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Updated: May 11, 2025
Cantigas de escarnho correspond in intention to the Provençal sirventes; if their satire was open and unrestrained they were cantigas de maldizer. They dealt for the most part with trivial court and personal affairs and not with questions of national policy upon which the troubadours so often expressed their opinions.
The song was in the Provencal dialect, well understood as the language of poetry in all the courts of Europe, and particularly in Scotland. It was more simply turned, however, than was the general cast of the sirventes, and rather resembled the lai of a Norman minstrel. It may be translated thus: The Lay of Poor Louise. Ah, poor Louise!
The preceding defeat of Alfonso's forces at Alarcos in 1195 had called forth a fine crusade sirventes from Folquet of Marseilles appealing to Christians in general and the King of Aragon in particular to join forces against the infidels.
Whatever may have been their utility in the advancement of the language and the cultivation of literary taste, these institutions extended a legal sanction to vice, and inculcated maxims of shameful profligacy. The songs of the Provencals were divided into chanzos and sirventes; the object of the former was love, and of the latter war, politics, or satire.
This is the only notice of the poet's death. Dante perhaps exaggerated the part he played in stirring up strife between Henry II. and his sons; modern writers go to the other extreme. Bertran is especially famous for his political sirventes and for the martial note which rings through much of his poetry.
He thus left Italy about the year 1229, and retired to the South of France, where he visited the courts of Provence, Toulouse, Roussillon, penetrating also into Castile. A chief authority for these wanderings is the troubadour Peire Bremen Ricas Novas, whose sirventes speaks of him as being in Spain at the court of the king of Leon: this was Alfonso IX., who died in the year 1230.
Neither the sirventes nor the chanzos of the troubadours, nor the fabliaux of the trouveres, nor the romances of chivalry, can be read without a blush. On every page the grossness of the language is only equaled by the shameful depravity of the characters and the immorality of the incidents. In the south of France, more particularly, an extreme laxity of manners prevailed among the nobility.
The Church, however, interfered with its efforts to organise the Third Crusade, which called from Bertran two sirventes in honour of Conrad, son of the Marquis of Montferrat, who was defending Tyre against Saladin.
Guillem de Montanhagol says in a sirventes upon this event, "If King Jaime, with whom we have never broken faith, had kept the agreement which is said to have been made between him and us, the French would certainly have had cause to grieve and lament."
In 1912, Wellesley had the unusual opportunity, which she unselfishly embraced, to return to the National Library at Florence, Italy, a very precious Florentine manuscript of the fourteenth century, containing the only known copy of the Sirventes and other important historical verses of Antonio Pucci.
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