Dante moulded the verdict of later literary scholars when he lauded the emperor Frederick II and his illegitimate son Manfred for their patronage of poets of ‘the Sicilian school’, and damned rulers of his own period, prominently including Charles II of Anjou, for their failure to preserve the traditions of the past. But nowadays this very negative view of Angevin literary achievement is being convincingly challenged. Stefano Asperti, in his book Carlo I d'Angiò e i trovatori, has produced a radically different picture. By examining seven chansonniers of Provençal, Italian or north French provenance in which troubadour lyrics of the mid and later thirteenth century were preserved, he has demonstrated, first, the major role played by members of Charles's entourage as recorders of these verses, including many unflattering to Charles himself. More importantly, he has seen Charles's court, first in Aix and then in the Regno, as a melting pot for different poetic traditions, particularly the Provençal and the northern French. According to him, from this fusion there emerged a new metrical form, the dansa, which rapidly developed in northern France into the virelai, and in Italy into the ballata. In other words, the court (though probably not the king himself) played a central part in the evolution of a poetic form that was to be extremely popular across Europe throughout the late thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries.