Troubadours
Basically a Troubadour was a composer and performer of songs, often accompanied by instruments and typically singing of war, chivalry and courtly love.
It was the Occitan language of the high medieval ages which saw Troubadour poetry and songs. In the fields and groves of the Languedoc the Jongleurs or performers of the Troubadour art first sang their songs of courtly unfulfilled love. The concept of unfulfilled love or fin'amors was a refreshing counterpoint to the earlier passion for the bloody epics and stories that had so captured the imagination in earlier times.
Troubadours and their art are forever linked with the Cathars, the great heresy and the albigensian crusade. All the horrors and glories of that time were put into the shadows with the flowering of the first concepts of chivalry.
The poem, Alba, is an example of Troubadour poetry. The 1st stanza is:
In orchard where the leaves of hawthorn hide,
A lady holds a lover by her side,
Until the watcher in the dawning cried.
Ah God, ah God, the Dawn! It comes how soon.