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Updated: June 18, 2025
His court became a place of refuge for those who had been driven out of Southern France by the Albigeois crusade; Peire Cardenal, Bernard Sicart de Marvejols and N'At de Mons of Toulouse visited him.
"You men!" pouted Beatriz. "You are always thinking of battles and sieges, wars and jousting. Perhaps you would like a tournament of pigeons!" "Why not?" queried Savaric undisturbed. "It would be highly amusing." "I lay my wager on Blanchette here," said Peire d'Acunha. "She is as graceful as a lady. She shows her breeding."
Count Manfred II. and Albert, the Marquis of Malaspina, engaged in tensos with Peire Vidal and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras respectively and are the first Italians known to have written in Provençal. Genoa produced a number of Italian troubadours of whom the best were Lanfranc Cigala and Bonifacio Calvo.
So Bertran of Born, Bernart of Ventadour, Peire Rogier, Cadenet and many others retired from the disappointments of the world to end their days in peace; Folquet of Marseilles, who similarly entered the Cistercian order, became abbot of his monastery of Torondet, Bishop of Toulouse, a leader of the Albigeois crusade and a founder of the Inquisition.
Peire Vidal, with the majority of the troubadours, shows himself a vigorous supporter of Alfonso. Referring to this same expedition of 1183 he asserted "Had I but a speedy horse, the king might sleep in peace at Balaguer: I would keep Provence and Montpelier in such order that robbers and freebooters should no longer plunder Venaissin and Crau.
Peire Vidal was the son of a Toulouse merchant. He began his troubadour wanderings early and at the outset of his career we find him in Catalonia, Aragon and Castile. He is then found in the service of Raimon Gaufridi Barral, Viscount of Marseilles, a bluff, genial tournament warrior and the husband of Azalais de Porcellet whose praises were sung by Folquet of Marseilles.
Yet greater was their surprise at him, and as they saw that he did not follow their example, they concluded that he had lost his senses.... So one strikes him in front, another behind; he is dashed to the ground and trampled under foot... at length he flees to his house covered with mud, bruised and half dead and thankful for his escape": The mad town, says Peire Cardenal, is the present world: the highest form of intelligence is the love and fear of God, but this has been replaced by greed, pride and malice; consequently the "sense of God" seems madness to the world and he who refuses to follow the "sense of the world" is treated as a madman.
One of the most extraordinary figures in the whole gallery of troubadour portraits is Peire Vidal, whose career extended, roughly speaking, from 1175 to 1215. He was one of those characters who naturally become the nucleus of apocryphal stories, and how much truth there may be in some of the fantastic incidents, in which he figures as the hero, will probably never be discovered.
Then he prays to God and says 'I am poor and in misery. Were God to answer him He would say, 'thou liest!" To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum: "there was a certain town, I know not where, upon which a rain fell of such a nature that all the inhabitants upon whom it fell, lost their reason.
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