Troubadour

A troubadour was a poet-musician who composed and performed lyric poetry in Old Occitan during the High Middle Ages, roughly from 1100 to 1350. The word is masculine in origin, so a female troubadour is called a trobairitz.

Spread

The troubadour tradition began in Occitania in the late 11th century and later spread to Italy and the Iberian Peninsula. It inspired similar movements across Europe: the Minnesang in Germany, trovadorismo in Galicia and Portugal, and the trouvères in northern France. Dante Alighieri described troubadour lyric as a blend of rhetoric, music, and poetry. The art peaked around the turn of the 13th century, saw a mid-century revival, then declined in the 14th century and vanished around the time of the Black Death (1348).

Troubadour songs mostly dealt with chivalry and courtly love. Their texts were often metaphysical, intellectual, and formulaic, but many were humorous or vulgar satires. Works fell into three styles: trobar leu (light), trobar ric (rich), and trobar clus (closed). The most popular genre was the canso, though sirventes and tensos were common in the post-classical period.

The English word “troubadour” comes from French, first recorded in 1575 in a historical context referring to a 12th- and 13th-century Occitan court poet. The earliest known form is trobadors, found in a 12th-century Occitan text by Cercamon.

Etymology

The French word derives from Occitan trobador, the oblique case of trobaire (“composer”), related to trobar (“to compose, discuss, invent”). Trobar likely comes from a hypothetical Late Latin tropāre (“to compose, invent a poem”), based on the Latin root tropus (“trope”), which itself comes from Greek trópos (“turn, manner”). The Latin suffix -ātor explains the Occitan forms: Gallo-Romance tropātor became Occitan trobaire (subject case) and tropātōre became trobador (oblique case).

An alternative theory suggests trobar may derive from the Arabic ṭaraba (“music”), from the root ṭ–r–b (“provoke emotion, make music”). Another proposed Arabic root is ḍ–r–b (“strike,” by extension “play an instrument”). This theory is supported by some historians and musicologists who see Andalusian Arabic influences on troubadour origins.

In archaic and classical poetry, the word “troubadour” was used mockingly, meaning “someone who makes things up.” Cercamon wrote that troubadours, mixing truth and lies, corrupt lovers, women, and husbands. Peire d’Alvernha began a famous satire of contemporary poets with “I will sing of these troubadours,” then dismissed them all. When referring to themselves seriously, troubadours almost always used chantaire (“singer”).

Arabic

Early scholarship on troubadour origins produced no consensus, with at least eleven competing theories. One major theory posits Arabic influence. The 16th-century Italian historian Giammaria Barbieri first suggested Arabian influences on troubadour music. Later scholars like J.B. Trend linked troubadour poetry to Arabic poetry from Iberia.

Examining William IX of Aquitaine, Évariste Lévi-Provençal and others found three lines they believed were in Arabic, suggesting an Andalusian origin, though medievalist Istvan Frank argued these lines were a scribe’s rewriting. Ramón Menéndez Pidal claimed William created the troubadour tradition under Moorish influence during the Reconquista, but George T. Beech noted William fought only one documented battle in Iberia, late in life. Beech added that William and his father had Iberian relatives and may have known Europeans who spoke Arabic. Magda Bogin argued Arab poetry, such as Ibn Hazm’s “The Ring of the Dove,” was likely one of several influences on European courtly love poetry.