Like the Occitan troubadours and the trouvères of northern France, the Minnesänger celebrated courtly love and gave medieval German its letters of nobility. These "singers of love" — Minne is the old German word for love — thus perpetuated a poetic and musical tradition that had begun nearly two centuries earlier in Occitania. The Minnesänger, generally of noble and knightly blood, gradually emancipated themselves from their French models and developed their own styles and forms during the 13th century.