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Updated: May 28, 2025
"I think of love more absolutely, madam, though I am certain no more tenderly, than a lady to whom I am indebted for such kindnesses," returned the Prince. "But this is unavailing. We are not here to hold a court of troubadours." "Still," she replied, "there is one thing you forget. If she conspires with Gondremark against your liberty, she may conspire with him against your honour also."
Lanfranc Cigala, the troubadour of Genoa, excuses the Spaniards at this time for their abstention from the Crusades to Jerusalem on the ground that they were fully occupied in their struggles with the Moors. He was born at Montpelier and was fond of revisiting his birthplace; troubadours whom he there met accompanied him to Spain, joined in his expeditions and enjoyed his generosity.
A. Jeanroy, Les origines de la poésie lyrique en France, 2nd edit., Paris, 1904. J. Anglade, Les troubadours, Paris, 1908, an excellent and trustworthy work, in popular style, with a good bibliography.
The Courts of Love held by ladies of high rank were originally courts in which the rules of minstrelsy were laid down, they pronounced on the qualifications of a candidate, they polished and cherished the Langue d'oc in its purity, dictated the subjects upon which the troubadours were to compose their lays, judged their pretensions, settled their controversies, recompensed their merits, and punished by disgrace or exclusion those who violated the laws.
As I have referred to the house in which I live, I may as well say something more with regard to it and the things which it contains. It is not one of the ancient houses of Figeac, but it is old-fashioned and provincial. The rooms are rather large, the floors are venerably black, and the boarded ceilings supported by rafters have never had their structural secrets or the grain of the timber concealed by a layer of plaster. What you see over-head is simply the floor of the room or the loft above. And yet this is not considered a poor-kind of house; it is as good as most good people hereabouts live in. The furniture is simple, but solid; it was made to last, and most of it has long outlasted the first owners. In every room, the kitchen excepted, there is a bed, according to the very general custom of the country. The character of the people is distinctly utilitarian, notwithstanding the blood of the troubadours. There is even a bed in the salle
And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all time the sovereign purifier to which the world must have recourse whenever that precipitate of baser instincts, which thickened like slime the love poetry of Antiquity, shall rise again and sully the purity of the love poetry of to-day.
But troubadours such as Bernart de Ventadour, the son of the stoker in the castle of Ventadour, Perdigon the son of a fisherman, and many others of like origin depended for their livelihood and advancement upon the favour of patrons.
It was her pleasure also to harbor these troubadours who sang her praises, and learn from them the secrets of their art; and in this pleasant intercourse it often chanced that she was inspired by the god of song, and vied with them in poesy.
Raimbaut d'Aurenga, Count of Orange from 1150-1173, is interesting rather by reason of his relations with other troubadours than for his own achievements in the troubadours' art. "Since Adam ate the apple," he says, "there is no poet, loud as he may proclaim himself, whose art is worth a turnip compared with mine."
It was from the viscount that Bernard received instruction in the troubadours' art, and to his patron's interest in his talents he doubtless owed the opportunities which he enjoyed of learning to read and write, and of making acquaintance with such Latin authors as were currently read, or with the anthologies and books of "sentences" then used for instruction in Latin.
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