by Tim Rayborn
Indeed, Fulk had no desire to maintain any connections with his previous secular life; demonstrating his commitment to his newfound faith, he became a committed enemy of the Cathars, a wildly popular religious movement in southern France that had been denounced as heretical by the Church and condemned. The Cathars denied the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and any validity to its sacraments, believing instead that the universe was ruled by the forces of light and darkness, forever in conflict. This is known as Dualism, and its long history goes back to at least ancient Persia. The good was pure spirit, so therefore, anything earthly, including the Church, was evil. I imagine that went over real well at the Papal Sunday brunch. Catharism was widely accepted (or at least tolerated) in the south, and many nobles professed it, possibly more to defy Church power than out of actual belief. These same nobles were often patrons to various troubadours, or were even troubadours themselves.
In 1215, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against the Cathars, which opened up the floodgates for armies from northern France and farther afield to beat some sinners into submission and get a tan—but just as importantly, to get in on the land-grab and lootings that would inevitably follow the confiscation of the southerners’ properties, castles, and estates. The famous phrase “Kill them all, God will know His own” was attributed to papal legate Abbot Arnold Amaury after the taking of one southern city and confusion over whom to spare and whom to kill.
An enthusiastic supporter of this crusade and such harsh sentiments, Fulk did what he could to assist, including helping to establish the Inquisition in southern France. The tragedy of this whole affair was that by the 1240s, the Cathars had indeed been all but wiped out, and with them the vibrant and rich troubadour culture that had flourished in a land of relative tolerance and openness. Various troubadours fled the dangers of the Languedoc and found new homes in Spain and Italy, but their time was ending and new musical tastes were fast supplanting them. Fulk, who died in 1231, had no remorse for helping to bring about the end of a culture he had once celebrated.
Châtelain de Coucy (fl. 1186–1203)
His heart just wasn’t in it
This fellow with an exotic and romantic-sounding name was probably Guy de Couci (“Châtelain” is a title), who lived in a castle by the name of, well, Couci. He held this fancy position from 1186 until his death. The Châtelain was a trouvère who wrote poems in the Old French language. Incidentally, the trouvères did not suffer the same sad fate as their southern counterparts (troubadours), but rather continued to flourish right up until the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Châtelain has left behind an impressive collection of high-quality songs that are remarkably tuneful, even to the modern listener.
He rates a place here due to a curious legend that grew up around him after his death. It is said that he fell in love with a noble woman, the Lady of Fayel, who was—naturally—already married. Whether this story is true or not, his lyrics reflect the poetic ideal of love as a state of suffering, elevating self-pity to an art form:
Lady, I have no torment that is not my joy,
For without you, I could not live, and do not want to.
Without loving you, my life has no use
Unless I want to annoy everyone, or walk around dying.
At least he admitted to being annoying.
While the love conventions of the time encouraged, at least in theory, adulterous love, needless to say the Lady’s husband, Sir Fayel, wasn’t all that thrilled when he found out. In an attempt to trap them, or at least get Guy away from his wife, he suggested a joint pilgrimage to the Holy Land but then backed out, forcing Guy to go alone. He smugly thought he had gotten rid of the upstart. Sure enough, the poor Châtelain was mortally wounded. Knowing he would never see his beloved again, he instructed his faithful servant to remove his heart after his death, embalm it, and send it back to her as a token of his love, even beyond death.
Mean old Sir Fayel got wind of this plan as well (apparently he had spies everywhere) and devised a particularly cruel trick. After intercepting the heart, he had it prepared as a delicious-looking meal and served to his wife, who had no idea. After she finished eating it, he triumphantly told her the origins of her meal. Lady Fayel, upon hearing this, died. In some sources it is from grief, in others it is because, she says, she has eaten the most perfect food and so will never eat again.
This strange little story circulated widely and was known in other sources. It was popularized in a later thirteenth-century romance about the Châtelain’s life. In fact, the same tale, which originally seems to have come from Brittany, was also told about a troubadour named Guilhem de Cabestaing and about a minnesinger (the German equivalent of the troubadours and trouvères) named Reinmar von Brennenberg. Hey, if you have a good story, why only use it once? This was pure tabloid fodder, and audiences were just as eager for it then as now.
Guilhem de la Tor (fl. 1216–1233)
She’s just not that into you
Guilhem was a minor troubadour who left his home in Périgord, France, to work in Italy; it would have been a hellish commute otherwise. For a minor figure, he is lucky (?) to have a rather detailed and odd story recorded about him, though once again, it is likely just an embellished fiction. The source of this peculiar tale appears to be one of his own poems, Uns amics et un’amia, wherein he debates with another troubadour, Sordel, about whether one should follow their beloved to death or live on. Guilhem writes:
A lover and his beloved … are so entirely of one mind
That it seems to them one of them could not have joy without the other.
If then the woman died in circumstances where her lover … saw her death
What would be better for him to do: to live on after her or to die?
Sordel responds that he thinks the lover should also die, though Guilhem is not completely convinced, replying that the beloved does not benefit from this.
This song may have directly inspired his odd biography. According to the tale, Guilhem met and fell madly in love with a barber’s wife in Milan and ran away with her to Como, near the border with modern Switzerland; actually, it seems that he may have abducted her. In any case, they married and he remained passionately in love with her. However, tragedy struck and she died, leaving poor Guilhem inconsolable and despairing to the point of madness.
He began to believe that she wasn’t dead at all and was simply trying to find an excuse to leave him. That seems like a rather complicated plan; couldn’t she have just run off with the stable boy? He spent ten days removing her from her tomb and holding her, asking her to tell him if she was alive or dead, and if she was in fact dead, to relate to him what she was experiencing in the afterlife, so that if necessary, he could have prayers and masses said for her. Needless to say, she wasn’t particularly chatty.
City officials weren’t overly pleased with his behavior. The poor man was expelled from the city and took to moving about looking for a wizard or sorcerer who could bring her back to life. He encountered a charlatan who was only too happy to give him detailed instructions. This was a complex and tortuous procedure involving saying 150 Lord’s Prayers, reciting the entire Psalter (a medieval book of the psalms), and giving alms out to seven poor people each day before he himself could eat (basically turning his breakfast into a late lunch). He was told to do this for a year; his beloved would then come back from the dead but would be unable to speak, eat, or drink.
Gullible Guilhem enthusiastically undertook this laborious process, only to find, of course, that it had no effect whatsoever. He was said to have died of grief shortly after failing to bring about his lover’s resurrection. It’s doubtful that this story is true, though let’s be honest, some medieval people did do very strange things.
Goliards (twelfth and thirteenth centuries)
Sex, booze, and rock ’n’ roll
The goliards are sometimes seen as the medieval equivalent of frat boys, and probably also the first rock stars. William IX might have fit in well with them, ha
d he lived in their time. The origin of their name is unclear but may come from the Latin gula, “gluttony,” or from “Goliath.” Abelard had been referred to as Goliath by the abbot Bernard of Clairvaux (Peter was good at pissing off authority, you’ll recall), and thus the term “goliard” could reflect an imagined connection between Abelard and his many students, of whom the goliards may have seen themselves as the descendants.
They were mainly clerical students at various universities, including those of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna, who decided to be a little less pious than they should have been and a little more hell-raising than was acceptable. When not immersed in their studies, they would spend large amounts of time at the local taverns, brothels, and gambling dens, obviously doing serious and intense research on the state of moral decay and hypocrisy in the modern world of ca. 1200. Such activities also often led to many a hastily written letter home asking the folks for more money. Some things never change.
Their wild ways led to some wickedly funny poetic and musical satires on a wide variety of topics: church corruption, love and marriage, financial shenanigans in authority, and the benefits of imbibing large amounts of alcohol. One song, In Taberna, finishes up with an admission of guilt but little repentance:
No amount of money could pay
The bill for all that we drink
We drink without measure
Only for our own enjoyment.
Everyone criticizes us
And we will soon be paupers
May our critics be confounded
When they are not recorded among the saved!
Not to be confined to just the written word, they were also known for pranks and outlandish behavior. In a scene straight out of Monty Python, a record from St. Remy in Provence states that they would go to mass each dragging a herring on a string behind him. The goal of this game was to try to step on the herring in front of you, while at the same time keeping your own herring from being stepped on (no jokes about red herrings, I promise).
One of the stranger musical works associated with this genre is the Mass of the Asses, Drunkards, and Gamblers, a musical and textual parody of the Catholic mass that involved references to all kinds of gambling, winning, and losing, and a share of insults thrown in for good measure. The Catholic exhortation “let us pray” became, in this work, “let us bet.” There is also a piece in praise of Bacchus:
I will go to the altar of Bacchus
To him who gives joy to the heart of man
Let us drink
We beseech you, Bacchus, take our clothes from us
That we may be worthy, with naked bodies, to enter the tavern.
Naturally, their wanton ways did not sit well with authorities, in either the universities or the Church. Crackdowns were enacted and various people threatened with expulsion, all of the usual things that impotent authorities do to try to maintain order. But strangely, more often than not, they got away with it, and in time, the Church (wisely) came to view some of their activities as simply a way of blowing off youthful steam.
Despite these activities, there is evidence that most of the surviving lyrics were not autobiographical at all, since many of the known poets were highly educated and well regarded. They were simply using such imagery as social criticism and rhetorical devices for equally sophisticated audiences. The actual students probably didn’t write a lot of the surviving songs.
A good collection of goliardic verse and song is in the manuscript known as the Carmina Burana from thirteenth-century Germany. This work inspired twentieth-century composer Carl Orff to set some of its poems to his own majestic orchestral music, thus inadvertently creating a soundtrack for dozens of cheesy low-budget fantasy films and an equal number of video games over the last thirty years. The goliards would be amused. Or at least they’d drink to it.
Jehan de l’Escurel (d. 1304?)
Hang him high
Little is known about Jehan other than that he was one of the last true trouvères. He was the son of a Parisian merchant and left a large (for the medieval period) collection of songs that reflected the themes of his times. He may also have composed some polyphonic music anonymously in other collections. It is recorded that on May 23, 1304, a certain Jehan de l’Escurel was hanged (along with three other clerics) for “debauchery” and “crimes against women.”
It has been traditional to assume that this was the same man as the composer in question. However, there has been a lot of debate about this in recent years, with convincing arguments that the executed man was someone else. The question will probably never be resolved, but it is intriguing to ponder. An equally puzzling topic is the reason for the hanging, as these charges were not normally capital offenses, unless he was a persistent and odious re-offender or there was more to it. Perhaps this Jehan was guilty of some dreadful, Jack-the-Ripper-esque crime that the authorities of the day were too shocked to mention? We’ll probably never know, but the idea of a medieval serial killer would make for a good Twilight Zone episode, or heavy metal video.
Grimace (late fourteenth century)
Grimace was a French composer living in the second half of the fourteenth century. He is known to have written five surviving songs, and maybe a few more. Nothing is known about his life, but with a name like this, he simply had to be included in this book.
3
The Renaissance
Brought to you basically by the same folks that created the term “the Middle Ages,” the Renaissance (a French word meaning “rebirth”) was touted in the nineteenth century as nothing less than the fantastic rebirth of humanity after a long, post-Roman dark night of stagnation and ignorance. And plague. And turnips. And monks.
Beginning with innovations in art and architecture in fourteenth-century Italy, the whole thing caught on and spread throughout Europe—not unlike the bubonic plague, but without the open sores and agonizing deaths. Before you could say “rebirth,” people were reading the old Greek classics, inventing printing presses, painting realistic pictures with better perspective, making music that sounds more “modern” to our ears, and questioning religious authorities left and right. And it’s true; the period between roughly 1350 and 1600 is simply remarkable. The Renaissance probably has more amazing art, music, architecture, and literary masterpieces per capita than any other era in Western history. From Leonardo da Vinci to William Shakespeare, from Rabelais to Michelangelo, the jewels in the Renaissance crown are many and brilliant.
It wasn’t all fun and games and lute songs, though. Religious differences tore apart nations, towns, and families as the Protestant Reformation drew huge lines in the sand and divided loyalties everywhere, resulting in dreadful persecutions from both sides (the Catholic Church launched a “Counter-Reformation” in response to Martin Luther’s teachings), massacres, and full-on battles. The witch hunts—surprisingly never that big of a deal in medieval times—came into their own, resulting in the deaths of one hundred thousand or more innocent people (nearly a quarter of whom were men). A horrendous book called Malleus Maleficarum, written in 1486 by two absolutely appalling priests, became the how-to manual for this bloody and paranoid phenomenon for the next few centuries. There was a real Dracula who impaled his victims on wooden stakes (we’ll meet him later), and a crime family, the Borgias, one of whom became pope. Wars broke out, the Ottoman Empire expanded dangerously into Eastern Europe while effectively ruling the eastern Mediterranean Sea, and monarchies and religious leaders were rocked with scandals. If it was a time of “rebirth,” it was a rebirth into the harsh realities of the nearly modern world.
Composers were not spared these unpleasant developments. Just like their medieval predecessors, some of them met with very strange fates and shocking ends.
Antoine Busnois (ca. 1430–1492)
The fight club
Busnois (“Boo-NWAH,” not “bus noise”) was a highly regarded French composer, whose songs many now see as ahead of their time in their complexity, melody, and rhythm. He attracted many patrons
, hobnobbed in various aristocratic circles, and ended up in the service of Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, in the mid-1460s. Charles loved two things: music and war. He often dragged his court composers and musicians along with him on his military campaigns—and more than one of them got killed as a result—because he didn’t want to be without his favorite music. Remember, this was in the days before iPods, so if you wanted music when you traveled, you had to bring the whole band with you.
This fighting spirit seemed to suit Busnois just fine. Despite serving as a chaplain and a subdeacon at various points in his career, he was prone to violence. He filed a petition for absolution (forgiveness) in Tours, France, in February 1461, confessing to being part of a gang that had beaten up a priest. Not once. Not twice. But five times. Five! Exactly why this particular priest was subjected to getting the stuffing kicked out of him so many times is not recorded. Perhaps “Subdeacon Smackdown” was a new team sport that never quite took off.
This behavior had put him in a “state of anathema,” basically the Church’s way of saying “you’ve been bad.” For whatever reasons, Antoine decided to celebrate mass while in this state (maybe to commemorate the priest’s butt-kicking), which was strictly a no-no. He was then excommunicated—the Church’s way of saying “you’ve been very bad.”
Some sources credit him with writing the incredibly popular song L’homme armé, “The Armed Man.” This little tune would be used and reused, strangely enough, as a melody in more than forty masses composed between 1450 and about 1700. It was common to take popular songs and mix them into religious music, especially for the mass, as a way of appropriating a sinful song back into holiness.
Despite Busnois’s troubles, things didn’t end badly for him. He was able to obtain a pardon from the pope and was reinstated. Presumably, he had learned his lesson and left his priest-thumping days behind him. Indeed, later contemporaries would proclaim his sterling character and suitability to instruct his students in both music and morals. Perhaps all he had really needed earlier on was a good military campaign with Charles the Bold to go kick the butt of a secular enemy and get it out of his system.
