The troubadours: the Occitan poetry that invented European love lyric

The earliest troubadour whose poems have come down to us was a great lord: William IX, duke of Aquitaine and count of Poitiers, who lived from 1071 to 1126. His songs mix student-style obscenity with amorous refinement, and they open a season that would last about two centuries. The poets who wrote in Occitan were called troubadours, from trobar, to find, that is, to compose verse and melody.

Poets and musicians

The troubadours composed words and music together, and their songs were meant to be sung. Some were noblemen, others of humble origin, like Bernart de Ventadorn, the son, according to his old biography, of a servant at the castle of Ventadorn and the author of some of the most musical love songs of medieval lyric. Performance was often entrusted to jongleurs, professional entertainers who travelled from court to court.

Around two thousand five hundred poems by several hundred authors have reached us, preserved in large songbooks copied mostly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, many of them in Italy. Melodies survive for only a small proportion of these texts. The vidas and razos, short prose biographies and commentaries, tell the poets' lives by mixing real information with legend.

Genres and styles

The main form is the canso, the love song. Alongside it the troubadours practised the sirventes, devoted to politics and satire; the alba, which describes the lovers' parting at daybreak, when the watchman announces danger; the pastourelle, an encounter between a knight and a shepherdess; and the tenso, a verse debate between two poets. Each genre had its own rules and conventions.

Style too was a matter of debate. The trobar leu, clear and plain, was set against the trobar clus, closed and obscure, and the trobar ric, precious and rich in difficult rhymes. Arnaut Daniel, master of the latter, invented the sestina, a form Dante and Petrarch would take up. In the Purgatorio Dante pays homage to him by having him speak in Provençal and by calling him, through Guinizelli's words, «miglior fabbro del parlar materno», the better craftsman of the mother tongue.

Distant loves and women poets

Jaufre Rudel sang of amor de lonh, love from afar, addressed to a woman he had never seen. His vida tells that he fell in love with the countess of Tripoli merely from hearing of her, crossed the sea to reach her and died in her arms as soon as he arrived. It is a legend built on the poems, but its power is such that it has reached the modern theatre and opera.

There were also trobairitz, women troubadours. The best known is the Comtessa de Dia, some of whose songs survive, overturning the usual point of view and giving voice to female desire and disappointment. Their presence, documented by some twenty names, shows that Occitan lyric was not an exclusively male experience, even though the surviving texts by women are few.

The Albigensian Crusade, fought in the south of France between 1209 and 1229, helped to break up the world of the Occitan courts. Many troubadours found hospitality in Catalonia, Castile and northern Italy, where Sordello of Mantua wrote in Occitan. Their legacy passed to the French trouvères, to the German Minnesänger and to the Sicilian School, which carried it into the Italian language.