The Troubadour's Song

by David Boyle

  As soon as her escort had disappeared back to Normandy, at New Year 1168, Eleanor set about touring her all but ungovernable provinces, banishing Henry's mercenaries, who had kept down the revolt, and trying to disentangle some of the laws that had been passed there by her two husbands. And among the yellow-stone aqueducts and Roman amphitheatres she created something extra­ordinary that has had historians and critics arguing ever since. Eleanor was about to capture a movement and style that would give the troubadours, including Blondel and his northern colleagues, a narrative and a spirit for their songs in the generations to come.

  Aquitaine and the small fiefdoms that made up what is now the south of France were always a source of disapproval for puritanical northerners, even without Eleanor. A contemporary guidebook for English pilgrims on the road to Santiago de Compostela despairs of the locals increasingly as it moves south. The author considers Aquitaine elegant and generous, but warns that Gascons never use tables and share the same rotting straw as their servants. By the time he has reached the Basque country, he is describing locals who make noises like dogs, lift their kilts in front of the fire and are so keen on sex with animals that mares and mules have to be given chastity belts. Everyone knew that the women of Aquitaine painted their cheeks, lined their eyes with charcoal and wore exotic perfumes from the East. Worse, Aquitaine refused to punish women for adultery. It was a very shocking place. Eleanor was also a dramatically romantic personality, perhaps even the model for Queen Guinevere in the contemporary Arthurian romances that were pouring from the pens of her daughter's protege Chretien de Troyes and her sister-in-law Marie de France. In a period when women of all classes were sold by their overlords in marriage to the highest bidder, sometimes over and over again, Eleanor was the blueprint for a powerful, independent kind ofwoman.

  She could not conjure Camelot out of the air, but she had turned her back on a second husband she considered boorish and brutal, and she seems to have been determined to create a different vision of the relationship between men and women. It was to be a creation of splendour, pomp, music and poetry that would capti­vate Europe and create a tradition that retains a mythic awe about it even today. The music and poetry came from the troubadours, and they in their turn were often expressing the emotions of what was then known in Occitan as fin' amor.

  Nobody really knows where the ideas behind fin' amor came from — the term 'courtly love' was coined only in 1883 — but it turned traditional medieval values on their head. One source was the Roman poet Ovid, rediscovered as part of the revival of the classics that emerged as part of the Twelfth-century Renaissance. Another source may have been Arabic poetry brought home by returning crusaders or filtering up from Arab Spain. But wherever it came from, fin' amor was profoundly influential on the ruling classes. Women became the powerful object of love and longing, love not battle became the heart of romance, and the resulting ritual of seduction between the sexes was suddenly valued for itsability to refine and purify the seducer — so that 'for joy of her a sick man can be cured, and from her anger a healthy one may die'. The result was a complex game whereby young knights could woo aristocratic married women, whose role was to educate and refine their lovers by their distance and superiority. It was a whole new kind of literature, not exactly feminist but certainly a tribute to feminine power. It was also anti-monastic, anti-feudal, anti-Roman and anti all those ancient myths about Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire on which the kings of France based their authority. But songs of love were clearly not enough for Eleanor once she was mistress of her own duchy again. She wanted a cultural revolution.

  The south of France was already a more equal place. Many small towns had local laws that forced men to get permission from their wives before they sold goods or property. Women and girls would also fight against the invaders alongside the men in the coming horrors of the Albigensian Crusade a generation ahead. But courtly love institutionalized this feminization as part of the European culture of chivalry. The new way of romance was rooted in two institutions, neither of which is absolutely secure as historical fact. One was a book called The Art of Courtly Love, written by Andreas Capellanus (Andrew the Chaplain), who was probably chaplain to Eleanor's daughter Marie of Champagne, who may even have commissioned him to write it. The other was the so-called Courts of Love, which Eleanor and her powerful women allies organized m Poitiers and other centres of the new movement, and which Andreas described in his book.

  Courtly love as set out by Andreas was definitely naughty:

  For when a man sees some woman fit for love and shaped according to his taste, he begins at once to lust after her in his heart. The more he thinks about her, the more he burns with love, until he comes to a fuller meditation. Presently he begins to think about the fashioning of the woman and to differentiate her limbs, to think about what she does, and to pry into the secrets of her body, and he desires to put each part of it to the fullest use.

  It was also outrageously snobbish. Not only were men incapable of love after the age of sixty, wrote Andreas, but so were peasants — who were quite content to have sex 'naturally, like a horse or mule', and must not be taught about love in case they left their farms. If you happened to fall in love with a peasant women, you were allowed to use force, he wrote. It was an outrageous piece of advice, and taken very literally by Richard and his colleagues. Courtly love like this was also a challenge to the Church — a kind of parody of religion. 'The heart leaps when the beloved unexpectedly appears,' wrote Andreas, when once it had been supposed to be the soul leaping at the sight of the body and blood of Christ.

  The famous Courts of Love were held in Poitiers, with aristo­cratic ladies sitting as judges on a dais deciding the questions of love brought to them by suitors, and presided over by Eleanor with Marie of Champagne, her niece Isabella, Countess of Flanders, and her sister-in-law Emma of Anjou, as well as Ermengarde, Countess of Narbonne.* Their rulings were set out in Capellanus's book as 'The Thirty-one Rules of Love', and woven through them all was the idea — which contradicted everything feudal society held dear — that love had to be mutual and freely given. It recognized that women might be sold into loveless marriages, but implied strongly that this need not be the end of passion for them. One of Ermengarde's rulings was about whether a woman had to forsake her love just because she got married. 'The fact that a new marital union has been entered into does not rightly exclude her former lover unless perchance the woman should altogether cease being devoted to her lover,' she decided. Infidelity wasn't neces­sarily infidelity, in other words. The key ruling was from Marie of Champagne, delivered by letter in 1174 — the only one with a date: that love cannot exist between husband and wife. Andreas did not accept this: he added also — as you would expect from a chaplain — that 'marriage is no barrier to love'.

  Taken together, courtly love was as much a set of ideals abouthow to behave for women as it was for men. Andreas included a little story about a knight searching for his horse as three groups of ladies passed by. The first was beautifully dressed, each attended by a lover on foot. The second had such a clamour of competing suitors that you just wanted to escape from the cacophony. The third rode bareback, clothed in rags, unattended, covered with dust from those that went before. The first ladies loved wisely, explained Andreas. The second gave kindness to everyone that asked — always a mistake. The third group of ladies may have been beautiful, but they had also been deaf to the pleadings of every potential lover.

  For Eleanor, love was not uncontrollable or indefinable. She was no romantic in the modern sense: she understood the realities of the world all too well. But like the trouvères around Blondel -whose lyrics were almost obsessively respectful to women, despite living in an age when rape and ransom were commonplace — she could imagine something different, beyond the whims of powerful men. It was as if she turned her back on her husband, took herself home to the place where she ruled in her own right — her favourite son at her side — and set about building a culture that
would stand as a bulwark against everything she had come to despise.

  Modern literary critics are hard on courtly love. The Marxists say that love was just a metaphor for money. The structuralists say that it was just a ritual, a game that rich young men played with each other to rise up the social hierarchy by making love to the wives of lords. Many modern critics say that The Art of Courtly Love was simply a parody, and that the Courts of Love were no more than a twelfth-century equivalent of satire. It is true there is little evidence outside the book that the courts were real, and even if they were, these peculiar events were in themselves a kind of satire — a playful comment on what was most important in the world. It is difficult to guess what really lay behind the phenomenon now, especially when we see everything as ironic in this postmodern era. But something was going on, and even if he was writing a parody, Andreas Capellanus must have had something out there to lampoon. If the troubadours and trouvères - in their various different incarnations — had just been clever, ironic social climbers, we canbe pretty sure that at some point life would have begun to imitate art: we know that the troubadour Raimon de Miraval's wife took the whole game so literally that he threw her out.

  Even Eleanor may well have been playing a sophisticated game, knowing all too well the limits of her new reality. The evidence is that Occitan culture rejoiced in aristocratic parlour games in which women submitted their love songs, or had them sung for them, to the judgement of an aristocratic woman, and Eleanor's Courts of Love may be an extension of these. These are contro­versial ideas now, as they were then. But I am inclined to believe that Eleanor of Aquitaine really held events of some kind — games as much as anything judicial — that could be caricatured as Courts of Love, not because she thought she could really turn the world upside down, but because she enjoyed it. But in doing so, she helped to mould the spirit of Blondel's generation that was just growing up.

  'Fair Aiglentine, undo your dress, for I wish to look on your fair body underneath,' says a character in Jean Renart's Roman de la Rose early in the next century, suspicious that her daughter might be pregnant.

  'I shall not do it, mother, for the cold can be fatal.'

  That is the voice of the era — sensual, naughty and a little shocking. What came out of the south of France, and spread rapidly to the north, had that same sensual and disturbing spirit. It was a worry for the Church, a source of disapproval for puritans like Philip Augustus, but the troubadour spirit was also a creative powerhouse for Europe. This is the tribairitz (woman troubadour) the Comtessa de Dia: 'I would very much like to hold my knight some evening, naked between my arms . . . my lover, generous and kind, may I hold you in my power and sleep with you one night, and give you a loving kiss. Know also that I have a great desire to embrace you rather than my husband.'

  That has the ring of authenticity about it, a fleeting glimpse of Richard's generation, though Blondel's songs would later empha­size the tragedy of love rather than the polite adultery enjoyed by the generation before. Both must have read Andreas Capellanus, and would have understood the idea of arguing about love in a court — one side versus the other — because that was the prevailing style of the Twelfth-century Renaissance. It was also the method of teaching used at the new universities. Disputes in class, public debates between Christians, Muslims and Jews, or even between orthodox Catholics and Cathar heretics, were the stuff of late-twelfth-century Europe. In the same way, the troubadour songs known as jeux parties were set out as arguments, and the troubadors who wrote them enthusiastically launched themselves into song contests with each other. Richard's generation loved debate, just as they loved paradoxes: it was in their songs and in their universi­ties too. It implied equality in an age of hierarchy and tolerance in an age of authority. Above all, it implied conversation: it was the tolerant legacy of Abelard.

  It is impossible now to know for sure exactly how much Eleanor created the culture of chivalry and how much she was influenced by it. She may have taken courtly love to new extremes and had an enormous influence on her son's generation, but it was also in the air all over Europe. The new culture emphasized spectacle and courtesy rather than brute force. It gloried in tales of King Arthur and the Round Table rather than Alexander and the Trojan Wars, and in the stories of Tristan and Iseult written by Marie de France.

  Henry II may have been an obsessive administrator, but even he understood the power of chivalric generosity and spectacle. It was he who organized a massive festival at Beaucaire in 1174 in order to bring about a reconciliation between King Alfonso II of Aragon and Henry's rebellious neighbour Raymond V of Toulouse — though neither was actually present. As many as 10,000 knights were there, and thousands of minstrels and troubadours, witnessing the distribution of 100,000 sous to the crowd, and the extraordinary gesture of ploughing another 30,000 into the earth — presumably a symbolic way of making the land richer.

  A decade later, the Holy Roman (German) Emperor Frederick Barbarossa organized an even bigger spectacle at Mainz over Whitsun 1184 to celebrate the knighting of his sons Henry (laterthe Emperor Henry VI) and Frederick. This attracted as many as 40,000 knights — 500 of them accompanied the young Duke Leopold V of Austria alone — as well as troubadours, trouvères and minnesingers from all over Europe. The imperial court was housed in a splendid palace made of wood outside the city, ringed by thousands of tents, but the festivities were brought to an abrupt end by a storm which blew down the wooden church, killing those inside.*

  A generation after that, these spectacles had become even more bound up with courtly love. The festival at Treviso, near Venice, in 1214 included a 'Court of Solace and Mirth' and a castle filled with the ladies of the court and their maids, covered all over with the most precious silks, brocades and purple cloth from throughout the Mediterranean. This then had to be stormed by two teams of knights, from Venice and Padua, with the aid of apples, dates, pears, tarts, lilies, violets, rose water, cinnamon and much else in the way of flowers and spices. Unfortunately, the rivalry between the two cities turned into a violent brawl, the festival broke up and enmity between them lasted for generations.

  Steeped in his mother's culture of feminine authority and bask­ing in the light of her favour, Richard seems to have understood his own destiny in chivalric terms. If anyone in Europe could be said to embody the tradition and heritage of King Arthur and the age of chivalry — in a generation immersed in the Arthurian legends — it was Richard. He came to represent the very apotheosis of military skill, with his red-gold hair and beard and his height: Richard was taller than six foot. Later, through family tragedy, he would inherit King Arthur's throne and his nephew and chosen heir would be called Arthur. Even as Richard was growing up, Marie de France — probably his aunt — had won a place as the most successful romantic writer of Western Europe, and his half-sister Marie of Champagne had commissioned Chretien de Troyes to write his legends of Lancelot and the Holy Grail.

  But it was more than that. Richard had been brought up like no other prince before him with the ideals of chivalry. He was the favourite son of the woman who might have been the original for the literary character of Guinevere, and whose court in Poitiers was filled with its culture. He had been brought up with the Round Table. When, just before his death, Henry II urged the monks of Glastonbury Abbey to start searching for King Arthur's tomb, we can be sure that Richard was paying attention.

  But there was a confusion about Richard's own attitude to romance, and you have to wonder whether it might have its roots in the Courts of Love. He was fascinated by what was forbidden and was particularly attracted to the order of military monks known as the Templars. He may even have been a member of their brotherhood, initiated into their aura of mystery. He was fascinated by Saracen culture, a trait that was to lead partly to his arrest. But the tension between the idea of the absolute power of women over men — bestowing love where they wanted — and his father's brutal militarism seems to have muddled his sexuality. Historians have speculated since the
eighteenth century whether Richard was homosexual or bisexual, fuelled by the peculiar accounts of his stay in Paris when he used to share a bed with Philip Augustus himself.

  That in itself is evidence of nothing very much — people regularly shared beds in the twelfth century — but there are other hints. He was clearly in no hurry to get married, and when he was married, he had to promise under duress that he would start sleeping with his wife. He had no heir, so perhaps he failed to take the advice — or not enough. He was clearly not repulsed by women: his power­ful sexual appetite certainly included them. He also had one illegiti­mate son, Philip Faulconbridge, lord of Cognac, and possibly an illegitimate daughter too — but when you think that the Bishop of Liege in the following century had sixty-two illegitimate children, that may not be testimony to enthusiastic heterosexuality.*

  Once again, Richard seems to have been torn in two violently different directions. In 1183 rebel barons from Aquitaine accused him of kidnapping their wives and daughters and, when he had raped them himself, handing them over to his soldiers. This is part of the undeniable dark side of Richard's career, yet there is also a message in existence from him to the wife of the Constable of Normandy, on a ribbon attached to his seal, which says, 'I am romance. Do not give me to the one who might separate our love.' It is almost as if his upbringing amidst the Courts of Love made him imbibe a little too much of the romantic powerlessness of men — as if he had to be brutal (with peasants) or hopelessly romantic (with aristocrats) or not love at all. The Blondel legend, of a troubadour searching for him across a continent with a love song, carries clear homosexual undertones, and it may be that Richard could only actually be passionate with men. Perhaps he learned this — as he learned much else — from the Arab civilization he so admired on crusade.