In the long run the poet had far more
influence than the priest upon the chivalric classes. It is remarkable how
uniformly Popes and Councils set their faces against the bloodshed and
extravagant futilities of the tournament; still more remarkable that even
threats of excommunication could not deter the most orthodox of knights from
seeking distinction and distraction in these mimic wars. Equally significant is
the growth of the service des dames which, although invested by
troubadours and minnesingers with a halo of religious allegory, was disliked by
the Church, not merely from a dread of possible abuses, but as inherently idolatrous.
The cult of the Virgin, while doing honour to the new conception of womanhood,
was also a protest against a secular romanticism. Here and there a Wolfram von
Eschenbach essays the feat of reconciling poetry with religion in the picture
of the perfect knight. But the school of courtoisie prevailed; the most
celebrated of the troubadours are mundane, not to say profane; Walther von der Vogelweide,
with his bitter attacks upon the Papacy, is more typical of his class than
Wolfram with his allegory of Parsifal and the Sangraal. It was in Provence, on
the eve of the Albigensian Crusade, in the society which was most indifferent to
official Christianity and most hostile to the clergy, that chivalry was most
sedulously preached and developed in the most curious detail. In the hands of
the troubadours it became a gospel of pageantry and fanfaron, of artificial
sentiments and artificial heroisms, cloaking the materialism, the sensuality
and the inordinate ostentation of a theatrical and frivolous society, intoxicated
with the pride of life.
