ound dance, a _rounde_ or _rondo_; a country
love song, a _pastorella_. Even the words descant and treble
go back to their time; for the _jongleurs_, singing their
masters' songs, would not all follow the same melody; one
of them would seek to embellish it and sing something quite
different that still would fit well with the original melody,
just as nowadays, in small amateur bands we often hear a
flute player adding embellishing notes to his part. Soon,
more than one singer added to his part, and the new voice was
called the triple, third, or treble voice. This extemporizing
on the part of the _jongleurs_ soon had to be regulated, and
the actual notes written down to avoid confusion. Thus this
habit of singing merged into _faux bourdon_, which has been
discussed in a former chapter. Apart from these forms of song,
there were some called _sirventes_--that is "songs of service,"
which were very partisan, and were accompanied by drums, bells,
and pipes, and sometimes by trumpets. The more warlike of these
songs were sung at tournaments by the _jongleurs_ outside the
lists, while their masters, the troubadours, were doing battle,
of which custom a good description is to be found in Hagen's
book on the minnesingers.

In France the Provencal poetry lasted only until the middle
of the fourteenth century, after the troubadours had received
a crushing blow at the time the Albigenses were extirpated in
the thirteenth century.

In one city alone (that of Beziers), between 30,000 and 40,000
people were killed for heresy against the Pope. The motto
of the Pope's representatives was "God will know His Own,"
and Catholics as well as Albigenses (as the sect was called)
were massacred indiscriminately. That this heresy against
the Pope was vastly aided by the troubadours, is hardly open
to doubt. Such was their power that the rebellious, antipapal
_sirventes_ of the troubadours (which were sung by their troops
of _jongleurs_ in every market place) could be suppressed only
after the cities of Provence were almost entirely annihilated
and the population destroyed by the massacre, burning alive,
and the Inquisition.

A review of the poems of Bertran de Born, Bernart de Ventadour,
Thibaut, or others is hardly in place here. Therefore we
will pass to Germany, where the spirit of the troubadours was
assimilated in a peculiarly Germanic fashion by the minnesingers
and the mastersingers.

In Germany, the troubadours became minnesinger