Download PDF | Linda Paterson - Singing the Crusades_ French and Occitan Lyric Responses to the Crusading Movements, 1137-1336-D.S. Brewer (2018).
352 Pages
Acknowledgements
This book is the fruit of a collaborative project, Lyric Reponses to the Crusades in Medieval France and Occitania, funded by research grants from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Academy, the Humanities Research Fund of the University of Warwick and the Warwick Department of French Studies. I am deeply grateful to all these bodies for enabling the project. It has led to the online publication of over 200 critical editions of Old French and Occitan texts, and although I wrote the present book and take full responsibility for its defects, I drew heavily on these editions and the philological, literary and historical research involved in their establishment.
In this sense the book’s authorship is collaborative. Luca Barbieri and Anna Radaelli produced all but one of the Old French texts, with assistance from Stefano Asperti, the remaining song being Richard the Lionheart’s Ja nus homs pris, edited by Charmaine Lee. I established the majority of the Occitan texts, either editing them anew or updating reliable ones. A number were also edited by Ruth Harvey, and we cross-checked each other’s editions. Other scholars kindly contributed other new Occitan editions: Miriam Cabré, Sadurni Marti and Marina Navas, Walter Meliga, Lauren Mulholland, Gianfelice Peron and Giorgio Barachini who stepped in most generously at a time of crisis.
I am also grateful to Stefano Asperti, Giorgio Barachini, Gilda Caiti-Russo, Gérard Gouiran, Saverio Guida, Giosué Lachin, Monica Longobardi, Paolo di Luca, Dario Mantovani, Caterina Menichetti, Carlo Pulsoni, Paulo Squillacioti and Sergio Vatteroni for the use of their published editions. The English translations were done by me with Ruth Harvey’s assistance, the Italian ones by Luca Barbieri with the help of Anna Radaelli, and Barbieri performed the technical work of putting the editions online at <http://www.rialto.unina.it/BdT.htm>, with some help from Oriana Scarpati and Paolo di Luca. Costanzo di Girolamo kindly hosted the editions in the Rialto website and gave unfailingly prompt assistance throughout the project and beyond.
I am grateful to Tom Asbridge, John Gillingham, Nick Paul, Jonathan Phillips, Isabel de Riquer and Jane Taylor for their encouragement and suggestions, and most particularly to: Simon Gaunt, who read the whole manuscript; to Jonathan Phillips and Simon Parsons, Royal Holloway University of London and the Isobel Thornley Fund for enabling us to hold a colloquium on the project in London in 2014; to Liese Perrin and Katie Klaassen for their invaluable help with grant applications and administration; to Steve Ranford who with assistance from Warwick IT Services set up the project website and gave generously of his time in contributing to its development and maintenance; and to Caroline Palmer, Rob Kinsey and the production team at Boydell & Brewer for their kind attention and hard work in bringing both Singing the Crusades and Literature of the Crusades to fruition. Francesco Carapezza and Gérard Gouiran contributed sung and spoken performances of melodies to the website, kindly recorded at short notice by Arthur Brown and Paul Savva-Andreou. Mike Paterson, unsparing as ever in his patience, inventiveness and time, took over the exacting tasks of putting the Old French texts online and producing the map outlines; he has been a boundless source of technical and moral support.
I should like to emphasise my particular gratitude to my closest collaborators over the last five years. Luca Barbieri went way beyond the call of his duties as Research Assistant, and his professional expertise, his constant and quick responsiveness and his readiness to help out in difficult circumstances have been essential to the project’s success. Anna Radaelli’s enthusiasm, fine scholarship and willingness to help out despite her other commitments have been of great benefit to our common endeavours and a source of keen pleasure to me personally. Ruth Harvey has done a great deal of work behind the scenes, and has been unflagging in her support and encouragement. She helps me see the wood for the trees.
Linda Paterson
Author’s Note
This book is an outcome of a wish to make the lyric sources available and to diffuse the information and insights they provide. It is based on a corpus of over two hundred texts which have been placed online, half of them newly edited from the medieval manuscripts, together with translations and information about their dating and the historical circumstances of their composition.’ References in the book are given to the trouvére (Old French) texts with the preface RS, for example RS 1125, and to troubadour (Occitan) ones with the preface BdT or BPP, for example BdT 10.1 or BPP 557.1.? The book is designed for a variety of readers, and to avoid overloading it with an excessive number of bibliographical references these are not given when the full background information is already provided with the online texts. The website should be consulted for these and for further discussions about dating and circumstances of composition. Such references are signalled within the book.
Introduction
The crusades have left a profound and disturbing legacy in inter-cultural and interfaith relations, nationally and worldwide, not least in the continuing aftermath of the then US President George W. Bush’s 2001 ‘crusade’ against Iraq. Daily we witness the interminable ravaging of ancient Middle Eastern cities, as crusading rhetoric gushes from the global political discourse transmitted in the media. In seeking more than a simplistic view of the original, medieval crusading movement, we can draw on a wide variety of written sources. Most are in Latin.
Ecclesiastical documents present official versions of the preaching, organisation and events of the medieval crusades. Narratives in both Latin and the vernacular offer a range of factual information, eye-witness or mythologised accounts of particular expeditions, the memorialisation of heroic ancestral deeds and fantasy adventures exploiting crusading themes. What the lyrics of the troubadours and trouvéres' provide is a myriad of different secular voices — thirty-seven trouvéres, seventy-five troubadours — bringing to life up-to-the-minute responses to the crusading movement, not only in France and Occitania but also in Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, Cyprus, the Holy Land and Greece.
These help us to understand what the multifarious public in the Middle Ages thought of the crusades: how it responded to particular expeditions; in what ways its responses varied according to time and place; how far it was inspired by the idea of holy war; how far it envisaged crusading and secular ideals as compatible; to what extent it accepted, influenced, participated in, resisted or challenged the Church's crusading propaganda; how its attitudes were affected by the Albigensian crusade launched against troubadour lands in the South; and how it faced the repeated failures of crusading efforts, as time went on.
Crusading troubadours and trouvéres
Not a few of our troubadours and trouvéres went on crusade themselves. Jaufre Rudel accompanied the French on the Second Crusade. Between then and the Third Crusade Peire Bremon lo Tort was in the service of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, Giraut de Borneil made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land with Viscount Aimar V of Limoges and Peire Vidal travelled to the court of Count Raymond II of Tripoli, where he was staying when Jerusalem fell to the Muslims in 1187. During the Third Crusade Giraut returned to the Holy Land, which Peirol also visited. Crusading trouvéres include Richard the Lionheart, the Chatelain de Coucy and possibly Gautier de Dargies. Conon de Béthune was supposed to go on the Third Crusade but did not.
However, he played a leading réle in the Fourth, which also saw the participation of the Chatelain de Coucy, who died at sea in June 1203, Hughes de Berzé, the Vidame de Chartres, and the Occitan poets Gaucelm Faidit, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Elias Cairel and Ysabella.* The Chatelain d’Arras took part in the Fifth Crusade; Hughes de Berzé invites Falquet de Romans in one of his songs to go with him, though there is no evidence that they went, while Pons de Capdoill announces his intention to take part (BdT 375.22, 25). His vida (Occitan prose ‘biography’) says he did so, and that he died overseas, which is plausible, even if there is nothing to corroborate this. Philippe de Novare is an important source for the crusade of Frederick I] Hohenstaufen. No other poets of our corpus are recorded in the context of this expedition, though Uc de Pena briefly addresses a certain Lord Guy (BdT 456.1) to say, ‘May God let you return from over there where you are in order to serve Him’, a nobleman probably to be identified as Count Gui IV of Forez, who accompanied Frederick on this venture; and in an exchange of cob/as (stanzas), Peire Bremon Ricas Novas accuses Gui de Cavaillon of abandoning this same crusade.
Taking part in the barons’ crusade of 1239 led by Thibaut de Champagne were other trouvéres: Philippe de Nanteuil,’ possibly Chardon de Croisilles (in RS 449 it would appear that he is about to leave on an expedition, though there is no historical certainty that he actually did so), Raoul de Soissons and the anonymous author of RS 1133. Raoul also went on the Seventh Crusade, as did Philippe de Nanteuil and the troubadour Austorc d’Aorlhac, who took the cross two years after King Louis IX’s capture at Mansurah in 1250. During the 1260s a Templar in the East, Ricaut Bonomel, sent out a desperate appeal for help, and Louis’ second crusade saw Raoul de Soissons leave for the East for a third time.
Some of our troubadours may have fought the Muslims in Spain: Marcabru supports Reconquista campaigns and may or may not have been involved in actual combat; Giraut de Borneil states his intention to participate in a Spanish campaign (BdT 242.74, 69-90), and in 1265 the troubadours Guiraut Riquier and Guillem de Mur debate whether to follow King James I of Aragon to Murcia (BdT 248.37).
Some of the trouvéres of our corpus are known to have been in contact with their Occitan counterparts. These include: Conon de Béthune and Bertran de Born, and possibly Giraut de Borneil, at the time of the Third Crusade; Conon de Béthune, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and Elias Cairel in Greece during the aftermath of the Fourth;’ and Thibaut de Champagne, Falquet de Romans and possibly Peire Cardenal during the Albigensian wars of 1224-1233. During the Second Crusade Marcabru indicates his wish to send a song (BdT 293.15) overseas to the French. Gaucelm Faidit appears to have composed a song for French crusaders during a stopover as the Fourth Crusade was under way.*
Crusading terminology
After the First Crusade it took eighty to a hundred years before troubadours and trouvéres felt the need to use specific terms for ‘crusader’ and ‘crusade’. ‘At their origins, Benjamin Weber remarks, ‘and indeed throughout the Middle Ages, crusades were usually referred to by terms, both in Latin and the vernacular, indicating movement or travel, such as peregrinatio, iter, via, expeditio and later passagium, and the corresponding verbs, often combined with a reference to Jerusalem, the Holy Land, the Holy Sepulcher, or the cross, and in the vernacular with ouzre mer or ober meer.? Our lyric poets commonly speak of going (away, on their way, to serve, overseas, there, on a journey), following (God) or riding.’° If a crusade was a type of pilgrimage, up to and including the Third Crusade references in our lyrics to crusade as pilgrimage, or crusaders as pilgrims, are rare. The earliest secure examples occur in Conon de Béthune and Peire Vidal,” at the same time as the somewhat more specific passar ‘to cross [to the Holy Land]’, passatge ‘the voyage [to the Holy Land]’,” the personal nouns crosatz and croisiés (literally ‘those crossed, marked by a cross’) in Bertran de Born and Conon de Béthune, and the Occitan verb crosar (‘to take the cross’) in Bertran de Born and Folquet de Marselha."
The vernacular term crozada is first recorded in a Navarrese charter of 1212 and in the Midi in 1210-1213 by Guilhem de Tudela, the Navarrese author of the first part of the Song of the Albigensian Crusade.’* Marjolaine Raguin has shown that the Anonymous Continuator (Guilhem Anelier de Tolosa?),’* who unlike Guilhem was profoundly hostile to the French invasion under Simon de Montfort, then used the word sarcastically to illustrate the way it was manipulated by the crusade’s clergy. She notes that both authors use the term an equal number of times (five), but argues convincingly that this apparent balance needs to be considered alongside the word guerra (war), employed by Guilhem in five instances but omnipresent in the Continuator (forty-five occurrences). Guilhem’s notion of crusade is supplanted in the Continuator’s text by its insistence on the guerra between southerners and the French (or the foreigners), a lexical change showing how the crozada has become secondary for this author, and the word crozada only figures in the text to emphasise what the author sees as the clergy’s travesty of the idea of holy war.* The troubadours Tomier and Palaizi echo such usage when they excoriate the falsa croisada of the French (BdT 442.1, 18). Raguin shows how the Continuator also exploits the term perdon, which can mean ‘indulgence’ and then the crusade that leads to it, to denounce Pope Innocent HI’s distortion of the idea of crusading and to set up the idea of a counter-crusade on the part of the southerners.”
The vernacular term crozada is transferred to papal usage only two centuries later, as the noun cruciata. Weber states that in the fifteenth century it is an Iberian word which the pope uses for the sake of convenience to designate a reality which has no name in his vocabulary." It refers first of all to a letter of indulgences, and then to a crusading expedition. He argues that by introducing the word cruciata to designate indulgences and the warfare waged thanks to those indulgences, popes justified their action by minimising their novelty. It was a way of legitimising their wars and the way they were waged: the new word was a political act aimed at imposing the right of popes to direct war, as they understood it, against the Ottomans. Weber raises the question of how far terms specific to oriental crusading appearing in narratives of the Albigensian Crusade represented a conscious move to justify that crusade, and how far it was just a ‘simple rapprochement mental’. Guilhem de Tudela’s use of the word crozada certainly incorporated the legitimising sign of the cross into the Albigensian war. Whether or not it was a conscious move on his part, the Continuator’s scathing response to it shows he was fully conscious of its political implications.”
Christopher Tyerman has observed that “The inability of an otherwise articulate and categorizing intellectual elite to agree or even propose a term for the activity which later was named “crusade” has tended to be noted without too much comment by modern observers. Yet the terminological vagueness of the twelfth century may be significant. To put it crudely, we know there were crusaders: they did not; or, if they did, their perception was far from the canonically or juridically precise definition beloved of some late twentieth-century scholars.”° The present book is not in fact concerned with defining what was or was not a crusade, and indeed the lyric poets themselves show little interest in this beyond arguing about the legitimacy of different Church-endorsed enterprises. The book adopts an inclusive approach to the crusading movement, and takes as its starting-point what medieval lyric poets composing in Occitan and Old French said, both about wars against Muslims in Spain and the Holy Land, and about wars against Christians in Greece, Occitania, Cyprus, Aragon and Italy which the Church sanctioned as holy wars.”
The corpus of texts
Since the focus of interest in this book is what the lyric poets say about the crusades, questions of genre are secondary. Just as it is not concerned with what was or was not a crusade, so the book does not attempt to define what was or was not a crusade song, even if it will offer some indication of the different types of text in which these responses appear.” Our corpus of relevant texts comprises 151 Occitan and 51 Old French songs. In the previous most complete overview of troubadour crusading songs, published in 1905, Kurt Lewent identified 33 so-called crusade songs and 30 others containing crusading elements, so 63 in all relevant to the crusades: some two-fifths of ours.” In her 1995 study of the Old French crusade song Cathrynke Dijkstra drew up a list of 35 texts on the basis of Bédier, Oeding and Schéber, excluding 5 of these from her own corpus; ours adds 16 more to her total.
We have excluded many texts containing passing references of little historical value beyond showing that their authors and audiences were imbued with a general awareness of the crusades. So, for example, it was not thought necessary to include twelve texts mentioning cities of the East as symbols of wealth and power, of the kind ‘T felt more joy than if I'd been given Corrosana’, or eight where the Holy Land represents exotic places meaning ‘far away’, in phrases such as ‘from here to Edessa’. Also excluded are fixed phrases such as trufas de Roais (trivial or illusory things from Edessa), ‘Saracen’ used as an insult to a Christian adversary, allusions to holy places in religious songs recounting lives of Christ or the Virgin, without reference to crusading, and what are judged to be the essentially literary exploitation of crusading locations or ideas, sometimes for the sake of a rhyme, such as a troubadour joking about defeating a couple of Saracens or Christians anywhere from here to the River Jordan, or saying that it would have been better to be imprisoned by the Masmutz (Muslims) than by his lady. Also set aside are references of doubtful or no value, where their significance or the referent is unclear, or they add nothing to our understanding of the crusades. Brief reference is made to a number of marginal texts for which online editions are not provided, and there are inevitably some grey areas in applying our criteria.
The history of the Albigensian Crusade is well known,” and the lyrics that concern it have been the subject of an excellent study by Eliza Ghil which this book does not attempt to reduplicate.** Included in our corpus are texts which shed light on ideas of crusading through comparisons their authors make between the Albigensian Crusade and combat against Muslims in the East or in Spain, but we exclude those which essentially constitute general anticlericalism, exhortations to resistance, or reminders of specific events such as Raymond VII’s humiliation at the Treaty of Paris in 1229.”
The trouvéres’ lyric treatment of the topic of crusading is different from that of the troubadours, not least because of the predominance of Old French songs of departure, which emphasise the love theme above that of crusading. We have decided whether to include a French text on the basis of two criteria: whether or not a trouvére is referring to a crusade, and whether a crusading reference is more than a passing literary exploitation of a crusading motif which adds little or nothing to our understanding of the crusades themselves. RS 768, RS 800 and RS 1157 fall under the latter category. We have regarded RS 1404 by Gontier de Soignies, in which the speaker, in the face of failure in love, announces his determination to voyage overseas and become a Templar, as a variation of chansons de départie (songs of departure and separation) and a cas limite for inclusion. Unlike Dijkstra, who rejected pieces by Gautier de Dargies (RS 1575 and 795), the Vidame de Chartres (RS 502) and Raoul de Soissons (RS 1204), we have included them. The Vidame took part in the Fourth Crusade and refers to being overseas, and his pieces have both historical and thematic interest. Raoul de Soissons’ song RS 1204 explicitly refers to crusading. It is uncertain that Gautier de Dargies went on crusade or that the two lyrics refer to this: RS 1575 states simply that he has been abroad for a long time, but it forms part of a fairly uniform group of texts on the subject of separation from the lady (see, for example, the introductory notes to RS 1204 and RS 421), some of which refer to crusading explicitly, and the piece is moreover linked to Raoul de Soissons’ song RS 1204, which explicitly refers to crusading, follows it chronologically and almost certainly draws on it. His song RS 795 contains elements that suggest, albeit inconclusively, his intention to leave on crusade, and it was judged appropriate to include it alongside his other piece.
Typology and transmission
It is easier to classify, in broad terms, the types of Old French texts included in our corpus than the Occitan ones. Dijkstra and Barbieri* identify the former as: firstly, songs of exhortation: propaganda texts often relaunching themes expressed in preaching, papal bulls and official documents of kings and lords; secondly, political sirventes containing references to the Holy Land; and thirdly, love songs ot chansons de départie, with either a masculine or a feminine first-person speaker.
The more extensive Occitan corpus also includes these elements, but is more wide-ranging and varied. Its exhortations concern Spain as well as the Holy Land and the Latin empire in Greece.*° While a few of these exhortations are addressed to an unspecified general audience,” in the vast majority of cases, unlike the French texts, they mention specific noblemen, named or implied; and they are often mixed in with other themes, sometimes little more than short references in love or moralising songs on unconnected topics.” Occitan political sirventes in our corpus are often hard to differentiate from songs of exhortation: a number concern the conflict between Frederick I] and the papacy; not a few involve criticism of crusading, crusaders,® or those who sabotage or abandon crusades,** and may refer to expeditions to the Holy Land as a foil for actions at home, particularly in the context of papally sanctioned crusades against Christians.” While Old French chansons de départie, comprising about two-fifths of the Old French corpus, lament the pain of separation from the beloved as the man leaves on crusade, Occitan songs of departure hardly ever conform to this general model. They may, for example, celebrate an imminent crusade,* announce departure in a local political context, regret departure from a specific courtly environment, emphasise the lovers’ fidelity rather than the pain of separation or claim that the lady has driven him overseas. Two troubadours focus on arrival rather than departure, giving thanks for safe landfall.° The Occitan songs often contain personal elements: Raimbaut de Vaqueiras tries to come to terms with the desperate situation in Greece; Peirol thanks God for letting him visit the holy places in Jerusalem.*? A number concern contingent issues such Frederick H’s conduct towards John of Ibelin in Cyprus, or Louis [X’s failure to secure the release of Venetian prisoners in Genoa as he leaves on his second crusade. Two troubadours discuss whether to join the Reconquista in hope of gain. Comedy and burlesque feature particularly in the Occitan texts, whether in the light-hearted (or even outrageous) presentation of the troubadour’s persona or crusading themes,* or in playful dialogue poems, though the Old French songs of Philippe de Novare satirise the poet’s enemies through comic allusions to the Roman de Renart, which itself parodies crusading themes.*
The differences between our Old French and Occitan songs may have a lot to do with their respective manuscript traditions. Luca Barbieri’s important research on the Old French songbooks has shown how these generally appear to be aristocratic, luxury productions, focusing primarily on an exclusive, monothematic canon of love songs, and making a more rigid distinction between genres. Their uniform and exclusive nature has probably emphasised the development of the Old French crusade lyric in the direction of the love song, and may well explain the proliferation of chansons de départie where crusading is largely subsumed into, and subordinate to, the theme of love. Barbieri observes that texts more closely linked to the Occitan sirventes tradition do exist, but these are contained in marginal manuscript traditions, or in association with chronicles, or in the exceptional Liederbuch (songbook) of the trouvére Thibaut de Champagne, and must in fact have been much more numerous in Old French than it would appear from the surviving material which reflects the tastes of the songbook compilers and those who commissioned them. Types of lyric composition extraneous to the courtly love song, the ‘grand chant courtois’,, tended to be set aside and have been preserved thanks to chance circumstances or less exclusive collections.**
‘The composers’ social status
Barbieri’s conclusions are mirrored in the social position of the known Old French and Occitan authors in our corpus. If we assume that all of the anonymous pieces were written by different authors, our corpus includes approximately twice as many Occitan composers (75) as Old French ones (37). There is a much higher proportion of anonymous texts in Old French: 18/51 of the Old French texts, only 6/151 of the Occitan ones (and only two of these are definitely without manuscript attribution). There is also a higher proportion of noblemen in Old French. Of the 26 trouvéres whose social status is known, half or more (14-17) are nobles.** The situation for the Occitan troubadours is hazier, since for those of lesser rank in particular we must rely for our information on the vidas or the conclusions of the Dizionario Biografico dei Trovatori (DBT). However, the overall picture gives a lower proportion of noblemen (23/59), with few of these belonging to the higher nobility and more being minor nobles, simple knights or stemming from knightly families.”
‘There is a correspondingly smaller range of non-noble trouvéres than troubadours. The trouvéres appear to include: one member of the minor bourgeoisie; two members of the upper bourgeoisie from Arras; a poor knight; a ‘master’; an Anglo-Norman scribe from the Royal Chancery of Henry II; and three clerics.“ The troubadours range more broadly over the social spectrum: 14 members of the bourgeoisie; a tailor (Guillem Figueira); a gold- and silver-worker who designed armour (Elias Cairel); 2 masters and 5 other clerics including a monk;” a teacher (Giraut de Borneil); three high-ranking officials (a podesta, a judge and a magistrate); a royal court poet (Cerveri de Girona); seven jongleurs; and a troubadour with outstanding musical gifts, Peirol, who may have been a servant at the court of Auvergne.
‘These figures seem to confirm that, as Barbieri has emphasised, the Old French manuscript tradition favours the preservation of aristocratic poetic production, while the Occitan one is more open and inclusive. When the Old French manuscripts do transmit songs which fall outside the traditions of chansons de départie and courtly love, they seem rather less interested in preserving the names of their authors. In a few cases* one may wonder whether the pieces have been commissioned for propaganda purposes and the authors, however talented, are under the direction of royal or ecclesiastical authorities. In the South, the figures may reflect the importance of towns as centres of troubadour activity, as well as the fluid border between knights and burghers, and indeed other social classes.
It might be assumed that the lower down the social scale the poet—musician was, the more dependent he was likely to be on patronage. Many troubadours did, clearly, voice the views of their actual or potential patrons; but they could be very free in their expression. Bertran d’Alamanon told Charles of Anjou in diplomatic but no uncertain terms not to waste time on Louis IX’s first crusade; Sordel wrote scurrilously about his alleged sexual preferences.
Public opinion
How far can our lyric poetry be said to reflect public opinion of the time? This is a question that has been primarily discussed in relation to vernacular lyric expressions of dissent: some scholars, such as Palmer Throop and Saverio Guida, have claimed that these can be regarded as a reliable index of public opinion, and others (Elizabeth Siberry, David Trotter) have minimised their value in this respect, while Alessandro Barbero concludes that whether or not the poet—musicians were reflecting public opinion, they were helping to form it.* But the question applies not only to songs of dissent but also, more widely, to any lyrics which comment on the crusading enterprise.
The historian Nicholas Paul has recently presented a compelling example of one troubadour at least whose poetry is an excellent source for evidence of the mentality of his region. By setting Bertran de Born within the historical and cultural context of the Limousin nobility in conflict with royal authority, Paul reveals how well the troubadour’s testimony concerning royal inaction in the face of repeated calls for help from the East complements that of other sources, such as the Limousin chronicler Geoffrey of Vigeois. Paul’s analysis shows not only the support felt in this region for the crusading enterprise but also the role played by the memory of the crusades in contemporary regional politics. Crusading, he argues, was a key part of the strategy that Henry the Young King used against his father King Henry II of England and his brother Richard the Lionheart in the Limousin in 1182-1183. All three were under considerable pressure to take the cross and help defend the Kingdom of Jerusalem against Saladin. When the Young King heard that Henry and Richard were on their way to Limoges, he first withdrew to a nearby town, then ‘suddenly returned to Limoges and seized the initiative by placing his hands over the body of Saint Martial and vowing to take the cross as a crusader’. Henry was checkmated, and compelled to support his son’s decision with a public display of enthusiasm. The Young King, Paul argues, was shrewdly exploiting his knowledge that ‘the Limousin was a region where the memory of the crusades and commitment to the continued crusading enterprise had not waned since the time when so many of the region’s knights and lords had headed for Jerusalem in 1096’, and that while ‘the kings of England, France, and Aragén had hesitated, the Viscount of Limoges, Adhémar V, and a number of other Limousin knights had traveled to the Holy Land in 1178’. Paul highlights the use of banners and other ceremonial cloths commemorating local crusading activities in this region, notably by the dynasty of the lords of Lastours, as a weapon in the contest between royal authority and local identity. Interestingly it was from Lastours that emanated, according to Geoffrey of Vigeois, one of the earliest narrative accounts of the First Crusade. Geoffrey states that this was a long vernacular poem that took twelve years to write. It is now lost, though a fragment known as the Canso d’Antioca no doubt derives from it. Its author was the knight Gregory Bechada from the castle of Lastours, whose lord was the Goufher of Lastours who distinguished himself in 1098 at the city of Ma’arrat-an-Numan.” The record of this reinforces the importance of crusade memorialisation in the region. At the same time the loss of this apparently massive work is a tantalising reminder of how far hitherto undiscovered, or permanently lost, material might affect our appraisal of the lyrics as evidence of public opinion of the time.*
Audiences, propaganda, impact
The case of Bertran de Born offers a telling instance of songs reflecting public opinion where this means the opinion of the knightly classes. In interpreting the value of other texts as evidence of wider opinion it is important, but not always easy or indeed possible, to identify the primary target audience, to consider the extent to which they can be regarded as propaganda on behalf of a particular person or group or to discover any evidence of their impact on the audience’s opinions or actions. Sometimes the primary target audience is clear: the song has a specific short-term goal and seeks to influence particular people in particular cirumstances. Richard the Lionheart’s Ja nus homs pris (RS 1891), written while he was in prison in Germany and sent to France and England, puts pressure on his vassals and suzerain to pay his ransom. It is addressed principally to them, while also aiming to create a climate of opinion that will increase such pressure. Raimbaut de Vaqueiras targets the emperor of Constantinople and his council to press them to fulfil the emperor’s promise to make Marquis Boniface of Monferrat ruler of Thessalonica (BdT 392.9a) — which he did. And when Louis IX, after his release from captivity in Egypt, is deliberating whether to return to France or stay behind to try to secure the release of prisoners, an anonymous trouvére composes a song to combat the efforts of the ‘cowards and flatterers’ urging him to leave (RS 1887). He must have intended for this to reach the king’s ears, or at least those of men who could influence the king’s decision. The king decided to stay.
‘The primary audience of Old French chansons de départie is also little in doubt. These are the self-reflexive songs of an in-group, where aristocrats address each other expressing refined sentiments in artistically constructed compositions which reinforce their courtly and knightly values. Such songs were no doubt performed at court, but the court is essentially where the lord is, and hence movable; there are signs that some songs were composed and performed at staging-posts of departure on crusade.” Others may have heard and transmitted such songs, but they are above all the exclusive, self-promoting and self-confirming entertainment of the nobility — while no doubt also being designed to stiffen morale and commitment once crusading is under way.
Other songs were visibly designed for performance at particular courts or in particular places: for example, the Limousin court to which Gaucelm Faidit bids farewell as he leaves on crusade (BdT 167.9), or the Malaspina court where Maria-Luisa Meneghetti very precisely identifies the audience as that of homines de masnada, i.e. members of Alberic’s feudal family, a compact group of unfree knights (the Dienstritter of Germanic tradition).°° When Raimbaut de Vaqueiras is holed up in Thessalonica while Boniface of Monferrat is off fighting the Wallacho-Bulgarians, never to return, the troubadour sings to others in the fortress to keep up their spirits and his own (BdT 392.24). The anonymous Chevalier, mult estes guariz (RS 1548a) is explicitly addressed to a knightly audience, while the use of proverbs with a mercantile flavour in RS 1967 suggests a bourgeois public. Many of the Occitan sirventes address rulers and other members of the nobility by name, though there is a wider circle involved, its nature varying according to the particular circumstances of composition and performance.
Whatever the primary audience, songs may well have reached other listeners. A short section of the account of the First Crusade on p. 187 of MS Hatton 77 of the Bodelian Library depicts the performance of rotrouenges and other songs as entertainment on crusade, describing how, after a great loss of life, the Christian camp fell silent at night, when throughout the night there was no rotrouenge ne neis un vers de son to be heard. A rotrouenge is a type of lyric; a vers de son could be a line or stanza or section of a song, perphaps lyric, perhaps epic.”
As we have seen, Dijkstra and Barbieri describe songs of exhortation as propaganda texts which often relaunch themes expressed in preaching, papal bulls and official documents of kings and lords. This raises the thorny issue of what constitutes propaganda, but these horatory texts can reasonably be so regarded in the sense that they seek to ‘propagate’ a particular doctrine or practice and persuade people to commit to specific action.” They may have been assimilated with preaching activity in contemporary consciousness: Stefano Asperti has observed that there is at least one explicit piece of evidence for this, in the prose razo to Folquet de Marselha’s song BdT 155.15 which supports Alfonso VII of Castile in his fight against the king of Morocco, and presents the song as una prezicansa.®
But the term prezicx in fact has a wider extension than the sense which we normally attribute to preaching. An interesting occurrence of the word occurs in a song by the troubadour Guillem Fabre of Narbonne, which probably dates from 1284 during preparations in the Narbonne region for the so-called Aragonese crusade. This was launched by Pope Martin IV against King Peter III of Aragon, and led by King Philip IIH of France and his nephew Charles of Anjou, then king of Sicily, with the support of Peter’s brother King James II of Mallorca (BdT 216.2). Guillem is deeply hostile to the looming conflict, which threatens not only internecine cruelty but also neglect of the holy places and God’s cause: the great princes, he declares, should be directing their mustering and prezicx at the heathens rather than each other. While it could in theory be imagined that the leaders on each side of the Pyrenees are ordering preachers to pronounce sermons on the religious justification of their cause, there is no evidence for this. What does exist is a series of short songs authored by troubadours including the king of Aragon which constitute a kind of flyting match or ritual exchange of insults, to be heard by the public at large in Narbonne on the one hand and Aragon on the other, and designed to stiffen the resolve of those who have already taken sides. Our edition translates prezicx here as ‘public addresses’: if there is preaching, it is preaching to the converted and intimidation of the enemy.
Many of the references to crusading and the Holy Land in our corpus are to be found in political sirventes, particularly those of a Ghibelline persuasion.“ Martin Aurell assumes these to constitute political propaganda, and describes their function as raising the prestige of a patron or transmitting messages favourable to him by creating a climate of opinion and putting pressure on the group of listeners.” The listeners, he argues, intervene actively in the development of the song, as the creation and oral transmission of the sirventes allow for considerable improvisation and audience reaction, the listeners will recite the song and change it at will, and the repetition of a well-known tune and the sirventes ability to make people laugh can make it very popular. There is evidence for this. At the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, some anticlerical sirventes by Peire Cardenal and Guillem Figueira were circulating in the Midi in bourgeois and popular milieux. Guillem Figueira’s famous sirventes against Rome, composed in 1227 (BdT 217.2), was still being sung in Toulouse in 1274, when inquisitors asked a certain Bernart Raimon Baranhon, the son of a merchant of Toulouse and suspected of heresy, whether he owned, held or had seen a book beginning ‘Roma Trichairitz’. He replied in the negative but said he had sometimes heard a song or some stanzas composed by a certain jongleur called Figuera recited in public in the presence of many people, which he thought began with the words ‘du siruentes far en est so que magensa e sai ses doptar que naurai maluolensa dels fals de Mauples de Roma que ez caps de la chaensa que dechai tots bes’.“° ‘Roma trichairitz’ is the first line of the third stanza of Guillem’s invective, and the words cited by Bernart Raimon correspond in part to its opening stanza. Miriam Cabré has shown how the power of poetry to convey a political message effectively and exacerbate conflicts in northern Italy is exemplified by a poem by Peire de la Caravana, which encouraged Italian cities to fight together against Frederick I], and which provoked an edict by the podesta of San Gimignano banning any songs about Guelfs and Ghibellines in its castle or court.” The genre of the sirventes, Aurell maintains, is the medieval media par excellence: the fastest, most far-reaching and effective way of diffusing political propaganda and influencing public opinion.* The goal — or one of the goals — of these songs which combine crusading exhortations and political messages is not so much to persuade people to commit to the crusading cause as to harness crusading ideas in the denigration of, and resistance to, political opponents.
However, as Asperti has argued, the Occitan sirventes is a literary product, rooted in the expressive traditions of cultured lyric poetry, and celebrating from within the group the qualities and values of the knights and their leaders. In this respect it would be no different from the Old French chansons de départie. The Italian scholar observes that in many cases political sirventes containing references to the Holy Land are formally complex and sophisticated, and therefore there is more to them than simply their content. What is transmitted in the first instance is the culturally elevated form, the discourse perfected in line with the aesthetic rules of the time, sung to a fashionable tune (the sérventes normally adopts the pre-existing versification and melody of a canso, or love song). If it is legitimate to situate vernacular literary texts within the operation of some kind of political propaganda, he argues, the action that can be attributed to the majority of the texts analysed in his article is filtered through their formal aspects, hence through symbolic forms. So the action of propaganda will be predominantly indirect and will be explained on a level dictated by symbolic affermation, not argumentation and persuasion. In other words, as Marco Grimaldi has put it, the expressive function is more important than the persuasive one.” This might be particularly true of songs in our corpus which combine crusading references with love songs or songs of general moral import, and where crusading themes may be included for the sake of reinforcing courtly and knightly values: ‘everyone knows’ that the courtly knight will want to serve God’s cause.”
As both Aurell and Asperti have remarked, one of the predominant features of the sirventes is its emphasis on the praise and blame of individuals and behaviours. Aurell sees this as part of the propaganda process, while Asperti distinguishes it from what he sees as the key feature of propaganda, namely its goal of persuading or convincing. The song’s diffusion, he argues, is based above all on a pre-existing solidarity which may be established on common aversions rather than a coincidence of aims. The ‘first’ public, composed of those who are the nearest witnesses to particular events and situations, do not need to be informed or convinced: they are already in the know and have presumably already taken up a position in the face of the relevant dispute.” But this is not necessarily the whole picture. The song can be expected to be transmitted to others, even if we are not informed who they are; reputation mattered, and songs could damage reputations. When Olivier lo Templier (BdT 312.1) and Guillem de Mur (BdT 226.2) were urging James I of Aragon, who had just returned from his failed crusade of September 1269, to fulfil his crusading vow, Guillem concluded by reminding the king to tener en pes son bon resso, ‘be mindful of his good name’. Luciano Formisano observes that the trouvéres ‘rignoraient pas le réle politique que peut jouer la poésie, car au tout premier début du XII siécle Luc de la Barre avait payé de sa vie ses chansons contre Henri I Plantagenét’.” Charles of Anjou feared the impact of hostile songs at a critical political juncture: after his execution of Conradin in 1268, in Perugia it was decreed that ‘anyone composing, reciting or singing a song against Charles of Anjou, or saying anything injurious against him anywhere/in some way, should be fined a hundred libras of deniers for each instance. And if he could not pay the said fine his tongue should be cut out, as should be the case of those arguing in favour of Conradin, according to the manner of the statute.’”? Marcabru’s thirteenth-century vida, the basis for whose assertion is unknown, claims that the troubadour was put to death for having slandered the castellans of Guyenne.”
In the end, the implied audience of a particular song and the question of whether or not its crusading references constitute propaganda may or may not be inferable on an individual basis, and the symbolic and persuasive aspects of crusade songs are not mutually exclusive. Of the songs in our corpus, most if not all reflect Asperti’s view that, on one level at least, they are the self-reflexive, symbolic production of an in-group, and in many — but not all — cases the affirmation of its values takes precedence over, or even excludes, any instrumental, propagandistic purpose. But often we can but surmise. When Richard the Lionheart asked Folquet de Marselha to sing for him on his arrival in Marseille on 31 July 1190, where his fleet was to join him for final departure on the Third Crusade, was this for reasons of personal propaganda? The song the troubadour produced (BdT 155.3) is mainly about love, which sets the aristocratic tone; but it also sets the record straight over Richard’s determination to go on the crusade, after criticisms of his long delays.
Modes of performance
The troubadours’ most highly regarded lyric genre was the canso, or love song, where not only the words but also, normally, the tune and versification were newly invented. Other genres such as the sirventes and the tenso (a dialogue song) would usually be modelled on the melody and versification of a canso. The Old French manuscripts have preserved a much higher proportion of tunes than the Occitan ones, and this is true for the texts of our corpus: over half of the Old French lyrics (29/51, all cansos), a ninth of the Occitan (17/151).” The available information suggests that all the Occitan ones bar a tenso (BdT 189.5) have original versification (in some if not all respects) and music.”° Two were composed for special occasions: one celebrates the election of Boniface de Montferrat as leader of the crusaders in 1201 (BdT 392.3); the other is a planh (funeral lament) for Richard the Lionheart (BdT 167.22), one of only two Occitan songs whose melody has been preserved in as many as four manuscripts, three of which (WXn) are French. The others include Marcabru’s magisterial Pax in nomine Domini (BdT 293.25), the highly unusual song Finament / et jauent (BdT 461.122) in a hybrid language preserved in French manuscripts (Wd, known as French MT), a canso by Gaucelm Faidit (BdT 167.15) and three songs by Guiraut Riquier which he designates as vers, a term he adopts as part of a strategy of reclassifying poetic genres and claiming prestige for his own productions.” In short, all have a claim to a high level of artistry.
It is very hard to know how any of these songs were first performed and how they were received as performances, whether from the dramatic or the vocal point of view.’ Some crusade songs have more than one tune preserved in the manuscripts, so it is difficult to know what was the original tune, let alone be absolutely sure that the author of the poem is the composer of any of those surviving.” Nevertheless, from the interweaving of verbal and musical effects scholars have been able to make some plausible suggestions about the performance style of particular pieces, whatever the actual occasion of the performance that corresponded most closely to the surviving tune. Vincent Pollina highlights the Gregorian flavour of the melody to Pax in nomine Domini, which he qualifies as a cantor’s piece, and the balanced rhythm of its incipit, which reinforces the solemnity of the Latin. The piece exemplifies what a later trobairitz described as Marcabru singing a lei de prezicaire (in the manner of a preacher).*° Pollina’s analysis of Gaucelm’s dirge-like planh for Richard the Lionheart (BdT 167.22) shows how the melody is designed to highlight key textual elements such as the break after the fourth syllable in the opening line (Fortz causa es | que tot lo maior dan), the name Richartz (v. 6), the emotive phrase es mortz emphasised by its position after an enjambement and before a powerful caesura following the second syllable of the line (v. 7). Anna Radaelli demonstrates how the musical notation of the Old French crusade song RS 4or1 serves to clothe the text in solemnity while reproducing the prosody of the words being declaimed, indicating vocal inflections and providing stylistic information about where to lose emphasis, lower the voice or impose stress.” Margaret Switten explores Peire Vidal’s blending of unique versification and refined melody, ‘a bravura piece of remarkable energy’, to produce ‘a tone both serious and mocking’ (BdT 364.11).®
Polemical sirventes often call for trenchant vehemence rather than poised solemnity or beguiling elegance. Martin de Riquer gives an idea of how one of our heavily ironic songs (BdT 245.1) might have been performed, citing the fourteenth-century grammatical and rhetorical treatise the Leys d'‘Amors on irony: ‘e fa se ab elevatio de votz, enayssi que a la maniera del pronunciar enten hom que-! contrari vol dir’ (it is done with the voice raised, so that from the manner in which it is pronounced people understand that the opposite is intended).** Troubadours speak of a difference between high, clear singing and a poor voice that is thin and squeaky or hoarse and rasping.*® A grating voice, risible in a courtly love song, is actively desirable in the trobar brau, the rough style characteristic of many of Marcabru’s vers and of later satirical sirventes.*° Duran Sartor de Paernas’s caustic attack on those who are failing to fight for the southern cause during the Albigensian wars (BdT 126.1) chooses clipped and harsh rhyme-sounds in -oc, -ics, -ort, -ap, reinforced by their hammering repetition in coblas singulars (where all lines of each stanza end in the same sound), suggesting a biting, aggressive performance style.
The book traces a broadly chronological path. It is envisaged, and indeed hoped, that this book will be read by a variety of readers, academic and non-academic, so each chapter begins with basic background historical information before presenting and commenting on the songs themselves. Discussion of particular poets, events or concurrent crusades may induce deviation from strict chronological order; Appendix B provides a chronological overview. While the numbering of crusades (First Crusade and so on) can now be regarded as arbitrary and misleading, if not simply absurd, given the numerous expeditions that do not slot into such tidy pigeonholes, such terminology has been included simply because many readers will be familiar with it and because it serves as a shorthand for particular expeditions. The main focus of discussion in the main chapters is historical. Appendix A offers an analysis of the poets’ crusading rhetoric, while Appendix C provides information about the survival of their melodies, and the project website contains some musical (and spoken) performances and commentary.
I have quoted extensively from the online editions, so as to let the poets speak in their many varied voices. Of course, these voices come to us through the medium of manuscripts that were nearly all transcribed many years after the songs were originally composed and performed, and after going through various stages of written and oral transmission. It has been the aim of the editors involved in this project to present texts that approach their authors’ creations as faithfully as possible. The process of editing, translating and historically and culturally contextualising the online texts has often led to eureka moments, even from such details as realising that a small scribal slip obscured an otherwise perfectly clear and significant statement or, conversely, that a word in the manuscript was, contrary to received scholarly opinion, actually the right one.*” Readers interested in the arguments which have led to the establishment of a text, its dating and its historical background can ‘drill down’ into these online editions.
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