Also composed in iambic pentameter were the earliest of the Old French chansons de geste of the 11th to 13th centuries. Like the examples above, the poems usually had a caesura after the fourth syllable. One of the oldest is The Song of Roland, which begins as follows: "Charles the King, our great Emperor, For seven full years has been in Spain; As far as the sea conquered the high land. No castle remains in his way; No wall or citadel is left to break, Except for Saragossa, which is on a hill." In this version of the metre as in the poems above, each line has two halves: the first half has four syllables (sometimes 5), while the second half has seven (sometimes 6); in the first half there are two stresses and in the second half three. In some places the final weak vowel -e is ignored, e.g. . Troubadors and Italians This line was adopted with more flexibility by the troubadours of Provence in the 12th century, notably Cercamon, Bernart de Ventadorn, and Bertran de Born. In both Old French and Old Provençal, the tenth syllable of the line was accented and feminine endings were common, in which case the line had eleven syllables. Italian poets such as Giacomo da Lentini, Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Dante adopted this line, generally using the eleven-syllable form (endecasillabo) because most Italian words have feminine endings. They often used a pattern where the fourth syllable (normally accented) and the fifth (normally unaccented) were part of the same word, the opposite of the Old French line with its required pause after the fourth syllable. This pattern came to be considered typically Italian. Dante's Divine Comedy, completed in 1320, begins as follows: "In the middle of the road of my life I found myself going through a dark forest where the straight path was obscured." There is now often no syntactic pause after the fourth syllable, and every line has eleven syllables. Another innovation common in Italian is synaloepha where a final and an initial vowel merge into one syllable, as in or above. Giovanni Boccaccio's Filostrato of the 1330s, imitated by Chaucer in his Troilus and Criseyde, has a similar rhythm. It begins as follows: "Some are accustomed to invoke Jupiter's favour in their pious opening verses; others call on Apollo's power" Chaucer The first to write iambic pentameter verse in English was