thirteenth century, but no longer in Provençal. Nor was Guiraut the only troubadour who stimulated the
spread of vernacular poetry into other languages. As we will see, the nobleman Arnaut Daniel (by
common consent the preeminent master of trobar clus) had a formative, if posthumous, influence on the art
of Dante and Petrarch, as well as their fourteenth-century Italian musical contemporaries. But long before
that, indeed by the end of the thirteenth century, the art of the troubadour was at an end.
FRANCE
TROUVÈRES
By that time, however, it had spawned a hardy successor in northern France itself, despite hostilities
between the northern courts and those of Languedoc. The earliest French imitations of Provençal lyrics,
by poet-musicians who called themselves trouvères (in direct translation from the Occitan), were
composed something less than a century after the Provençal tradition had its start, and gathered strength
all through the thirteenth century while the art of the troubadours declined.
One of the main brokers of this northward migration was Eleanor of Aquitaine herself. She was the
granddaughter of the first troubadour, the patron of a great troubadour (Bernart de Ventadorn), whom she
brought with her up to France, and both mother and great-grandmother of notable trouvères. Eleanor’s
trouvère son, Richard I (Lion-Heart), though born in England and eventually his father’s successor as king
(1189–99), had succeeded first to the titles of his great-grandfather William and lived most of his life in
Aquitaine. He never learned English. His poems are found in both Provençal and French sources; the only
one to survive with its melody (or, at any rate, with a melody) is found only in French.
That song, Ja nun hons pris (Ex. 4-3), while cast in a form resembling the canso (or, in French,
chanson courtoise), is not about love but about honor. It is a lament on his famous captivity (1192–94)
following the Third Crusade, when his enemy Leopold V of Austria held him for the proverbial “king’s
ransom,” a ruinous levy that was eventually raised by Richard’s English subjects. (Apocryphal though it
almost surely is, one cannot omit the “well-found” legend that Richard’s squire and fellow trouvère
Blondel de Nesle succeeded in learning the captured king’s whereabouts by singing one of Richard’s
songs within the royal earshot and hearing the King come back in turn with the refrain. The tale goes back
to the thirteenth century and in 1784 was turned into an opera by the French composer André Grétry, in
which Richard’s “romance,” as imagined by Grétry, is a dramatically recurring “leitmotif.” True or false,
the story certainly shows the importance the knight-crusaders attached to their musical activity.)