Most Romance languages, and all those under consideration here, had a name first for the residence and then for the retinue of a prince – the court. The word derived from the classical Latin words ‘cohors’ and ‘curia’, via the medieval Latin ‘cortis’. In the Middle Ages, all the languages under discussion formed a verb whose root derived from the word for court – Provençal ‘cortejar’, the Hispanic languages ‘cortejar’, French ‘cortoyer’ (becoming ‘courtiser’), and Italian ‘corteare’ (becoming ‘corteggiare’). And, in almost all cases, the verb began with a purely social sense signifying ‘being at court’, as in the following example from the thirteenth-century Chanson des Quatre Fils Aymon, where a mother describes how she sent her sons to serve Charlemagne:

At this early stage, ‘cortoyer’ and its equivalents also particularized certain specific aspects of courtly behaviour. In the following extract from Guillaume d'Orange's epic La Battaile d'Aleschans, for example, the hero's humble behaviour contrasts with the civilized norms that ‘being a courtier’ evidently entailed:

Then, in the fifteenth century, a parallel lexical development took place in French and Italian. The French intransitive verb ‘cortoyer’ developed the transitive ‘courtiser’ (its medial ‘s’ deriving either from ‘courtisan’ or from ‘courtois’), and the Italian intransitive ‘corteare’, the transitive ‘corteggiare’. From its inception, the new French verb ‘courtiser’ covered a whole range of meanings.