AQUITAINE
TROUBADOURS
The earliest secular repertories of which we have direct knowledge consist of songs by knightly poets of
courtly love and feudal service. Stylistically, they are remarkably like the sacred repertories with which
we have been dealing so far. Not that this should surprise us: if these secular songs were thought worthy
of commemoration and permanence (that is, worthy of writing down), they must have had some
transcendent or elevating purpose like that of the sacred. And as surely as style follows function, a like
purpose should entail a like manner.
The earliest such written-down knightly songs in a European vernacular (that is, a currently and
locally spoken language) originated in Aquitaine, a duchy whose territory occupied parts of what is now
southern and south-central France. It had been conquered by Charlemagne in the late eighth century and
incorporated into the Carolingian Empire; but with the weakening of the Empire as a result of invasions
by Normans on one side and Muslims on the other, royal influence over Aquitaine gave way over the
course of the ninth and tenth centuries to several independent noble families who established local
jurisdictions and maintained networks of patronage and protection among themselves. Eventually the
counts of Poitou emerged as the most powerful among these clans and, from 973, asserted dominion over
the whole territory and took the title of Duke. (Later, the marriage of the duchess Aliénor or Eleanor of
Aquitaine to the French king in 1137 joined Aquitaine to France; and her second marriage, to the Norman
duke who later became King Henry II of England, led to a long struggle over the territory that would not
be ended until the fifteenth century.)
It was during the period of Aquitaine’s relative independence that its courtly poetic and musical
traditions arose. William (Guillaume), seventh count of Poitiers and ninth duke of Aquitaine (1071–ca.
1127), was the first European vernacular poet whose work has come down to us. The tradition, socially
speaking, thus began right at the top, with all that that implies as to “highness” of style, tone, and diction.
The language William used was Provençal, alias Occitan or langue d’oc, from the local word for “yes.”
(Old French, spoken to the north, was called langue d’oïl for the same reason.) In Provençal, poetry was
called trobar, meaning words “found,” and a poet was called a trobador, a “finder” of words. In English
we use the Frenchified form, troubadour.
A troubadour’s subject matter was the life he led, viewed in terms of his social relations, which were
ceremonial, idealized, and ritualized to the point of virtual sacralization. In keeping with the rarefied
subject matter, the genres and styles of troubadour verse were also highly formalized and ceremonious, to
the point of virtuosic complexity of design and occasional, sometimes deliberate, obscurity of meaning.
The genres reflected social relations directly. Feudalism, arising in unsettled conditions of weak
central power and frequent ruinous invasion, was based on land grants and on contractual, consensual
exchanges of service and protection on which everyone’s welfare depended. The bonds of honor thus
pledged were taken very seriously indeed. The utopian ideal—never realized except (more or less
theoretically) in the tiny, short-lived “Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem” established by the Crusaders in 1099
—was a wholly hierarchical—and therefore, theoretically, a wholly harmonious—society. Under
feudalism, all land was legally owned by an elected (rather than a hereditary) king, who deeded and
parceled it out to the greatest nobles in the form of “fiefs” (from the Latin feodum, whence “feudal”), who
deeded it in turn to lesser nobles, and so on down to the manorial barons and their serfs, who actually
worked it.