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Courts of Love, Castles of Hate

Troubadours & Trobairitz in Southern France, 1071â"1321

The History Press

We consider that marital affection and the true love of lovers are wholly different and arise from entirely different sources

(Ermengarde, Viscountess of Narbonne. Bk 2, Ch. VII, 171)

A woman who under the excuse of a mistake of any kind seeks to preserve an incestuous love is clearly going contrary to what is right and proper.

(Eleanor, Queen of England. Bk 2, Ch. VII, 170)

The two quotations come from: Andreas Capellanus, De Arte Honeste Amandi, 'The Art of Courtly Love', c. 1180.

The Art of Courtly Love

The French love courts [cours d'amour] have attracted the most scholarly attention. A number of misconceptions used to exist about this institution, until it became clear that these courts were not real legal sessions but social events that were especially popular with women.

(J. Bumke, Courtly Culture ..., 2000, 408)

The judges were all of high nobility and they were all women. There was Eleanor, Countess of all Aquitaine, former wife of King Louis VII of France. There was her daughter by him, Marie, Countess of Champagne. There was Adèle, third wife of Louis VII; and Eleanor's niece, Isabelle of Vermandois, Countess of Flanders, whose mother was Eleanor's sister. There was the learned Ermengard, Viscountess of Narbonne. There was even a circle of ladies in Gascony, each one of good birth.

All of them, it was believed, were discriminating judges of the quality of the poems sung to them by importunate troubadours at tribunals in the courts of Poitiers, Troyes, Narbonne and elsewhere. The courts debated the answers to questions posed by the singers: which gifts it was seemly for a lady to accept from her would-be lover; whether love could exist between a man and his wife; whether jealousy was permissible between unmarried lovers; whether a man could truly love two women at one same time.

The ladies were undisputed arbiters of courtly behaviour, presiding over the Courts of Love, seats of poetical judgement. Such assizes, however, were the late-twelfth-century literary creations of Andreas Capellanus, who claimed to be the resident chaplain of Marie of Champagne at Troyes. Between 1182 and 1186 he was a clerical witness to seven charters. As one was signed by Marie herself, it is probable that he was telling the truth about his position.

Capellanus flattered the Countess of Champagne, complimenting her on her artistic sensitivity, and improving the praise by including the names of other great ladies, all of them relatives, friends and intimates of Marie.

Descriptions of their attractive courts were given in his manuscript De arte honesti amandi (On the Art of Honourable Love), also known as 'De amore livres tres' (The Three Books of Love). In this it followed the pattern of the three books of the Roman poet Ovid's Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), Books I–II for men, Book III for women, a cynical manual of sexual seduction, considered by the Encyclopaedia Britannica as 'perhaps the most immoral book ever written by a man of genius'.

Follow my advice, wrote Ovid in the last decade BC, and no man would fail to entice a woman to bed.

Posse capi; capies, tu modo tende plages ...

Girls can be caught – and that you'll catch her if

You set your schemes right ...

Technique was the secret. Dress well, be courteous, attentive, give modest presents and reach the inevitable goal by patient, calculated stages. Ovid was almost unconcerned about the pleasurable final act. Advice on bedroom gymnastics was as succinct as the words that Frank Sinatra was to sing two thousand years later, 'Just take it Nice'n Easy'. 'Relax', advised Ovid.

Crede mihi, non est veneris properanda voluptas.

'Believe me, Love's height of pleasure must not be hurried'

and

Sed neque tu dominam veils maioribus usus

'Take care not to cram on full sail and outrace your mistress'.

Behind its alluring words, Ars Amatoria advocated the adulterous pursuit of married women, using serving-girls and intermediaries as assistants. In this Ovid was following a tradition of earlier Roman poets, Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius among them, who had wooed and won the consent of highly born wives to discreet adultery.

Capellanus' three books became extremely popular in medieval France as a hilarious satire. There had already been enthusiasms for Virgil and Horace, but the thirteenth century was the aetas Ovidiana, 'the Age of Ovid', and it was from Ovid that Capellanus framed the structure of his own book.

It had a similar basis but an entirely different and moral interpretation of love, in which the lady had complete sovereignty over her lover. Troubadours had to pay court to a well-born wife, but 'with a lover undertaking to serve his married, and therefore enticingly unavailable, mistress'.

The second of his three books contained twenty-one letters posing questions of the behaviour of women towards their suitors. Predictably, the greatest number of challenges, seven, were solved by Marie. Of the others, five problems received answers from Ermengard, three each from Eleanor and 'the Queen', Adèle, two from Isabelle, and one from the group of ladies in Gascony.

The final book listed the thirty-one definitive Rules of Love, beginning 'Marriage is no excuse for not loving' and concluding with 'Nothing forbids one woman from loving two men nor one man by two women' and in between were twenty-nine pronouncements that, despite Andreas' clerical status, would not have been approved of by his Church.

Pure love, he said, 'goes as far as the kiss and the embrace and the modest contact with the nude lover, omitting the final solace'. Mixed love, however, included copulation and gets its effect from every delight of the flesh and culminates in the final act of Venus ... it too is true love and it is praiseworthy, and we say it is the source of all good things. 'It would be improper ... to claim as a sin the thing from which the highest good of this life takes its origin'.

Even though he had taken holy orders, Capellanus claimed that he had the right to make physical love. 'So if I ask any woman to love me, she cannot refuse me on the pretext that I am a clerk.' He even boasted of his insidious serpent's tongue that persuaded an attractive nun that she should submit to his advances. Luckily, perhaps hypocritically, maybe fearing divine retribution, or even simply lying, he added that, just in time, he quelled his lustful insanity 'and with a great effort' resisted the temptation to seduce her.

The social status of other women decided how they would be treated by followers of the code of courtly love. A knight should invariably be courteous and submissive to ladies of quality. Females of the bourgeoisie would usually receive respect. But, should the man take a liking to some peasant woman, he should condescend to praise her, then, 'when you find a convenient place, do not hesitate to take what you seek and to embrace them by force ... use a little compulsion as a convenient cure for their shyness'. Ovid had said much the same.

Vim licet ...

It's all right to use force – force of that sort goes down well with
what in fact they love to yield
they'd often rather have stolen. Rough seduction
delights them, the audacity of near-rape
is a compliment ...

Capellanus never advocated treating a high-born lady so brutally. Decorum forbade it. His writings were popular and widely read, but, although their treacherous arguments were persuasive, his Courts of Love were fictional. In Capellanus the descriptions of courts were evocative with their good food and wine, service, warmth, laughter and love. The courts were real but they were not court-rooms.

Yet they were accepted as realities until late in the nineteenth century because of a book of 1575, Les Vies des Plus Célébrès et Anciens Poètes Provensaux (Lives of the Most Famous Old Poets of Provence), by Jean de Nostradamus, brother of the famous astrologer and self-proclaimed prophet. The Lives was an uncritical medley of traditional biographies, guesswork and deliberate deception. He claimed it was based on a manuscript by a monk, Moine des Îles d'Or, but his name, 'Cybo de Gennes', was actually an anagram of the name of one of his brother's friends. His book was worthless. Yet for centuries it was given credence.

One reason was that it was apparently confirmed by a poem of Geoffrey Chaucer's, 'The Court of Love'. Chaucer certainly knew about Capellanus and courtly love. HisTroilus and Criseyde similarly sang the joys and pains of love. He had been to France on several occasions, four times in 1377 alone, and in 1359 he had been captured near Reims during an invasion by Edward III, finally being ransomed for the sum of £16.00, less than was paid for the release of Sir Robert de Clyntone's warhorse. From Chaucer's knowledge of French society it was entirely credible that the poem 'The Court of Love' described a court of judgement or poetical tribunal that he had seen.

It did not. The poem, which once existed only as a single manuscript at Trinity College, Cambridge, was no more than a pastiche, a sixteenth-century imitation in competent Chaucerian style, and its contents showed that the anonymous writer knew the books of Capellanus. Until the verses were exposed as spurious, the Courts of Love remained credible.

For Capellanus it is probable that his invention of a poetical Court of Love derived from a traditional form of verse that had long been used by troubadours. It was the tenson, a debate or argument on some point of love between two troubadours who, if they could not agree, referred the unresolved question to an independent judge. One tenson concerned a contemporary of Andreas, the nobleman Savaric de Mauléon.

He was a great lord, the seneschal or steward of Poitou, holding many castles in the service of John, king of England. In 1206 he successfully defended one at Niort against Philippe-Auguste of France. For his loyalty he was granted lands in England despite having briefly supported John's nephew, the rebellious Arthur of Brittany, being captured with him at Mirabeau and imprisoned in the deadly 'no food or water' Corfe castle in Dorset. He escaped. Arthur was murdered.

De Mauléon lived at the midpoint of the troubadour period, an age of 250 years that began five years after the Battle of Hastings and declined and disappeared twenty-five years before the Battle of Crécy in 1346.

The intervening 250 years began with a birth. The first great troubadour, William of Poitiers, was born in 1071. The period ended with a death. The great Italian troubadour Dante Alighieri died in Ravenna on September 1321.

The tradition of courtly love began in Poitiers but it soon spread southwards into that land of sunshine, song and east, Occitania, 'region of Oc' (Fig. 1).

In France two different words had developed from the Latin hoc ille, 'yes', the corrupt northern French oui, and the purer southern oc, from which the Languedoc gets its name, 'the langue d'Oc'. It was spoken in France but it was not French.

In England the first line of a poem by the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn would be translated as: 'When the fresh grass and leaf appears ...', but in France the lines differed:

Occitan
French

Can l'erba fresch'.lh folha par Quand l'herbe [est] fraiche, et la feuille parait

They are similar but not identical. A linguistic parallel can be made between two English medieval poets, Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, fourteenth-century contemporaries who were both composing their masterpieces, The Canterbury Tales and The Vision of Piers Plowman, around 1380. Chaucer's Prologue begins with lines that even in the original spelling are understandable today;

Whan that Aprillë with his shourës soote
The droghtë of March hath percëd to the roote

Whereas Langland begins clearly enough:

In a somer season. whan soft was the sonne

but only five lines later becomes incomprehensible:

Me byfel a ferly. of fairy me thougte

meaning, 'I chanced upon a wonder of enchantment as it seemed to me'.

In England the vernacular varied almost unintelligibly from region to region, north, south-east, south-west. For Chaucer, a Londoner, the dialect was East Midlands, but Langland, a Shropshire man from Cleobury Mortimer, wrote his poem in the dissimilar patois of the West Midlands.

'A northern and southern man, meeting by chance, or for business, would resort to French because the dialects were mutually incomprehensible, as much in diction as in accent.'

From similar parochial contrasts in vocabulary people from northern France considered the 'langue d'oc' barbaric and fit only for effete southerners. But the troubadours used it and sang it in tens of thousands of musical verses over a boisterous quarter-millennium of years.

It was boisterous because it was two and half centuries of turmoil during which the baron and troubadour Savaric de Mauléon lived, fought and loved. There were constant wars between England and France over French territory extending from Normandy and Anjou in the north, through Aquitaine, down to Gascony in the south-west, wars that involved English kings from Henry I to Edward III.

The same centuries saw eight crusades to the Holy Land. De Mauléon himself went on the indecisive Fifth Crusade in 1219. Between those crusades there was a lesser but just as brutal crusade in the south of France, the early thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade that smashed castles and razed towns as the Catholic Church ponderously crushed the blasphemous cult of the Cathars, a persecution that saw military suppression followed by religious cruelties as the Inquisition imprisoned and tortured heretics in their scores and burnt hundreds more alive, cleansing their flesh of sins.

The troubadour centuries were times of national and personal loyalties. Loyalties were transitory. They were guided by ambition, power, wealth, advantage. There were humiliations, treacheries, assassinations.

It was an elusive epoch when there were no objective historians, only partisan chroniclers and credulous biographers of the wandering singers. One was about Savaric de Mauléon describing him as 'a mighty lord of Poitou' and 'Above all did he delight in generosity, and chivalry, and love and jousting, and singing, and playing, and poetry, and feasting, and spending money'. The 'Life' or vida was written by another troubadour, the long-lived, much travelled Uc de Saint-Circ, who was probably the author of several other anecdotal lives.

Among the many contradictions of that knightly age Savaric de Mauléon was a triple chameleon, white as a famous troubadour, green as a frustrated lover, red as the militaristic employer of a powerful army of mercenaries and crossbowmen whom he could hire out to considerable financial advantage.

Like many French noblemen he opposed attempts by feeble French king after king to increase the royal dominions and gain control over the estates of barons with loyally pugnacious armies. It was self-interest that caused de Mauléon to support England against Philippe-Auguste, Philip II, in John's claim to be lord of many regions in France including Aquitaine, a vast area of 16,000 square miles that stretched from the River Garonne northwards to the River Loire, and westwards from Burgundy to the Bay of Biscay. Aquitaine covered a third of France.

De Mauléon also helped John more locally in the Languedoc south of Aquitaine. The king asked him to assist Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse. To John family honour was involved. Raymond was married to John's sister, Joan.

The count was raising an army to fight the leader of the Albigensian Crusade, Simon de Montfort. As an inducement Raymond sent 100,000 gold livres to de Mauléon, who 'promised his ready and willing help, whether anyone else liked it or not'.

In early September 1211 a formidable host laid siege to the crusaders' weakly manned, crumbling walls of the town of Castelnaudary some miles west of Carcassonne. De Montfort was absent. But, instead of attacking the pitiful garrison, Raymond VI entrenched his enormous army on a nearby hill and contented himself with bombarding the town with a trebuchet. The missiles reached the targets, but the hastily chosen stones were brittle and crumbled harmlessly against the walls.

The tactic was characteristic of the Count. He was generously considered an irresolute man by some writers, but a more trenchant term would be 'coward'. There was no onslaught or battle until far too late after de Montfort had arrived with cavalry and reinforcements. The armies met at Saint-Martin-Lalande and, despite much individual courage, the Toulousians were overcome.

As always de Mauléon fought bravely. As the crusaders charged into his men he shouted, 'Stay calm, my lords, don't move. No one take down or fold his tent, or you are all dead men!' It was futile. Because of Raymond's customary indecision defeat and retreat were inevitable.

The young Cistercian monk Pierre des Vaux-de-Cernay, who wrote a triumphant Catholic history of the Albigensian Crusade, the Historia Albigensis, rejoiced at the victory but expressed venom at the vile opponent who had had the effrontery to bring paid mercenaries to fight the crusaders.

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Excerpted from Courts of Love, Castles of Hate by Aubrey Burl. Copyright © 2011 Aubrey Burl. Excerpted by permission of The History Press.
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