Dunbabin, Jean. France in the Making, 843–1180. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
THIBAUT DE CHAMPAGNE
(1201–1253). The most illustrious of the trouvères and one of the most prolific, Thibaut
IV, count of Champagne and king of Navarre, grandson of the great patroness of poets
Marie de Champagne, was also an important political figure. After several years’
education at the royal court of Philip II Augustus, young Thibaut began his life as a ruler
under the regency of his mother, Blanche of Navarre. He later took part in the war of the
newly crowned Louis VIII against the English, appearing at the siege of La Rochelle in
1224, and continued to serve the king, his overlord, thereafter. In 1226, however, he
withdrew his support during the royal siege of Avignon and returned home in secret.
Upon the king’s death a few months later, Thibaut was accused of having poisoned him,
but nothing came of this apparently groundless charge. The following year, he allied
himself with other feudal powers in an attempt to dethrone Blanche of Castile, widow of
Louis VIII and regent for their son Louis IX, but the queen succeeded in detaching him
from the rebellious group and making him her defender. Attacked by his erst-while allies,
Thibaut was saved by the royal army.
Thibaut’s relations with the crown, however, were unsteady, particularly after 1234,
when he succeeded his uncle Sancho the Strong as king of Navarre, and it was not until
1236 that a final peace was achieved, based on the vassal’s submission. Three years later,
he left for the Holy Land as head of the crusade of 1239; the undertaking was marked
from the start by discord among the Christian leaders and by Muslim military superiority,
the result of which was Thibaut’s decision in 1240 to withdraw from his charge and
return to France. There, armed struggles engaged his attention through the following
years, and in 1248 he made a penitent’s pilgrimage to Rome. He died in Pamplona. He
had been betrothed twice, married three times, divorced once, widowed once, and had
fathered several children. The rumor has persisted since his day that the great love of his
life was none other than Blanche of Castile, but apart from offering a tempting key to his
political shifts, it seems to have no merit.
As a trouvère, Thibaut was immediately successful, seen as equaled only by his great
predecessor Gace Brulé. Dante was to consider him one of the “illustrious” poets in the
vernacular, and the medieval songbooks that group their contents by composer place his
works before all others. The over sixty pieces ascribed to him with reasonable certainty,
almost all preserved with music, show a majority of courtly chansons, none
anticonventional in theme or form but most marked by an unusual development of
imagery, especially allegorical, use of refrains, or self-confident lightness of tone. The
other works, revealing a style similarly characteristic of Thibaut, are jeux-partis (among
the earliest known), debates, devotional songs (including one in the form of a lai),
crusade songs, pastourelles, and a serventois.
Samuel N.Rosenberg
[See also: CHAMPAGNE; GACE BRULÉ; THIBAUT; TROUVÈRE POETRY]
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