Courtly love tradition is a love conception which was created by the troubadours(the medieval equivalent of a traveling folksinger who played other people's songs as well as his own) at the end of the 11th century. The conception found its genesis in the ducal and princely courts in regions of present-day southern France, sufficiently peaceful and isolated country for such a movement to develop. Generally, courtly love was secret and between members of the nobility. It was also generally not practiced between husband and wife. It involved a paradoxical tension between erotic desire and spiritual attainment, "a love at once illicit and morally elevating, passionate and self-disciplined, humiliating and exalting, human and transcendent." It can be seen as a combination of complex factors: philosophical, social, religious, romantic, and erotic.
The courtly lover is characteristically a knight. Young boys of noble birth were trained the manners they would need to know as knights. They were taught to honor the Christian church, to respect women, and to devote their lives to the service of a lady. Such service was supposed to increase their abilities as warriors. Often a knight would worship his lady at a distance, never speaking to her and perhaps never even seeing her. The hero of the poems, the knight-lover, sings the praises and seeks the favor of a lady according to a well-defined ritual. The lady is ordinarily his superior socially and is nearly always presented as a paragon of beauty and virtue. The knight offers his song and his service in the hope of winning his lady's regard, her "grace," and perhaps ultimately her love. Final success (or the promise of it) produces the perfect joy that the lover seeks. The troubadour concentrates on this joy as a goal. It generates the excitement of the chase.
The terms used for courtly love during the medieval period itself were "Amour Honestus" (Honest Love) and "Fin Amor" (Refined Love). The term "courtly love" was first popularized by Gaston Paris in 1883, and has since come under a wide variety of definitions.
The French court of the troubadour Duke William IX was an early center of the culture of courtly love. William's granddaughter, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was a great influence in spreading this culture. She supported the ideals of courtly love throughout her reign in Aquitaine and brought it to England when she married Henry II. Her daughter, Marie of Champagne, encouraged Chrétien de Troyes to write Lancelot. Later, the ideas of courtly love were formally expressed in a three part treatise by André le Chapelain. In the thirteenth century, the lengthy poem, Roman de la rose, painted the image of a lover suspended between happiness and despair.
Many of the conventions of courtly love can be traced to Ovid but it is doubtful that they are all traceable to this origin. Accounts of courtly love often overlook the Arabist hypothesis, which has been posed in some form almost from the beginnings of the term "courtly love" in the modern period. A proposed source for the differences is the Arabic poets and poetry of Muslim Spain and the broader European contact with the Islamic world.
Given that practices similar to courtly love were already prevalent in Al-Andalus and elsewhere in the Islamic world, it is very likely that Islamic practices influenced the Christian Europeans. William of Aquitane, for example, was involved in the First Crusade, and in the ongoing Reconquista in Spain, so that he would have come into contact with Muslim culture a great deal.
The notion of the "ennobling power" of love was developed in the early 11th century by the Persian psychologist and philosopher, Ibn Sina (known as "Avicenna" in Europe), in his treatise Risala fi'l-Ishq (Treatise on Love). The final element of courtly love, the concept of "love as desire never to be fulfilled", was at times implicit in Arabic poetry, but was first developed into a doctrine in European Literature, in which all four elements of courtly love were present.
The era of courtly love vanished quickly under the impact of economic and cultural devastation brought by the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). Northern knights headed by Simon de Montfort swept down, the country was impoverished, freedom disappeared, and an inquisition and northern French dialect were imposed. The rule of Paris put an end to the south for centuries. But the songs did survive and travel, into the north by the trouveres, east into Germany, and south to Italy.
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