The troubadours

The manuscripts tell a curious story with regard to this treachery. The reader will remember that at the beginning of the war Henry had entered into a league with the King of Aragon. This king was Alfonso II., well known as one of the most liberal protectors of the troubadours, who in return lavished their praise upon him. Bertran de Born was on terms of intimacy with him, and the manuscript tells us that ‘he was very glad that King Alfonso was amongst the besieging army, for he was his most especial friend.’ It appears that Castle Autafort was better provided with meat and drink than the camp, for King Alfonso, on the ground of their intimacy, asked Bertran for a supply of bread, wine, and meat. This the troubadour generously granted, but in return asked another favour, which was nothing less than that the King of Aragon should use his authority to remove the besieging engines from a certain side of the castle where the wall was rotten and would give way easily. Such a demand implied the fullest confidence in him to whom it was made, and this confidence unfortunately turned out to be misplaced. The King of Aragon immediately betrayed the secret to Henry; the assault was directed against the weak point of the defences, and the castle fell.

Such is the story as told by Bertran’s biographer, and, if true, it fully accounts for the troubadour’s implacable hatred evinced by many poetic onslaughts on the private and political character of Alfonso. But we ought to hesitate in condemning on such doubtful evidence the conduct of a king who by the all but unanimous testimony of contemporary writers was a model of knightly virtues and wholly incapable of the base treachery here laid to his charge.

However this may have been, Bertran’s castle was taken, and he a prisoner in the hands of his bitterest enemies. But even in this extremity Bertran’s genius did not forsake him, and it is on this occasion chiefly that we catch a glimpse of that undauntable strength of character which, combined with a keen insight into the secret springs of human impulse, explains his extraordinary sway over men’s minds. I follow closely the graphic account of the Provençal manuscript:—‘After the castle was taken Sir Bertran, with all his people, was brought to the tent of King Henry. And the King received him very ill, and said to him,

‘“Bertran, Bertran! you have boasted that never half of your sense would be needful to you at any time, but know that now you stand in need of the whole of it.”

‘“Sir,” replied Bertran, “it is true that I have said so, and I have spoken the truth.”

‘And the King said, “Then now, it seems, you have lost your wits altogether.”

‘“Sir,” said Bertran, “it is true that I have lost all my wits.”

‘“And how is that?” replied the King.

‘“Sir,” said Bertran, “the day that the valiant young Henry your son died I lost sense and cunning and consciousness.”

‘And the King, when he heard Bertran’s words, wept for his son, and great grief rose to his heart and to his eyes, and he could not constrain himself, and fainted away from pain. And when he recovered himself he called out to Bertran, and said, weeping,

‘“Sir Bertran! Sir Bertran! you are right and wise in saying that you lost your sense for the sake of my son, for he loved you better than any other man in the world; and for the love of him I release your person, your lands, and your castle, and I will receive you to my grace and favour, and I give you five hundred marks of silver for the damage you have suffered at my hands.”

‘And Bertran fell at his feet, tendering him service and gratitude.’

We may feel inclined to look upon the substantial data of the closing sentences with some amount of scepticism; but the consummate skill with which Bertran at first excites the curiosity of the King, the way in which he finally acts upon his feelings, all the more powerfully as his own grief is true and powerful—all this is much beyond the invention of a simple-minded Provençal scribe. These traits are too intrinsically real for mere fiction; they are inherent in the nature of a strong man and a great poet. It is also an undeniable fact that soon after the events described, Bertran was again in possession of his castle, and that the remonstrances of his unfortunate brother Constantine were treated with scorn by both Richard and King Henry.

To the former Bertran now seems to have attached himself, and during the incessant feuds in which the lion-hearted monarch subsequently was involved with the King of France and his own unruly vassals the troubadour seems to have remained faithful to him, barring always such inclinations towards whoever might be the aggressive party, which Bertran’s unbounded love of fighting made excusable. We possess a sirventes dated many years later in which the poet rejoices at Richard’s release from the German prison, ‘because now again we shall see walls destroyed and towers overthrown and our enemies in chains.’

But I must not detain the reader with further stories of feuds and battles, of which most likely he has had already more than his fill. It remains to add a few words with regard to another side of Bertran’s life and poetry, his love affairs. These, it must be hoped, will form a somewhat more harmonious conclusion to an account of a wild, reckless career.

Bertran’s love-songs are not the emanations of a pure guileless heart, such as the canzos of Guillem de Cabestanh or Folquet of Marseilles. Upon the whole one is glad to find that they are not and do not pretend to be such; for a lover’s unselfish devotion could be nothing but pretension in a man of his character. Bertran was, and appears even in his canzos, a man of the world, to whom his love affairs are of secondary importance. Yet these canzos are not without passion, and not seldom have a peculiar charm of simple grace, all the more delightful because of its contrast with the warlike harshness of his ordinary strains. What, for instance, can be more sweet and graceful than the following stanza, which occurs at the beginning of one of Bertran’s sirventeses?—

After such an opening the reader expects a love-song of tenderest pathos. But no. After another stanza, Bertran suddenly changes his mind. Perhaps the lady whom he silently adored did not understand or appreciate his passion. ‘As without a lady’—he now exclaims—‘one cannot make a love-song, I am going to sing a fresh and novel sirventes.’ And forthwith he begins his ordinary strain of invective against a whole catalogue of hostile barons.

Of the objects of Bertran’s passion—for we know of two, and there may have been others of whom we do not know—the old manuscripts give us a prolix account. We first hear of a Lady Maenz or Matilda of Montignac, wife of Count Talairand (for as a matter of course she was married), and sister to two other ladies celebrated by the troubadours for their beauty and courteous demeanour. The Lady Maenz was wooed by many noble knights and barons; and even three scions of royalty, the Princes Richard and Geoffrey of England and King Alfonso of Aragon, are mentioned amongst her suitors. But Bertran’s valour and fame as a poet gained the victory in her heart over power and riches. Such at least is the account of the old biography, founded, it seems, on a somewhat vague statement in one of Bertran’s own poems, to the effect that his lady ‘refused Poitou, and Tolosa, and Bretagne and Saragosa, but has given her love to the valorous poor knight’—meaning of course himself.

Unfortunately the course of true love did not run smooth for long; the blast of jealousy troubled its waters. Bertran had written a few songs in praise of another lady, the wife of his friend the Viscount of Camborn. Pure gallantry, he alleged, was the motive, but the Lady Maenz refused to view the matter in this innocent light, and angrily discarded her lover. Bertran was in despair; he knew, the manuscript says, ‘that he could never regain her, or find another lady so beautiful, so good, so gentle, and so learned.’ In this dilemma Bertran had recourse to the following pretty conceit of gallantry. Whether he had heard the story of the Athenian artist who, from the combined charms of the most beautiful women, moulded the type of the Goddess of Love, seems doubtful; but the coincidence of ideas between the troubadour and the antique sculptor is striking. For Bertran de Born, the biographer tells us, went to the most beautiful ladies of the country asking from each the loan of her greatest charm (metaphorically it must be understood), and from these he reconstructed the ideal type of his lost love. The poem in which this is done is a model of grace and gallantry, flattering alike to the divers ladies whose beauties are commemorated, and to the one who in her being concentrates and surpasses the charms of all others.

But her heart was unmoved, and, in a fit of amorous despair we must suppose, the troubadour now offered his services as knight and poet to another lady, complaining at the same time bitterly of the cruelty of his former love. His offer was not accepted, neither was it disdainfully rejected. It would have been a breach of courtesy and good faith to deprive a lady of her lover, and much as the Lady Tibors (this was the name of Bertran’s new flame) may have been desirous of the praise of one of the greatest troubadours of the time, she resisted the temptations of vanity. Her answer to Bertran is a model of good sense; at the same time it smacks a little of that technical pedantry with which the ladies of Provence were wont to treat difficult cases of love. ‘Either,’ said the Lady Tibors, ‘your quarrel is of a slight and temporary kind—and in that case I will try to effect your peace with your lady; or else you have been guilty of a serious offence towards her—and, if so, neither I nor any good lady ought to accept your services. But in case I find on inquiry that your lady has left you from fickleness and caprice, I shall be honoured by your love.’ The first of these surmises fortunately turned out to be true. By the interference of Lady Tibors the lovers’ quarrel was settled, and in commemoration of the event Bertran was ordered to write a song in which he declares his immutable love for Lady Maenz, paying at the same time a grateful and graceful tribute to the kind peacemaker.

This is all we hear of the beautiful Lady Maenz. But Bertran appears presently as the passionate admirer of another lady, of much more exalted rank. It must have been soon after his reconciliation with Count Richard that the troubadour met in his camp the Count’s sister Mathilda, the wife of the celebrated Duke Henry of Brunswick. The inflammable heart of the poet caught fire at her beauty, and his enthusiastic praise seems to have been received with much condescension. It tends to prove Bertran’s importance that it was by Richard’s express desire that his sister showed kindness to the troubadour, who, the manuscript adds, ‘was a renowned man and valorous, and might be of great use to the Count.’ In the praise of Mathilda Bertran wrote several beautiful canzos, one of which is particularly remarkable for an allusion in the first line to so prosaic a subject as dinner—the poem having been composed, it is said, one Sunday when that meal failed to be forthcoming at the ill-provided camp.

In addition to these amorous entanglements Bertran was also married, although neither he nor his biographer deigns to mention so unimportant a personage as his wife. We know, however, that his children at Bertran’s death came to a compromise with their uncle Constantine as to the possession of Castle Autafort and its dependencies. One of his sons inherited with his father’s name some of his father’s poetic talent and, it appears, all his fierce passions. By this younger Bertran de Born, who has sometimes been mistaken for the great poet, we possess a sirventes against King John worthy of the paternal example. The luckless king is mercilessly assaulted. The loss of his continental possessions is attributed to cowardice and irresolution, and the king’s immoderate love of the chase does not escape notice. The barons also come in for their share of vituperation. In fact everything is done more patrio. Bertran died at an advanced age, having entered a monastery not long before his death.

Such was the not inappropriate close of a life passed in the wildest turmoil of political strife. As a type of the warlike mediæval baron, reckless and ruthless, Bertran stands unsurpassed in history or literature. But we have seen that the refining and softening influences of friendship, of love, of knightly courtesy, were not wholly absent from his career.

Another consideration suggests itself. Would it not be worth while for the authorities of the Record Office to secure a competent hand to glean from the biography of this and other troubadours the many important and hitherto totally neglected facts bearing on the continental policy of the Plantagenets?