Some 400 troubadours are known, authors of over 4,000 poems, coming from all strata of society. The earliest whose songs survive is Guillaume IX, duke of Aquitaine, writing at his courts in Poitiers and Bordeaux, and doubtless elsewhere on travels that took him to the Holy Land and to Spain. He was also in contact with the courts of Anjou and Ventadour. He lived from 1071 to 1127. Bernart de Ventadour (fl. 1150-1200) was of poor birth, working for Ebles II ('The
Singer') of Ventadour, as well as in Narbonne and Toulouse. He also wrote for Eleanor of Aquitaine with whom he travelled to Normandy and England, writing at least one extant poem north of the Channel. Marcabru, a Gascon of humble origins, was in contact with Jaufre Rudel, prince of Blaye, who died on crusade in 1148 or 1149, giving rise to a romantic legend. Marcabru also worked for the courts of Aragon and Castile. Most troubadours seem to have been peripatetic, the great Guillaume IX, Richard I of England, Alfonso II of Aragon, for reasons of state, others to follow their lords. Peire Vidal worked not only for the count of Toulouse and king of Aragon but also for the marquis of Montferrat, like many late twelfth-and early thirteenth-century troubadours, with whom he visited Cyprus and perhaps Constantinople. The routes taking Gausbut de Poicebot from the Limousin to Spain are less well charted; like the earlier Gascon poet Cercamon ('Search the World') he may have been the archetypal 'wandering troubadour'. Other poets, however, remained at home: Maria de Ventadour, Raimbaut d'Orange, the countess of Die, Peire d'Alvernhe in Clermont. Major centres like Vienne, seat of the Dauphin, Le Puy, which lent its name to northern French poetic societies, and Toulouse, home of the 'Floral Games' of the fourteenth-century troubadour revival, proved magnets to many poets. Not all troubadours were Provencal. Lanfranc Cigala and Fouquet de Marseille, bishop of Toulouse, were from Genoa; the former wrote there. Sordel was from Mantua; Guillem de Cabestaing and Guillem de Bergedan were Catalan; all three travelled in France and Spain. Much of this movement, and the concomitant cultural diffusion, stemmed from the vast and interconnected politicogeographical influence of the houses of Anjou, Aragon-Toulouse and Provence, which, together with transalpine houses like Montferrat, provided a continuing tradition of poetic patronage, as well as producing poets among their own members.
P. E.Bennett
Languages, c. 1200
The map outlines the linguistic situation c. 1200. A map covering the end of the first millennium would have looked very different, since, apart from Latin—the almost universal language of literacy—other languages mainly existed as more or less distinct (and largely unwritten) dialects from which, in ensuing centuries, there would emerge the first signs of maturing written (and hence standardizing) forms. It was in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (very occasionally earlier, sometimes later) that vernacular languages began to be prominently recorded; then we can detect converging developments which became the bases of later standard and national forms. Spoken and regional forms—always perhaps the primary language of troubadours, preachers and ordinary people—developed into national written forms with the impetus of social, cultural and political evolution.
Virtually all the languages of Europe are descended from a postulated common prehistoric origin—Indo-European. The exceptions are Basque, whose origins seem more primitive still, and perhaps Albanian; and interloping languages of the Finno-Ugric family—Hungarian, and Estonian and Finnish.
Under the Roman Empire, Latin was the learned lingua franca throughout Europe. In the very early Middle Ages, Slavic and Magyar incursions westward surrounded the Latinspeaking province of Dacia: hence the separate development of Rumanian. It is from Slavic that Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian and Bulgarian ultimately develop. Related, at least by contact if not by descent, are the Baltic languages of Lithuania and Latvia.
In northern Europe, the languages of Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and the Faroes began
To develop separately out of Old Norse between 1150 and 1250.
Before the turn of the thirteenth century various phonological developments served to distinguish Low German (the precursor of Dutch, Flemish and Frisian) from (southern) High German, from which modern standard German evolved.
In medieval France a similar dialectal division holds between northern and central dialects (grouped as langue d'oil) and the dialects of the south (langue d'oc). It was from one of the north-central forms, francien, the dialect of the Ile-de-France, that modern standard French developed.
Among various languages of the Iberian peninsula, one in particular occupied more and more territory with comparative rapidity: Castilian.
In thirteenth-century Italy much literary and non-literary material was still written in Latin. It was in the early part of the fourteenth century that Tuscan, specifically the Tuscan of Florence, emerged as the literary language of Italy.
In the British Isles medieval English, which had been very much to the fore in developing a written vernacular standard in Anglo-Saxon times, again emerged and would soon be ascendant, despite linguistic incursions from Scandinavia and France. In the east, north and south of the Forth Scots began to emerge as a separate standard language before 1400. Other regions of northern and western Britain became the locations of various (and, once, more prominent) Celtic languages—the descendants of Brythonic in Wales and Cornwall, and of Goidelic in Ireland and Scotland.
N. Macleod
THE LATE MIDDLE AGES (c. 1300-c. 1500)
World History
