Bisson, Troubadours among violent lords
Cultures of castles during the crisis of the twelfth century..
The Source:
Thomas N. Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century : Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government, Princeton 2009
Chapter 6
Celebration and Persuasion (1160–1225)
… This chapter carries forward a story of power in which the works of lord-kings are foremost because the claims and pretences of castellans [governors of castles] remain insistent, the accountability of agents and servants problematic. How people variously thought about power comes next, followed by evidence of intensified violence, renewed efforts to pacify, and the incipient politicising of peace and other ‘causes’. Kings, princes, even urban potentates found it needful to engage with their peoples, harder to persist in the wilful lordship that was their own inheritance from the castles; and these new circumstances help to explain crises of power in Catalonia and England that were at once characteristic and auspicious. All but insensibly the engagement with people is found associated, then identified, with assemblies, which become the expression of interests no longer their lord-prince’s alone to argue. Status and persuasion begin to compete with celebratory lordship, alongside accountability, office, and the recognition of social purpose.
Lay lords possessed of patrimonies and ambitions tended to become cogs in the exercise of public powers. Their cultures were increasingly those of functional dependence, service, and fidelity. While the castellans around 1100 could reasonably aspire to the values of noble lordship, their successors a century later were more likely to feel like retainers. Even more insistently than Philip Augustus the young Frederick II imposed his own faithful castellans in the Regno; and in the statutes of Capua (1220) they are subjected to something like official accountability. Reflections on power shift from concern with ideals of valour, prowess, and largesse to the modalities of command, management, and competence; to the changing realities by which justice and protection were coming to be secured and theorised.
People in service to those with means and public purposes multiplied from about 1140; and what bore critically on the shift here in view was that their patrons—notables like Archbishop Theobald and King Henry II—were close to the new devices of justice and finance … and were disposed to favour educated men, even as they saw no reason to propagate the talents and expertise they nurtured. The patrons were, indeed, ‘used’ by secular clerks in quest of ecclesiastical preferments: John of Salis- bury, Walter Map, and Gerald of Wales, to name but three. These are famous names to modern historians, and with reason, for their competencies were symptomatic of new and distinct impulses in the exercise of power. Yet they were the contemporaries of people surely better known, more widely known, who thought very diversely about power. A sampling of their experience will help us to get the conceptual novelties of the later twelfth century into better perspective. …
[MH: There follows, firstly, the experience of the magnates of castles—the castellans—a few of whom were accomplished poets and singers, the troubadour lords.]
Guilhem de Cabestanh was a Catalan lord-castellan who wrote and most likely sang songs about love and longing in the early thirteenth century. He may well have fought the Almohads under his Lord-King Pere I in 1212. Seven or eight of his songs were soon famous enough to be copied in anthologies of such inventions, together with a capsule biography of the knight-poet composed before all memory of his life had faded and itself soon embellished and enlarged in further copies.
The fame of this ‘inventor’ (trobador) need not be exaggerated. He was one of some 460 troubadours whose songs have come down to us in song-books copied in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But if Guilhem de Cabestanh fell below the line marking off the most celebrated poet-singers of his day, he made the ‘second cut’ of those from his region to be recopied, perhaps as early as the 1220s, and he must already have been recognized in his lifetime. As we can tell from his own songs as well as from the explicit assertion of his biographer, he was a man of castles.
[From earlier in the book: “Many castles of this age were built on natural elevations, often called puig or puy in southern lands”.]
His love (he said) was the best ‘there is from Le Puy to Lerida,’ the merits of ‘my lady’ like a ‘high dungeon’ such as rose on every puig from the Puy (en-Velay) southwest to the Ebro River. And when his baronial neighbour Raimon of Castellrosselló learned that his own wife Seremonda was the object of Guilhem’s devotion, he murdered his rival, and then—if the sequel is not wholly imagined—served his victim’s heart to his wife, who, upon learning what she had eaten, refused ever to eat again.
The ‘legend of the eaten heart’ belongs to the same stratum of mythologising memory as the story that Peire Vidal, a more celebrated troubadour, had his tongue cut out by the cuckolded husband—he too of noble status—of a lady of Saint-Gilles. Such men and women were famous among the castles. Theirs was a culture of unsevered tongues wagging about people and their failings, yet mostly about power in the metaphor of love, or of love as power; and of love and power within a tenacious paradigm of dependence, fidelity, and the largesse of lordship. ‘E car vos am, dompna,’ wrote Guilhem de Cabestanh, ‘tan finamen / Que d’autr’amar no.m don’ Amors poder’ [‘And because I love you, Lady, so faithfully / that Love denies me the power to love another. . . .’].
Such sentiments would have been understood widely in later twelfth-century Europe; perhaps, indeed, wherever lordly courts enticed—or did not banish—poet-musicians and joglars. Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1210), who came from a little castle in Périgord, was said to have been well known in Prince Richard’s courts, and to have attended the coronation of Philip Augustus (1180). A remarkable further indicator of the breadth and diffusion of this imaginative culture may be found in the versified ‘Instruction’ (ensenhamen) by which around 1150–55 the Catalan troubadour-baron Guiraut de Cabreira affected to chastise his juglar Cabra for his ignorance of a mass of literary texts, including no fewer than fifteen chansons de geste. It is a veritable catalogue of songs, heroes, and singers, including Raoul de Cambrai, Girart de Rossilho, and the troubadours Jaufré Rudel and Marcabru, from north of the Pyrenees.
What such courtly entertainments meant to the experience of power is more problematic than first appears. With few exceptions the troubadours are mere names to us, their works transmitted by copies made from variably performative versions long after they were composed. Yet the recognition that this transmission was a cultural survival dates from the period of this chapter, when troubadours like Peire Vidal proclaimed their fidelity to chant e solatz. As early as ca.1200–1210 Raimon Vidal of Besalú wrote a grammar of provençal, the Razos de trobar, with a view to securing good practise and teaching beginners in an artificial language distinct from everyday speech (parladura). That this writer was himself a Catalan may not be accidental. The singers had first multiplied in Aquitaine, which is why their contrived language was first identified with Limoges (limousin). But Catalans had to learn this language, needed to seek out teachers, in ways that must have drawn these would-be singers into touch with themselves as well as with the admired singers.
So their culture of castles was by no means confined to Catalonia. The count-king Alfons I of Barcelona-Aragon, himself an initiate, welcomed troubadours from near and far. Whether he used this creative clientele to further his aims in southern France, as Martí de Riquer argued, is problematic, for apart from winning the approval of many troubadours there is nothing to suggest that Alfons courted popularity or acted politically. He mediated a courtly discourse of love, service, and benevolence that came and went with its transpyrenean language of lordship and fidelity. This was the default mode, so to speak, even for truculent spirits like Guillem de Berguedà and Bertran de Born, both of whom composed in this way. The tension between fidelity and wilful power cannot have been lost on them. Yet it is these two untypical troubadours who bring us closest to the life of power in the castles.
Both of them were castellans actively engaged with the lordships of their castles. Less deferential than the singer-sons of furriers and merchants, caught up in ugly realities of accusation and dispossession, unreluctant to put their worst suspicions into words, their sirventes convey emotions—anger, exultation, contempt—colloquially.
In the early 1170s Guillem de Berguedà bragged of cuckolding all his neighbouring castellans. In 1183 Bertran de Born gloated when Henry II restored his natal castle of Hautefort, although this was merely to ratify Bertran’s eviction of his brother. In capturing this castle, an incident of the baronial revolt in which Bertran was implicated, Prince Richard had help from King Alfons, who thereby earned the troubadour’s biting contempt.
Extolling violence, Bertran de Born was outdone by Guillem de Berguedà, who practised it. Having murdered his enemy Viscount Ramon Folc of Cardona in 1176, he was forced into a long exile during which he seems to have met and exchanged songs with Bertran de Born. And while the latter subsided into the religion of crusades and convent, Guillem never gave up his venomous singing upon return to his castles, dying—by the hand of a nobody, it would be remembered—a rebel against the lord-king who had been slandered by them both.
What can be overheard in these troubadours, however distorted, is the coarse chatter of their castles. Power is moral, not political; people are judged for what they are, not what they think. The invective goes beyond this, to be sure; but Guillem’s ironic pretence that he means not to injure Ponç de Mataplana by vilifying him, only to vent his own ‘natural desire,’ serves as rhetorical cover for the vilania of his victim’s words in contrast to the ‘artfully invented cortesia’ of his own. Words sting in this culture. Arguably, the verbal virtuosos were often giving expression to commonplaces of contempt or envy; that whatever the slant, this is how people around them talked. Despising peasants, Bertran de Born warns against misguided efforts to coddle them.
If it is hard to read such prejudices in other troubadours, so it is harder to hear real voices. But the pervasive stress on love and fidelity, shared by their vindictive fellows, likewise sprang from the castles; from the tradition still nourished, in its third generation, by the genius of William IX of Aquitaine (1071–1126).
That this soon spread to the Pyrenees is clear from the Ensenhamen of Guiraut de Cabreira, he too a master of castles. As were, in the following generation, Guillem de Berguedà, Ponç de la Guàrdia, Uc de Mataplana, and Guillem de Cabestanh. Of the earliest known Catalan troubadours all but one or two were castellans and indeed, so far as we know, actively engaged with the lordships of their strongholds. Of the far more numerous troubadours from Provence, Occitania, and Aquitaine, while many seem to have been nurtured in castles, few of them are known to have lived the militant life, like Bertran de Born, in search of coercive power.
Ademar lo Negre was disinherited by Count Raimond VI of Toulouse (1194–1222). Raimon de Miraval, ‘a poor knight from the Carcasses, had only a quarter-part in the castle of Miraval [which had] fewer than forty people in it!’ Not a few troubadours from these lands were escaping or rejecting the knightly dominations in which they had been nurtured, including those fathered by merchants (Peire Vidal, Folquet de Mar- seille) or working people (Bernart de Ventadorn, Guillem Figueira).
So the cultural perspective brings full circle the problem of castles. One reason for leaving castles—or for contenting oneself with one’s lone ‘high fort’—was that the cost of securing multi-castle dominations became prohibitive after 1160. To dismiss Bertran de Born as a pretentious blowhard is therefore to miss the point. That he lacked the resources to cut a figure in Plantagenet courts may seem little more than his personal crisis of ambition; but other Aquitanian lords less witty would have understood. That is why the arrogance, the hyperbolic vulgarities, matter, for however absurd or distorted, they seem to betray a strain of desperation in this culture of power. Must one now be someone else’s castellan?
Not yet, it appears, in upland Catalonia. This was a land of troubadour castles, where to sing cleverly was to proclaim one’s power. Here if anywhere the inherent ambiguity of sung fidelity figured in the honouring of Marquesa, granddaughter of the count of Urgell allied with the count-king in the interest of peace, and wife of Ponç of Cabrera, the rebel son of a troubadour favoured by Guillem de Berguedà. In her the interest of lineage ran up against an inchoate ideology without the slightest cultural expression of it own. The later songs of Guillem de Berguedà, caustic as ever and with a subtext yet to be examined, play on his obsessive sense of honour and his resentments. Guillem cultivated other singers, more devoted to his art, it seems, than anxious about current challenges to his lordship. …
… Indeed, as courtly performance and lyric esprit gave way to advocacy in the greater northern courts, the ‘cultures’ here in view came into rivalry with ‘discourses’ of tendentious ideas. Contributing to this, more visibly in the North than the South, was some growing suspicion of verse as a medium for (truthful) persuasion. The anxiety of dynastic elites up against an expanding Capetian domination, though hardly new in Philip II’s day and with some analogy to the failing struggles of castellans in their times of sung fidelity, assumed a new discursive form in vernacular prose histories … For all its lay patronage and presumable stimulus to lay literacy, this was virtually a clerical culture to be distinguished from that of the poet-composers. …
Pierrot with Guitar by Honore Daumier [Date: 1869]
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