by peasants at their work in the fields in the nineteenth century.[65] Dance or action always accompanies the cossante as it does in the danza prima of Asturias (to the words Ay un galan d’esta villa, ay un galan d’esta casa).[66] If it be objected that the songs printed by Dr. Leite de Vasconcellos are rude specimens by the side of a poem like Ay flores, ay flores do verde pinho, it should be remembered that the quadra (or perhaps one should say distich without refrain) has now replaced the cossante on the lips of the people, and that among these quatrains something of the old cossante’s charm and melancholy is still found. D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos and others have remarked that these quadras pass from mouth to mouth and are perfected in the process, smoothed and polished like a stone by the sea, and this may well have been true of the earlier cossantes.[67] The jogral who hastened to his patron with a lovely new poem was but reaping the inspiration of a succession of anonymous singers, an inspiration quickened by competition in antiphonies of song at many a pilgrimage. One singer would give a distich of a cossante, as to-day a quadra, another would take it up and return it with variations. The cossante did not always preserve its simple form, or, rather, the more complicated poems renewed themselves in its popularity. We find it as a bailada (C. V. 761), balleta (cf. C. A. 123: Se vos eu amo mais que outra ren), as cantiga de amor (C. A. 360 or 361, C. V. 657-60), cantiga de maldizer (C. V. 1026-7), or satirical alba (C. V. 1049). But these hybrid forms are not the true cossante, which is always marked by dignity, restraint, simple grace, close communion with Nature, delicacy of thought, and a haunting felicity of expression. The cossante written by King Sancho seems to indicate a natural development of the indigenous poetry. In its form it owed nothing to the poetry of Provence or North France, but its progress was perhaps quickened, and at least its perfection preserved, by the systematic cultivation of poetry introduced from abroad at a time when no middle class separated Court and peasant. The tantalizing fragments that survive in Gil Vicente’s plays show all too plainly what marvels of popular song might flower and die unknown. In spirit the original grave religious character of the cossante may in some measure have affected the new poetry. To this in part may be ascribed the monotony, the absence of particular descriptions in the cantigas de amor. In religious hymns obviously reverence would not permit the Virgin to be described in greater detail than, for example, Gil Vicente’s vague branca e colorada, and the reverence might be transferred unconsciously to poems addressed to an earthly dona. (Only in the extravagant devotional mannerisms (gongorismo ao divino) of the seventeenth century could Soror Violante do Ceo describe Christ as a galan de ojos verdes.) Dona genser qu’ieu no sai dir or la genser que sia says Arnaut de Marueil at the end of the thirteenth century. The Portuguese poet would make an end there: his lady is fairest among women, fairer than he can say. He would never go on to describe her grey eyes and snowy brow: huelhs vairs and fron pus blanc que lis. But introduced into alien and artificial forms, like mountain gentians in a garden, the monotony can no longer please. In the cantigas de amor the iteration becomes a tedious sluggishness of thought, whereas in the cossantes it is part of the music of the poem.

C. A. = Cancioneiro da Ajuda.

C. A. M. V. = Cancioneiro da Ajuda. Ed. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos. 2 vols. Halle, 1904.

C. A. S.= Fragmentos de hum Cancioneiro Inedito que se acha na Livraria do Real Collegio dos Nobres de Lisboa. Impresso á custa de Carlos Stuart, Socio da Academia Real de Lisboa. Paris, 1823.

C. A. V. = Trovas e Cantares de um Codice do XIV Seculo. Ed. Francisco Adolpho de Varnhagen. Madrid, 1849.

C. V. = Cancioneiro da Vaticana.

C. V. M. = Il Canzoniere Portoghese della Biblioteca Vaticana. Ed. Ernesto Monaci. Halle, 1875.

C. V. B. = Cancioneiro Portuguez da Vaticana. Ed. Theophilo Braga. Lisboa, 1878.

C. T. A. = Cancioneirinho das Trovas Antigas colligidas de um grande Cancioneiro da Bibliotheca do Vaticano. Ed. F. A. de Varnhagen. Vienna (1870), 2nd ed. 1872.

C. A. P. = Cantichi Antichi Portoghesi tratti dal Codice Vaticano 4803 con traduzione e note, a cura di Ernesto Monaci. Imola, 1873.

C. L. = Cantos de Ledino tratti dal grande Canzoniere portoghese della Biblioteca Vaticana. Ed. E. Monaci. Halle, 1875.

C. D. M. = Cancioneiro d’ El Rei D. Diniz, pela primeira vez impresso sobre o manuscripto da Vaticana. Ed. Caetano Lopes de Moura. Paris, 1847.

C. D. L. = Das Liederbuch des Königs Denis von Portugal. Ed. Henry R. Lang. Halle, 1894.

C. C. B. = Il Canzoniere Portoghese Colocci-Brancuti. Ed. Enrico Molteni. Halle, 1880.

C. M. = Cantigas de Santa Maria de Don Alfonso el Sabio. 2 vols. Madrid, 1889.

C. G. C. = Cancioneiro Gallego-Castelhano. Ed. H. R. Lang. Vol. i. New York, London, 1902.

C. M. B. = Cancionero Musical de los Siglos XV y XVI. Transcrito y comentado por Francisco Asenjo Barbieri. Madrid (1890).

C. B. = Cancionero de Juan Alfonso de Baena. Madrid, 1851.

C. G. = Cancionero General (1511).

C. R. = Cancioneiro de Resende. Lisboa, 1516 (= Cancioneiro Geral).

FOOTNOTES:

§ 2. The Cancioneiros

If, besides the Cancioneiros da Vaticana, Colocci-Brancuti, and da Ajuda, we include King Alfonso X’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. M.) we have over 2,000 poems, by some 200 poets. Of these the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (C. A.) contains 310. Preserved in the Lisbon Collegio dos Nobres and later in the Royal Library of Ajuda at Lisbon, it was first published in an edition of twenty-five copies by Charles Stuart (afterwards Lord Stuart of Rothesay), British Minister at Lisbon (C. A. S.). Another edition, by Varnhagen, appeared in 1849 (C. A. V.), and the splendid definitive edition by D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos in 1904 (C. A. M. V.). C. A. M. V. contains 467 poems, in part reproduced from C. V. M. and C. C. B. The third volume, of notes, is still unpublished.

Of the Cancioneiro preserved as Codex Vaticanus 4803, and now commonly known as Cancioneiro da Vaticana (C. V.), fragments were published soon after its rediscovery: viz. that portion attributed to King Dinis, edited by Moura in 1847 (C. D. M.). This part received a critical edition at the hands of Professor H. R. Lang in 1892; 2nd ed., with introduction, Halle, 1894 (C. D. L.). A few more crumbs were given to the world by Varnhagen in 1870, 2nd ed. 1872 (C. T. A.), and in 1873 (C. A. P.) and 1875 (C. L.) by Ernesto Monaci, who printed his diplomatic edition of the complete text (1,205 poems) in the latter year (C. V. M.), and with it an index of a still larger Cancioneiro (it has 1,675 entries) compiled by Angelo Colocci in the sixteenth century and discovered by Monaci in the Vatican Library (codex 3217). Dr. Theophilo Braga’s critical edition appeared in 1878 (C. V. B.).

In this very year a large Cancioneiro (355 ff.), corresponding nearly but not precisely to the Colocci index, was discovered in the library of the Conte Paolo Antonio Brancuti (C. C. B. For convenience’ sake C. C. B. also = the fragment published by Enrico Gasi Molteni), and the 442 of its poems, lacking in C. V. (but nearly half of which are in C. A.), were published in diplomatic edition by Enrico Molteni in 1880 (C. C. B.). All these (C. A., C. V., and C. C. B.) were in all probability derived from the Cancioneiro compiled by the Conde de Barcellos. When his father, King Dinis, died, silence fell upon the poets. The new king, Afonso IV, showed no sign of continuing to collect the smaller Cancioneiros kept by nobles and men of humbler position, a custom inaugurated by his grandfather, Afonso III (if the Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Afonso in King Duarte’s library was his), continued by King Dinis (Livro de Trovas del Rei D. Dinis), and perhaps revived by King Duarte a century later (Livro de Trovas del Rei). It was thus a time suitable for a ‘definitive edition’, and Count Pedro, who was the last of the Cancioneiro poets and who was more collector than poet, probably took the existing Cancioneiros (of Afonso III and Dinis) and added a third part consisting of later poems. Besides the chronological order there was a division by subject into cantigas de amor, cantigas de amigo, and cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer (Santillana’s cantigas, serranas e dezires, or cantigas serranas, the Archpriest of Hita’s cantares serranos e dezires). C. V. is divided into these three kinds; in the older and incomplete C. A. 304 of the 310 poems are cantigas de amor. Eleven years after the death of King Duarte the Marqués de Santillana wrote (1449) to the Constable of Portugal, D. Pedro, describing the Galician-Portuguese Cancioneiro—un grant volume—which he had seen in his boyhood in the possession of D. Mencia de Cisneros. (This may have been the actual manuscript compiled by D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos and bequeathed by him in 1350 to Alfonso XI of Castille and Leon—a few days after Alfonso XI’s death. Or it may have been a copy of the Cancioneiro of D. Pedro or the Cancioneiro of Afonso III or of Dinis.) It is significant that in this very important letter it is a foreigner informing a Portuguese. Under the predominating influence first of Spain then of the Renaissance, the old Portuguese poems, even if they were known to exist, excited no interest in Portugal. They were musas rusticas, musas in illo tempore rudes et incultas.[68] With this disdain the Cancioneiro became a real will-o’-the-wisp. Even as late as the nineteenth century one disappeared mysteriously from a sale, another emerged momentarily (see C. T. A.) from the shelves of a Spanish grandee only to fall back into the unknown. In the sixteenth century the evidence as to its being known is contradictory. Duarte Nunez de Leam in 1585 says of King Dinis that extant hodie eius carmina. Antonio de Vasconcellos in 1621 declares that time has carried them away: obliviosa praeripuit vetustas.

A few vague allusions (as that of Sá de Miranda concerning the echoes of Provençal song) were all that was vouchsafed in Portugal to the Cancioneiro, although prominent Portuguese men of letters—as Sá de Miranda, André de Resende, Damião de Goes—travelled in Italy and met there Cardinal Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), who had probably owned the Cancioneiros (copies by an Italian hand of a Portuguese original) acquired by Angelo Colocci; yet at this very time Colocci (†1549) was eagerly indexing and annotating the Cancioneiros in Rome. It is this Portuguese neglect and indifference to the things of Portugal which explains the survival of the cossantes only in Rome while the more solemn and less indigenous poems of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda remained in the land of their birth. A fuller account of the Portuguese Cancioneiros, with the fascinating and complicated question of their descent and interrelations, will be found in the Grundriss (pp. 199-202) and D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos’ edition of the Cancioneiro da Ajuda (vol. ii, pp. 180-288).[69]

When the poetry of the troubadours flourished in Provence Portugal was scarcely a nation. The first Provençal poet, Guilhaume, Comte de Poitou (1087-1127), precedes by nearly a century Sancho I (1154-1211), second King of Portugal, who wrote poems and married the Princess Dulce of Aragon; and the Gascon Marcabrun, the first foreign poet to refer to Portugal, in his poems Al prim comens del ivernaill and Emperaire per mi mezeis, in the middle of the twelfth century, spoke not of her poetry but of her warrior deeds: la valor de Portegal. Gavaudan similarly refers at the end of the twelfth century to the Galicians and Portuguese among other (Castille, &c.) barriers against the ‘black dogs’ (the Moors). It was in Spain that the Portuguese had opportunity of meeting Provençal poets. The Peninsula in the thirteenth century was, like Greece of old, divided into little States and Courts, each harbouring exiles and refugees from neighbouring States. Civil strife or the death of a king in Portugal would scatter abroad a certain number of noblemen on the losing side, who would thus come into contact with the troubadours as Provençal poetry spread to the Courts of Catalonia and Aragon, Navarre, Castille and Leon. The first King of Portugal, although a prince of the House of Burgundy, held his kingdom in fief to Leon, and all the early kings were in close touch with Leon and Castille. Fernando III, King of Castille and Leon (St. Ferdinand), was a devoted lover of poetry, and his son Alfonso X gathered at his cort sen erguelh e sen vilania a galaxy of talented troubadours, Provençal and Galician. Portugal came into more direct touch with France in other ways, but the influence might have been almost exclusively that of the trouvères of the North had not the more generous enthusiasm of Provence penetrated across the frontier into Spain. Trade was fairly active in the thirteenth century between Portugal and England, North France and Flanders. Many of the members of the religious orders—as the Cluny Benedictines—who occupied the territory of the Moors in Portugal were Frenchmen. With foreign colonists the new towns were systematically peopled. The number of French pilgrims was such that the road to Santiago became known as the ‘French Road’. The Crusades also brought men of many languages to Portugal.[70] The Court by descent and dynastic intermarriage was cosmopolitan; but indeed the life of the whole Peninsula was cosmopolitan to an extent which tallies ill with the idea of the Middle Ages as a period of isolation and darkness. The Portuguese had already begun to show their fondness for novedades. Yet it was they who imposed their, the Galician, language. As the Marqués de Santillana observed and the Cancioneiros prove, lyric poets throughout the Peninsula used Galician.[71] Probably the oldest surviving instance of this language in verse by a foreigner is to be found (ten lines) in a descort (descordo) written by Raimbaud de Vaqueiras (1158-1217) at the Court of Bonifazio II of Montferrat towards the end of the twelfth century. We cannot doubt that the character and conditions of the north-west of the Peninsula had permitted a thread of lyric poetry to continue there ever since Silius Italicus had heard the youth of Galicia wailing (ululantem) their native songs, and that both language and literature had the opportunity to develop earlier there than in the rest of Spain. The tide of Moorish victory only gradually ebbed southward, and the warriors in the sterner country of Castille, with its fiery sun and battles and epics, would look back to the green country of Galicia as the idyllic land of song, a refuge where sons of kings and nobles could spend their minority in comparative peace. When from the ninth century Galicia became a second Holy Land its attractions and central character were immeasurably increased. Pilgrims thither from every country would return to their native land with some words of the language, and those acquainted with Provençal might note the similarity and the musical softness of Galician.[72] It is not certain that the eldest of the ten children of San Fernando, Alfonso X (1221?-84), el Sabio, King of Castille and Leon, Lord of Galicia, and brother-in-law of our Edward I, passed his boyhood in Galicia. But when he was compiling a volume of poems referring to many parts of the world besides Spain, to Canterbury and Rome, Paris and Alexandria, Lisbon, Cologne, Cesarea, Constantinople, he would naturally choose Galician not only, or indeed chiefly, because it was the more graceful and pliant medium for lyric verse but because it was the most widely known, and, like French, plus commune à toutes gens.[73] He had no delicate ear for its music and made such poor use of its pliancy that it often becomes as hard as the hardest Castilian in his hands. His songs of miracles offer a striking contrast to contemporary Portuguese lyrics in the same language. Their jingles are only possible as a descort in the Portuguese Cancioneiros. At the same time he would be influenced in his choice of language by his knowledge of Galicia as the traditional home of the lyric, of the encouraging patronage extended to Galician poets by his son-in-law Afonso III, of the Santiago school of poets, and of the promising future before the Galician language in the hands of the conquering Portuguese. Multas et perpulchras composuit cantilenas, says Gil de Zamora, and likens him to David. But when we remember the prodigious services rendered by Alfonso X to Castilian prose, the first question that arises is whether he was indeed the author of the 450 poems in Galician[74] that we possess under his name. Of these poems 426, or, cancelling repetitions, 420, are of a religious character, written, with one or two exceptions, in honour of the Virgin: Cantigas de Santa Maria. Many of these poems themselves provide an answer to the question: they record his illnesses and enterprises and his trobar in such a way that they could only have been written by himself: he is the entendedor of Santa Maria (C. M. 130), he exhorts other trobadores to sing her praises (C. M. 260), he himself is resolved to sing of no other dona (C. M. 10: dou ao demo os otros amores); and his attractive and ingenuous pride in these poems accords ill with an alien authorship. When he lay sick at Vitoria and was like to die it was only when the Livro das Cantigas was placed on his body that he recovered (C. M. 209), and he directed that they should be preserved in the church in which he was buried. There is little reason to doubt that he was the author, in a strictly limited sense, of the majority of the poems, although not of all. Various phrases seem to imply a double method. C. M. 219 says: ‘I will have that miracle placed among the others’; C. M. 295: ‘I ordered it to be written.’ On the other hand, C. M. 47 is ‘a fair miracle of which I made my song’; C. M. 84 ‘a great miracle of which I made a song’; of 106 ‘I know well that I will make a goodly song’; of 64 ‘I made verses and tune’; for 188 ‘I made a good tune and verses because it caught my fancy’; for 307 ‘according to the words I made the tune’; of 347 ‘I made a new song with a tune that was my own and not another’s’. The inference seems to be that, the personal poems and the loas apart, if a miracle especially attracted the king he took it in hand; otherwise he might leave it to one of the joglares, and he would perhaps revise it and be its author to the extent that the Portuguese jograes were authors of the early cossantes. We know that he had at his Court a veritable factory of verse. The vignettes[75] to these Cantigas show him surrounded by scribes, pen and parchment in hand, by joglares and joglaresas. Poets thronged to his Court and he was in communication with others in foreign lands. Some of the miracles might come to him in verse, the work of a friendly poet or of a sacred jogral such as Pierres de Siglar, whom C. M. 8 shows reciting his poems from church to church: en todalas eigreias da Uirgen que non a par un seu lais senpre dizia,[76] and this would account for the variety of metre and treatment. Of raw material for his art there was never a scarcity, nor was the idea of turning it into verse original. In France Gautier de Coincy (1177-1236) had already written his Miracles de la Sainte Vierge in verse, and the Spanish poet Gonzalo de Berceo (1180-1247) had composed the Milagros de Nuestra Sennora. But there was no need for direct imitation. If the starry sky were parchment and the ocean ink, the miracles could not all be written down, says King Alfonso (C. M. 110). Churches and rival shrines preserved an unfailing store for collectors. Gautier de Coincy spoke of tant miracles, a grant livre of them, and King Alfonso chooses one from among 300 in a book (C. M. 33), finds one written in an ancient book (265) written among many others (258), in a book among many others (284), and refers to a book full of them at Soissons. The miracles were recorded more systematically in France, and the books of Soissons and Rocamadour (Liber Miraculorum S. Mariae de Rupe Amatoris) provided the king with many subjects, as did also Vincent de Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale, of which he possessed a copy. But the sources in the Peninsula were very copious, as, for instance, the Book of the Miracles of Santiago, of which a copy, in Latin, exists in the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale. Of other miracles the king had had personal experience, or they were recent and came to him by word of mouth. Thus he often does not profess to invent his subject: he merely translates it into verse and sometimes appraises it as he does so. It is ‘a marvellous great miracle’ (C. M. 257), ‘very beautiful’ (82), ‘one in which I have great belief’ (241), ‘one almost incredible’, mui cruu de creer (242), or ‘famous’ (195), ‘known throughout Spain’ (191). Many of these miracles occurred to the peasants and unlettered: then as now the humbler the subject the greater the miracle. Accordingly we find the king in his poems dealing not with the conventional shepherdesses of the pastorelas but with lowly folk of real life, peasants, gleaners, sailors, fishermen, beggars, pilgrims, nuns; and it is one of the king’s titles to be considered a true poet that he takes an evident pleasure in these themes and retains their graphic, artless presentment. The collection abounds in charming glimpses of the life of the people. Indeed, in many of the poems there is more of the people than of King Alfonso,[77] and he sings diligently of the misdeeds of clerics and usurers, of the incompetence of doctors, and of massacres of Jews. He seems to have followed the originals very closely, and evident traces of their language remain, French, English, and perhaps Provençal. The poems are often of considerable length, sometimes twenty or thirty verses, and as a rule the last line of each verse must rhyme with the refrain. The attention thus necessarily bestowed upon the rhymes sometimes mars the pathos of the subject, and the reader is reminded that he has to do with a skilful, eager, and industrious craftsman but not with a great original poet. In the remarkable Ben vennas Mayo and in many of his other poems materialism and poetical ecstasy go hand in hand. Yet in several of the more beautiful legends the poet proves himself equal to his theme. Some of these legends are still famous, that of the Virgin taking the place of the nun (C. M. 55 and 94), of the knight and the pitcher (155), of the stone miraculously warded from the statue of the Virgin and Child (136 and 294), of the monk’s mystic ecstasy at the lais of the bird in the convent garden (103). Others had probably an equal celebrity in the Middle Ages, as that of the captive miraculously brought from Africa and awaking free in Spain at dawn (325),[78] of the painter with whom the Devil was wroth for always painting him so ugly (74), or of the peasant whose vineyard alone was saved from the hail (161). Every tenth poem (the collection was intended originally to consist of one hundred) interrupts the narratives of miracles by a purely lyrical cantiga de loor, and some of these, written with the fervour with which the king always sang as graças muy granadas of the Madre de Deus Manuel, are of great simplicity and beauty. The king had not always written thus, and of his profane poems we possess thirty[79] (since no one who has read the lively essay by Cesare de Lollis will doubt that C. V. 61-79 and C. C. B. 359-72 (= 467-78) were written by Alfonso X). The most important of these are historical, and invoke curses on false or recalcitrant knights, non ven al mayo! C. V. 74 is a battle-scene description so swift and impetuous that we must go to the Poema del Cid for a parallel. And indeed some of the old spirit peeps out from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, as when he prays to be delivered from false friends or praises the Virgin for giving his enemies ‘what they deserved’.

From the return and enthronement of Afonso III imitation of French and Provençal poetry was in full swing in Portugal. The long sojourn of the prince in France, accompanied by several noblemen who figure in the Cancioneiros (as Rui Gomez de Briteiros and D. Joan de Aboim), had an important bearing on the development of Portuguese poetry. He came back determined to act the part of an enlightened patron of letters; he encouraged the immigration of men of learning from France and maintained three jograes permanently in his palace.[80] Princes and nobles as trobadores for their own pastime, the segreis,[81] knights who went from Court to Court and received payment for the recital of their own verses, the jograes, belonging to a lower station, who recited the poems of their patrons the trobadores, all vied in imitation of the love songs of Provence. In general, i. e. in the structure of their poems, the resemblance is close and clear enough. The decasyllabic love song in three or four stanzas with an envoi, the satirical sirventes, the tenson (jocs-partits) in which two poets contended in dialogue, the descort in which the discordant sounds expressed the poet’s distress and grief, the balada of Provence, the ballette and pastourelle of North France, were all faithfully reproduced.

If, on the other hand, we look for imitations in detail it is perhaps natural that we should find them less frequently.[82] The conventional character of the Portuguese poems would sufficiently account for this, and moreover their models were probably more often heard than read, so that reproduction of the actual thought or words would be difficult. When Airas Nunez in a poem of striking beauty, which is almost a sonnet (C. V. 456), wrote the lines:

he need not have read Peire de Bussinac’s lines:

in order to know that birds sing and trees grow green in spring. And generally it is not easy to say whether an apparent echo is a direct imitation or merely a stereotyped phrase. The Portuguese trobadores introduced little of the true spirit of the Provençal troubadours—that had passed to Palestine and to the Lady of Tripoli. In their cantigas de amor is no sign of action—unless it be to die of love; no thought of Nature. Jaufre Rudel (1140-70), that prince of lovers, had ‘gone to school to the meadows’ and might sing in his maint bons vers of la flor aiglentina or of flors d’albespis, but in the Portuguese cantigas nothing relieves the conventional dullness and excessive monotony (which likewise marked the Provençal school of poets in Sicily). Composed for the most part in iambic decasyllables they describe continually the poet’s coita d’amor, grave d’endurar, his grief at parting, his loss of sleep, his pleasure in dying for his fremosa sennor. She is described merely as beautiful, or, at most, as

Vocabulary and thought are spectre-thin. Indeed, it was part of the convention to sing vaguely. Eu ben falarei de sa fremosura, says one poet[83] (C. C. B. 337)—he will sing of her beauty, but not in such a way that the curious who non o poden adevinhar should guess his secret. As to allusions to Nature, perhaps the climate, with less marked divisions than in Provence, furnished less incentive to sing of spring and the earth’s renewal or to imitate Guiraut de Bornelh in going to school all the winter (l’ivern estava a escola a aprender) and singing only with the return of spring. King Dinis, perhaps in reference to that troubadour, declares that his love is independent of the seasons and more sincere than that of the singers of Provence:

and even as he wrote the words he was unconsciously imitating the thought of the Provençal poet Gace Brulé, who had spoken of les faus amoureus d’esté. The exceeding similarity of the cantigas de amor did raise doubts as to the sincerity of all this dying of love (cf. C. V. 353 and C. V. 988) and as to whether a poem was a cantar novo or an article at second hand (C. V. 819). Yet the poets evidently had talent and poetic feeling; indeed, their skill in versification contrasts remarkably with their entire absence of thought or individuality. They appear to revel in monotony of ideas and pride themselves on the icy smoothness of their verse. All their originality consisted in the introduction of technical devices, such as the repetition at intervals of certain words (dobre), or of different tenses of the same verb (mordobre, as C. V. 681), to carry on the poem without stop from beginning to end by means of ‘for’, ‘but’, &c., at the beginning of each verse (cantigas de atafiinda,[84] as C. V. 130, C. A. 205), to begin and end each verse with the same line (canção redonda, as C. V. 685), to repeat the last line of one verse as the first line of the next (leixapren), to use the same word at the end of each line (as vi in C. A. 7). The poet who addressed cantigas de amor to his lady also provided her with poems for her to sing, cantigas de amigo in complicated form, or as the simpler cossante, which the cantigas de amigo include. These are poems with more life and action, often in dialogue. Perhaps the dona herself, wearied by the monotonous cantigas de amor, had pointed to the songs of the peasant women, and the form of these cantigas de amigo was a compromise between the Provençal cantiga de meestria and the popular cantiga de refran. The peasant woman composed her own songs, and the poet places his song on the lips of his love: thus we find her describing herself as beautiful, eu velida; eu fremosa; trist’ e fremosa; fremosa e de mui bon prez; o meu bon semelhar. Poetical shepherdesses sing these cantigas de amigo; the fair dona sings them as she sits spinning (C. V. 321). The old Poetica (II. 2-12) distinguishes between the cantigas de amor, in which the amigo speaks first, and the cantigas de amigo, in which the first to speak is the amiga. Both were artificial forms, but the latter are clearly more popular in theme (the amiga waiting and wailing for her lover), and in treatment sometimes convey a real intensity of feeling.[85] The favourite subject of the cantiga de amigo is that the cruel mother prevents the lovers from meeting. The daughter is kept in the house: a manda muito guardar (C. V. 535). She reproaches and entreats her mother, who answers her as choir to choir; she bewails her lot to her friends, or to her sister. She is dying of love and begs her mother to tell her lover. Her mother and lover are reconciled. Her lover is false and fails to meet her at the trysted hour. She waits for him in vain, and her mother comforts her in her distress. She pines and dies of love while her amigo is away serving the king in battle or en cas’ del rei.

The third section of the Cancioneiro da Vaticana does not sin by monotony. We may divide Pope’s line, since if the cantigas de amor are ‘correctly cold’ many of the satiric poems are ‘regularly low’. In these verses, containing violent invective and abuse (cantigas de maldizer) or more covert sarcasm and ridicule (cantigas d’escarnho), the themes are often scandalous, the language ribald and unseemly. They were written with great zest, although without the fiery indignation of the Provençal and Catalan sirventeses. They are concerned with persons: the haughty trobador may take a jogral to task for writing verses that do not rhyme or scan, but even then it is a personal matter and he rebukes his insolence for daring to raise his thoughts to altas donas in song. Some of these poems should never have been written or printed, but many of them give a lively idea of the society of that time. They laugh merrily or venomously at the poverty-stricken knight with nothing to eat; at the knight who set his dogs on those who called near dinner-time; the jogral who knows as much of poetry as an ass of reading; the poet who pretended to have gone as a pilgrim to the Holy Land but never went beyond Montpellier; the physician (Mestre Nicolas) whose books were more for show than for use (E sab’ os cadernos ben cantar quen[86] non sabe por elles leer, C. V. 1116); the Galician unjustifiably proud of his poetical talent (non o sabia ben, C. V. 914); the jogral who gave up poetry—shaved off his beard and cut his hair short about his ears—in order to take holy orders, in hope of a fat living, but was disappointed; the jogral who played badly and sang worse; the poet who was the cause of good poetry in others; the gentleman who spent most of his income on clothes and wore gilt shoes winter and summer. We read of the excellent capon, kid, and pork provided by the king for dinner; of the fair malmaridada, married or rather sold by her parents; of the impoverished lady, one of those for whom later Nun’ Alvarez provided; of the poet pining in exile not of love but hunger; of the lame lawyer, the unjust judge; the parvenu villão, the knighted tailor, the seers and diviners (veedeiros, agoreiros, divinhos). These cantigas d’escarnho e de maldizer were a powerful instrument of satire from which there was no escape. A hapless infançon, slovenly in his ways, drew down upon himself the wit of D. Lopo Diaz, who in a series of eleven songs (C. V. 945-55) ridiculed him and his creaking saddle till at Christmas he was fain to call a truce. But the implacable D. Lopo forthwith indited a new song: ‘I won’t deny that I agreed to a truce about the saddle, but—it didn’t include the mare’,[87] and so no doubt continued till pascoa florida or la trinité. But the majority of these verses are not so innocently merry. Many of the poets of the Cancioneiros wrote in all three kinds: cantigas de amor, de amigo, and de maldizer. Of Joan de Guilhade[88] (fl. 1250) we have over fifty poems.[89] He imitated both French and Provençal models, and, having learnt lightness of touch from them, would appear to have contented himself with writing cantigas de amigo (besides cantigas de amor and escarnho) without having recourse to the cossante. There is life and poetical feeling as well as facility of technique in his poems.

Pero Garcia de Burgos (fl. 1250) is, with Joan de Guilhade, one of the more voluminous writers of the Cancioneiros. He shows himself capable of deep feeling in his love songs, but speaks with two voices, descending to sad depths in his poems of invective. His contemporary, the segrel Pero da Ponte, is also an accomplished poet of love, in the even flow of his verse far more accomplished than Pero Garcia, and in his satirical poems wittier and, as a rule, more moderate. He placed his poetical gift at the service of kings to sing their praises for hire, and celebrated San Fernando’s conquest of Seville in 1248; Seville, of which, he says, ‘none can adequately tell the praises’. To satire almost exclusively the powerful courtier of King Dinis’ reign, Stevam Guarda, devoted his not inconsiderable talent, and the segrel Pedr’ Amigo de Sevilha (fl. 1250) shone in the same kind with a great variety of metre as well as in numerous cantigas de amigo. Martin Soarez (first half 13th c.), born at Riba de Lima, and considered the best trobador of his time (by those who could not appreciate the charm of the indigenous poetry), wrote no cossante nor cantiga de amigo, and in his satirical poems displayed a contemptuous insolence—towards those whom he regarded as his inferiors in lineage or talent—which places him in no attractive light. A notable poet at the Courts of Spain and Portugal was Joan Airas of Santiago de Compostela (fl. 1250), of whom we have over twenty cantigas de amor and fifty cantigas de amigo. Contemporary criticism apparently viewed their quantity with disfavour,[90] for he complains that Dizen que meus cantares non valen ren porque tan muitos son (C. V. 533). But if his poems lack the variety of those of King Dinis, which they almost rival in number, they are nevertheless marked not only by harmony but by many a touch of real life. Of most of the other singers we have far fewer poems. Like Meendinho and Estevam Coelho, Pero Vyvyães (first half 13th c.) is known chiefly for a single song: his bailada (C. V. 336). By D. Joan Soarez Coelho (c. 1210-80) there are two cossantes (C. V. 291, 292) and numerous other poems. He was prominent at the Court of Afonso III (1248-79) and in the conquest of Algarve, as was also D. Joan de Aboim (c. 1215-87), whose poems are less numerous but include a dozen cantigas de amigo and a pastorela (C. V. 278: Cavalgava noutro dia per hun caminho frances), and Fernan Garcia Esgaravunha,[91] whose cantigas de amor show characteristic life and vigour, and a good command of metre. There is an engaging grace and spirit in the cantigas de amigo written in dancing rhythm by Fernan Rodriguez de Calheiros (fl. in or before 1250), who preceded those soldier poets; deep feeling and melancholy in the cantigas de amor of D. Joan Lopez de Ulhoa, their contemporary. Neither of these, however, possessed the poetical genius and versatility of the priest of Santiago, Airas Nunez (second half 13th c.)—the name appears in a marginal note to one of King Alfonso’s Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. M. 223 in the manuscript j. b. 2)—whose poems show a perfect mastery of rhythm and a true instinct for beauty. He wrote a pastorela in the manner of the trouvères, and combined it with some of the most exquisite specimens of the indigenous poetry.[92] The fact that one of these was by Joan Zorro makes it probable that Nunez’ celebrated bailada (C. V. 462) is but a development of Zorro’s (C. V. 761), unless both drew from a common popular source. Another of his poems (C. V. 468) reads like an anticipatory slice out of Juan Ruiz’ Libro de Buen Amor. Great importance has been attached to another (C. V. 466) as a remnant of a cantar de gesta, but D. Carolina Michaëlis de Vasconcellos has shown that it was written to commemorate a contemporary event, probably in 1289.[93] More than any other poet of the Cancioneiros, with the exception, perhaps, of King Dinis, Nunez anticipated that doce estylo, the introduction of which cost Sá de Miranda so many perplexities.

The Cancioneiros contain poems by high and low, prince and, one would fain say, peasant, noble trobador and humble jogral, soldiers and civilians, priests and laymen, singers of Galicia, Portugal, and Spain, but more especially of Galicia and North Portugal. As in the case of C. V. 466, the interest of many of the poems is historical: C. V. 1088, for instance, written by a partisan of the dethroned King Sancho II; or C. V. 1080, a gesta de maldizer of fifty-six lines in three rhymes, with the exclamation Eoy! at the change of the rhyme, which was written by D. Afonso Lopez de Bayan (c. 1220-80), clearly in imitation of the Chanson de Roland.[94] Almost equally prominent, though not from any historical associations, is the curiously modern C. A. 429 (= C. C. B. 314) among the cantigas de amor. It tells of a girl forced against her will to enter a convent, and who says to her lover: ‘My dress may be religious, but God shall not have my heart.’ (For the metre, cf. C. V. 342.) Its author was the fidalgo D. Rodrig’ Eanez de Vasconcellos, one of the pre-Dionysian poets. But indeed no further proofs are needed to show that, even had King Dinis never existed, the contents of the early Portuguese Cancioneiros would have been remarkable for their variety and beauty. When Alfonso X died his grandson Dinis (1261-1325)[95] had sat for five years on the throne of Portugal. Plentifully educated by a Frenchman, Ayméric d’Ébrard, afterwards Bishop of Coimbra, married to a foreign princess, Isabel of Aragon (the Queen-Saint of Portugal), profoundly impressed, no doubt, by the world-fame of Alfonso X, to whom he was sent on a diplomatic mission when not yet in his teens, he became nevertheless one of the most national of kings. If he imitated Alfonso X in his love of literature, he showed himself a far abler and firmer sovereign, being more like a rock than like the sea, to which the poet compared Alfonso. Far-sighted in the conception of his plans and vigorous in their execution, the Rei Lavrador, whom Dante mentions, though not by name: quel di Portogallo (Paradiso xix), fostered agriculture, increased his navy, planted pine-forests, fortified his towns, built castles and convents and churches, and legislated for the safety of the roads and for the general welfare and security of his people. Among his great and abiding services to his country was the foundation of the first Portuguese University in the year 1290, and in the same spirit he ordered the translation of many notable books from the Spanish, Latin, and Arabic into Portuguese prose, including the celebrated works of the Learned King, so that it is truer of prose than of poetry to say that he inaugurated a golden age.[96] Had he written no line of verse his name must have been for ever honoured in Portugal as the real founder of that imperishable glory which was fulfilled two centuries later. But he also excelled as a poet, d’amor trobador. It had no doubt been part of his education to write conventionally in the Provençal manner, but his skill in versification, remarkable even in an age in which Portuguese poetry had attained exceptional proficiency in technique, would have availed him, or at least us, little had he not also possessed an instinct for popular themes, perhaps directly encouraged by Alfonso X. The Declaratio placed by Guiraut Riquier of Narbonne on the lips of that king in 1275 marked the coming asphyxia of Provençal poetry, for it showed the tendency to take the jogral[97] away from tavern and open air and to cut off his poetry from the life of the people. It was owing to the personal encouragement of Dinis that the waning star of both Provençal and indigenous poetry continued to shine in Portugal for another half-century. The grandson of Alfonso X was the last hope of the trobadores and jograes of the Peninsula. From Leon and Castille and Aragon they came to reap an aftermath of song and panos at his Court, and after his death remained silent or unpaid (C. V. 708). The poems of King Dinis are not only more numerous but far more various than those of any other trobador, with the exception of Alfonso X, and it may perhaps be doubted whether they are all the work of his own hand. In poetry’s old age he might well wish to collect specimens of various kinds for his Livro de Trovas. But many of the 138 poems[98] that we possess under his name are undoubtedly his, and display a characteristic force and sincerity as well as true poetic delicacy and power. Among them are some colourless cantigas de amor and others more individual in tone, pastorelas (C. V. 102, 137, 150), cantigas de amigo (more Provençal than Portuguese in their spirit of vigorous reproach are C. V. 186: Amigo fals’ e desleal, and C. V, 198: Ai fals’ amigo e sen lealdade), a jingle worthy of the Cantigas de Santa Maria (C. V. 136), a poem in 8.8.4.8 metre (C. V. 131), atafiindas (e. g. C. V. 130), a mordobre in querer (C. V. 113, Quix ben, amigos, e quer’ e querrei Ũa molher que me quis e quer mal E querrá), and cossantes of an unmistakably popular flavour: Ay flores, ay flores do verde pino (C. V. 171), two albas (C. V. 170, 172), C. V. 168, 169, with their refrains louçana and ai madre, moiro d’amor, C. V. 173 with its quaint charm: Vede-la frol do pinho—Valha Deus, and the bailada-cossante (C. V. 195: Mia madre velida, Voum’ a la bailia Do amor). If the king wrote these cossantes he must be reckoned not only as a musical and skilful versifier but as a great poet. And certainly, at least, his graciosas e dulces palavras well earned him the reputation of being not only the best king but the best poet of his time in the Peninsula.

It would seem that, unlike his grandfather, who had begun with profane and ended with religious verse, King Dinis, no doubt at his grandfather’s bidding, who would be delighted to find a disciple (Dized’, ai trobadores, A Sennor das Sennores Por que a non loades?), began writing songs in honour of the Virgin and sent them to the Castilian king. His book of Louvores da Virgem Nossa Senhora is said to have been seen in the Escorial Library and in the Lisbon Torre do Tombo, and it is impossible altogether to set aside the statements of Duarte Nunez de Leam[99] and Antonio de Sousa de Macedo, who says that he read religious poems by King Dinis at the Escorial.[100] On the other hand, it must be remembered that it was the common opinion that King Dinis had been the first to write Portuguese poetry, and the temptation to attribute ancient poems to him would be strong. The possibility of confusion with the Livro de Cantigas of Alfonso X (to which his grandson may well have contributed poems)[101] is also obvious. But the statement of Sousa de Macedo, who was no passing traveller in a hurry, and who had wide experience of books and libraries,[102] is very precise. No trace or

memory of the existence of this manuscript exists, however, at the Escorial Library, nor is to be found in the Catálogo de los Manuscritos existentes antes del incendio de 1671. The subjects of King Dinis’ ten[103] satirical poems are trivial, but he had too much force of character to descend to such vilenesses as were common among profaçadores. (His concise definition of a bore: falou muit’ e mal (C. C. B. 411) is worthy of Afonso de Albuquerque.) Of his illegitimate sons, besides D. Afonso Sanchez, D. Pedro, Conde de Barcellos, long had a reputation as a poet almost equal to that of his father, owing to the association of his name with the Cancioneiro; but of his ten poems six (C. V. 1037-42) are satirical, and the four cantigas de amor (C. V. 210-13) are perhaps the heaviest and most prosaic in the collection. It was as a prose-writer and editor of the Livro de Linhagens that he worthily carried on the literary tradition of King Dinis.

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