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Authors: Alan Ereira
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Cathars back to the fold.
In 1208, after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III changed tack and invited the chivalry of Europe to stop killing Saracens and start killing Cathars â a worthy deed for which they would be granted absolution from sin. This holy war, the first crusade deliberately launched against Christian âhereticsâ, lasted until 1229 and decimated the Languedoc. It was called the Albigensian Crusade as the Cathars were identified with the town of Albi and known by the northern French as Albigensians.
It was ruthlessly savage. Arnold Aimery, the papal legate at the siege of Béziers, ordered his men: âShow mercy neither to order, nor to age, nor to sex . . . Cathar or Catholic, Kill them all . . . God will know his own.â The attackers were Anglo-French Normans eager to seize property in the Dordogne (nice farmhouse, needs some repairs . . .) This was how Simon de Montfort was granted control of the area encompassing Carcassonne, Albi and Béziers.
The troubadours had to flee or be killed. They sought refuge in northern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the north, producing new musical movements across Europe. In fact, the only real survivor of the slaughter was the troubadour sensibility; an outflow of poetic refugees had an impact on the rest of Europe comparable to the flight of intellectuals from Nazi Germany. The comparison is not far-fetched. The Albigensian Crusade was truly genocidal in intent, and it has been estimated that a million people were slaughtered.
TRIUMPH OF THE VERNACULAR
One example of the troubadour influence is in the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian who is remembered as the most brilliant of Germanyâs narrative poets and who wrote the epic Parzival , which was clearly based on Chrétien de Troyesâ Arthurian romance, Perceval. Wolfram said he used extra material given him at the time of the Albigensian Crusade by one Kyot of Provence; apparently Kyot had taken refuge in Spain, like many Provençal troubadours, before going to Germany.
The legacy of the troubadours far outlasted their own shattered culture. The impact on writers in other lands was profound, even when they had no sympathy for the ideology of Catharism. The most important and influential of these admirers was the Italian Dante Alighieri, who at the very beginning of the fourteenth century wrote a Latin essay, âDe Vulgari Eloquentiaâ (On Vernacular Language), in which he extolled spoken language (as opposed to Latin) as a suitable vehicle for literature. He identified as exemplars three great troubadours, one of whom, Arnaut Daniel, he quoted in Occitan and immortalized in his Divine Comedy.
Arnautâs poetry is quite astonishing. He writes with an unforced lightness of touch, constructing rhyme-schemes and scansion that are beautifully calculated and precise. The more you recite his verses the more complexity is revealed beneath a surface that is entirely natural and open, one human being speaking to another. It feels as though the language has been borne along with the poem. This makes it quite untranslatable; it is impossible to mimic the rhyme, scansion and spirit while translating the meaning into another tongue. The joy of the poetry and the language that expresses it are inseparable.
No vuelh de Roma lâemperi
I donât want the Empire of Rome
ni quâom mâen fassa postoli
or for someone to make me the Pope
quâen lieis non aia revert
if I canât find a place by her
per cui mâart lo cors eâm rima;
by whom my heart is burned and scorched
e siâl maltrait noâm restaura
and if she does not cure this injury
ab un baizar anz dâannueu ,
with a kiss within a year
mi auci e si enferna.
I die and to hell with her
A great deal of effort went into making troubadour verse seem respectable, and collections of poems were produced with biographies of the poets attached to
In 1208, after the murder of a papal legate, Innocent III changed tack and invited the chivalry of Europe to stop killing Saracens and start killing Cathars â a worthy deed for which they would be granted absolution from sin. This holy war, the first crusade deliberately launched against Christian âhereticsâ, lasted until 1229 and decimated the Languedoc. It was called the Albigensian Crusade as the Cathars were identified with the town of Albi and known by the northern French as Albigensians.
It was ruthlessly savage. Arnold Aimery, the papal legate at the siege of Béziers, ordered his men: âShow mercy neither to order, nor to age, nor to sex . . . Cathar or Catholic, Kill them all . . . God will know his own.â The attackers were Anglo-French Normans eager to seize property in the Dordogne (nice farmhouse, needs some repairs . . .) This was how Simon de Montfort was granted control of the area encompassing Carcassonne, Albi and Béziers.
The troubadours had to flee or be killed. They sought refuge in northern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula and the north, producing new musical movements across Europe. In fact, the only real survivor of the slaughter was the troubadour sensibility; an outflow of poetic refugees had an impact on the rest of Europe comparable to the flight of intellectuals from Nazi Germany. The comparison is not far-fetched. The Albigensian Crusade was truly genocidal in intent, and it has been estimated that a million people were slaughtered.
TRIUMPH OF THE VERNACULAR
One example of the troubadour influence is in the work of Wolfram von Eschenbach, a Bavarian who is remembered as the most brilliant of Germanyâs narrative poets and who wrote the epic Parzival , which was clearly based on Chrétien de Troyesâ Arthurian romance, Perceval. Wolfram said he used extra material given him at the time of the Albigensian Crusade by one Kyot of Provence; apparently Kyot had taken refuge in Spain, like many Provençal troubadours, before going to Germany.
The legacy of the troubadours far outlasted their own shattered culture. The impact on writers in other lands was profound, even when they had no sympathy for the ideology of Catharism. The most important and influential of these admirers was the Italian Dante Alighieri, who at the very beginning of the fourteenth century wrote a Latin essay, âDe Vulgari Eloquentiaâ (On Vernacular Language), in which he extolled spoken language (as opposed to Latin) as a suitable vehicle for literature. He identified as exemplars three great troubadours, one of whom, Arnaut Daniel, he quoted in Occitan and immortalized in his Divine Comedy.
Arnautâs poetry is quite astonishing. He writes with an unforced lightness of touch, constructing rhyme-schemes and scansion that are beautifully calculated and precise. The more you recite his verses the more complexity is revealed beneath a surface that is entirely natural and open, one human being speaking to another. It feels as though the language has been borne along with the poem. This makes it quite untranslatable; it is impossible to mimic the rhyme, scansion and spirit while translating the meaning into another tongue. The joy of the poetry and the language that expresses it are inseparable.
No vuelh de Roma lâemperi
I donât want the Empire of Rome
ni quâom mâen fassa postoli
or for someone to make me the Pope
quâen lieis non aia revert
if I canât find a place by her
per cui mâart lo cors eâm rima;
by whom my heart is burned and scorched
e siâl maltrait noâm restaura
and if she does not cure this injury
ab un baizar anz dâannueu ,
with a kiss within a year
mi auci e si enferna.
I die and to hell with her
A great deal of effort went into making troubadour verse seem respectable, and collections of poems were produced with biographies of the poets attached to
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