Guilhem IX, le premier troubadour (document en anglais)

Guilhem IX: the First Troubadour

Guilhem IX is known as the first troubadour, being credited with the first recorded lyrics. The lyrics of the poems attributed to him suggest that he was quite a character, and with the wealth of documented evidence of Guilhem his is clearly identifiable as a historical political figure. The volume of information available on Guilhem IX makes him an invaluable resource for understanding not only his time, but the tradition of the troubadours.

Guilhem IX was Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou, born 1071 and died 1127. He was the son of Guilhem VIII of Aquitaine by his third wife Hildegarde of Burgundy and he inherited the duchy at the age of fourteen. While the king of France was technically his overlord, the lordship inherited by Guilhem was more extensive and he enjoyed significant independence. There is some dispute as to how many times he was married, but the generally accepted story is that he was married first to Ermengard of Anjou and when she failed to conceive, the marriage was dissolved. Later, Guilhem married Philippa of Toulouse and the couple had five daughters and two sons, including Guilhem’s heir, Guilhem X of Aquitaine.

Pope Urban II spent Christmas 1095 at the court of Guilhem IX to encourage him to take the cross and leave for the Holy Land, but Guilhem was more interested in the territories of the Counts of Toulouse, to which the Dukes of Aquitaine believed they had a long standing claim bolstered by Guilhem's marriage to Philippa. While Raymond IV Count of Toulouse, his wife’s uncle, was away on crusade, Guilhem pressed his claim to Toulouse. Without the help of the Church, he and Philippa seized Toulouse in 1098, an act for which they were threatened with excommunication. Partly out of a desire to avoid this Guilhem joined the Crusade of 1101, later known as the Crusade of the Faint-Hearted, an expedition inspired by the success of the First Crusade in 1099. To fund this he mortgaged Toulouse to Bertrand of Toulouse, the son of Raymond IV. He arrived in the Holy Land in 1101 and stayed there until the following year. Guilhem fought mostly small battles in Anatolia without noteworthy success and his army was ambushed on several occasions. In September 1101, nearly his entire army was destroyed and he was one of the few survivors. The chronicler Ordericus Vitalis said that Guilhem made joking verses about his misfortunes in the East after his return, although none are left for us to read ourselves. After Phillipa's death in 1118, Guilhem was inspired to join the armies fighting the Moors in Spain and united with the kingdoms of Castile and León, meeting with far greater success. Despite his crusading efforts, Guilhem was excommunicated at least once for breaking his pledge to protect the neighboring lands of crusaders. He was possibly excommunicated a second time for kidnapping Viscountess Dangereuse, the wife of his vassal Aimery I de Rochefoucauld, Viscount of Châtellerault. Whether or not there is any truth to that story, Guilhem would marry his eldest son to the daughter of the Viscountess.

Guilhem's greatest legacy to history was as a poet, the first troubadour, using the Occitan language. They are attributed to him under his title as Count of Poitou, or Coms de Peitieus. The topics vary, treating sex, love, women, his own sexual prowess, and politics. While it is unlikely that Occitan was the spoken language of his court, Guilhem used the regional language to demonstrate solidarity with his subjects in the south.

His frankness, wit and vivacity caused scandal and won admiration at the same time. William of Malmesbury said that he would turn “everything into a joke, he made his listeners laugh uncontrollably.” According to the chroniclers, Guilhem was a man of great bravery and accomplishments but also who loved scandal and no doubt enjoyed shocking his audiences. He was said to take “delight in singing of the miseries of his wretched experiences in rhythmical verse and pleasing melodies…” in Many of his songs are so coarse and bawdy that they evoke images of a modern day men’s locker room rather than chivalrous knights expressing courtly love. There are, however, a few of his songs expressing pleasantly sincere love and admiration. We do not know for certain to whom these songs were written, but given Guilhem’s reportedly immoral and scandalous behavior we can assume that he had multiple affairs. By most standards he can fairly be described as a quite character. A 13th century biography, or vida, of Guilhem, forming part of the collection Biographies des Troubadours, remembers

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