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Guiraut Riquier applied to a Northern patron for protection, a proceeding unexampled in troubadour history and the patron he selected was the King of France himself. Neither Saint Louis nor his wife were in the least likely to provide a market for Guiraut's wares and the Paris of that day was by no means a centre of literary culture.
But his reputation is fairly attested by the number of his poems which have survived and by the numerous MSS. in which they are preserved; when troubadours were studied as classics in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Guiraut's poems were so far in harmony with the moralising tendency of that age that his posthumous reputation was certainly as great as any that he enjoyed in his life-time.
Guiraut's moral sirventes are reprobations of the decadence of his age. He saw a gradual decline of the true spirit of chivalry. The great lords were fonder of war and pillage than of poetry and courtly state. He had himself suffered from the change, if his biographer is to be believed; the Viscount of Limoges had plundered and burnt his house.
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