Apart from the brief blaze of glory in the late fourth and fifth centuries, with the flourishing of the Bordeaux schools and the reign of the Visigothic kings, south-west Gaul is very much a terra incognita from the time of Caesar's conquest down to the emergence of Romanesque architecture and the poetry of the troubadors. It is usually on the periphery of affairs, it nourished no authors of importance save in that one period of a hundred years, and it has attracted few historians in modern times.