the great poetic form of the period was at first disdained by many of the most renowned poets. It reached its peak of popularity as the Cid Campeador was menacing many of the mulūk and while other cities, such as Barbastro, were plagued by incursions from the north. The song was called muwashshaḥa. The reasons for its lack of respect among the paragons of haute culture, men such as Ibn Ḥazm, were also the reasons for its success and popularity among those less protective of the canon of Arabic literature. The song embodied the symbiotic culture of al-Andalus rather than its classical Arabic heritage, and it vaunted its uniqueness with something revolutionary: a final verse in Mozarabic, the Romance vernacular of this world. The formal and musical alternations between strophes and refrain in these songs were reiterated and enhanced by the oscillation between classical and vernacular, between the language and poetry of the courts and that of the streets.
Some of the purists may not have liked it, but their disapproval, like the disapproval of many guardians of the old classical ways in every culture and period of history, did little to prevent its spreading popularity. The innovation, in fact, proved widely appealing for numerous generations of Andalusians, and for none more than for those of the eleventh century, whose cultural decadence in the eyes of stricter Muslims was to invite (or at least to serve to justify) the invasion of the fundamentalist Almoravids. It was a fateful invasion for the history of Europe and its culture, one that would provoke the alliance between the Cid and some of the mulūk and that would precipitate a long period of orthodox retrenchment that would eventually exile two of the greatest Andalusian philosophers, Maimonides and Averroes.
But in 1064 that period of defense and austerity was still in the unimaginable future, and the status quo in Spain was still one of prolific cultural production, luxurious court life, and the heyday of the revolutionary new song, the muwashshaḥa. Contacts between the men of Provence and those whose sphere of influence was still mainly limited to south of the Pyrenees were far from infrequent, and they were varied. Already in the time of William the Great, grandfather of William IX, the export of Andalusian scholarship to other parts of Europe was noteworthy: An astrolabe had been built at Lièges in 1025, and several books on the subject, clearly dependent on the works of the Arabic predecessors who had developed the instrument, were available by the midpoint of the century and were instrumental in the revolution in navigation that followed. The material, intellectual, and artistic riches that escaped al-Andalus in bits and pieces such as these graced the ancestral home of the man who was to be known as the first troubadour. Even as a young man he could hardly have avoided knowing the songs of the women of Barbastro, because the Arabic singing-slaves taken by Guillaume de Montreuil were dutifully presented by that William to his commander in chief, William VI of Poitiers, father of the man whose own songs would for many centuries be known as the first songs of Europe.
Whether or not William of Aquitaine, in his childhood or adolescence, heard the entertainments of the Barbastrian women then serving, through the vicissitudes of history and the Reconquest, in Provence, it is most unlikely that during his lifetime he could have remained ignorant of the salient features of life as it was lived in the Ṭaifa kingdoms of Spain or of the many amenities that world provided for its inhabitants.
In fact, even aside from the particular incident at Barbastro and its ramifications in the life of William, everything we know about the geographic and political ties of what are now southern France and northern Spain (the latter far from completely reconquered or Christianized) shows clearly the extent to which the citizens of the area of Languedoc were in intimate contact with and tied to the fronterizo and the still strongly Arabized world of the late eleventh century. During the lifetime of William of Aquitaine the two societies were contiguous, and the interrelations between the two worlds, which we are scarcely justified in seeing as fundamentally separate, were remarkable. A rough sketch of their political history alone tells a story that reveals much. The county of Barcelona, which remained largely in Arab hands until well after the period of the first troubadours, spanned the western Pyrenees to include areas that in modern times separate France from Spain. Saragossa, for example, was not captured until 1118. The kingdom of Aragon was nominally Christian at the turn of the twelfth century, but many of its cities remained Muslim for some time. Even those that were in Christian hands had been so only for a very short period of time. Huesca, for example, had only been recaptured in 1096.
William was thus born and raised in Christian territory more than just randomly or sporadically involved with its Andalusian and semi-Andalusian neighbors. And the record of William’s direct ties with the culture of the muwashshaḥas and of his own society’s life in the limelight of al-Andalus leaves little or no doubt that the birth of Provençal troubadour poetry occurred at a time and place when the Arabic world and its culture were of immediate fascination and importance. Toledo, already an important seat of learning and translation, was conquered in 1085, and what followed in the wake of that Christian military victory was a victory of far greater proportions for Arabic learning, the virtual explosion of cultural material from al-Andalus to all points north.
In 1094, two years before the Aragonese city of Huesca was captured, William had married Philippa of Aragon, and his fascination with the most distinctly Arabized, polyglot and culturally polymorphous society of the reconquered territories was well noted at home—and little to be wondered at, given the tastes and proclivities nurtured earlier in life. It was not the first, nor would it be the last, occasion on which he would enjoy the considerable benefits of the rich court life, the learning, the music and singing that had already made Córdoba a byword for an unimaginable abundance of such wealth and were soon to make Toledo the best-known gateway to at least certain parts of that wealth. William, like his fellow Aquitainian Gerbert before him, had many advantages and previews of what was to come, since his personal ties with the fronterizo world were already intimately established when he married the Aragonese princess. One of his sisters had married Pedro I of Aragon, and yet another had married none other than Alfonso VI of Castile, the same Alfonso who had not only captured Toledo but had proclaimed himself “Emperor of Spain and the Two Faiths.”
In 1095, the year after his marriage, the First Crusade began. William followed it to the Holy Land in 1100, when Jerusalem had already fallen. He remained there for several years (the years for which there is the clearest documentation of the virtually complete acculturation of the crusaders to Arab ways, though few of them, of course, had the advantages William had had). Back in Europe, a William who is described by his contemporaries as both restless and bored with traditional Christian society, who was twice excommunicated by the Church for ambiguous departures from orthodox Christian behavior, who was reviled by contemporary Christian chroniclers as an enemy of “modesty and goodness,” and who was by now as familiar with the prodigious cultural wealth of both Palestinian and Andalusian court life as any Christian monarch of his lifetime could hope to be, this same William began to write the courtly lyric poetry that was to make him the father of the courtly vernacular lyric of Europe.
William interspersed this period of cultural fertility and innovation with a number of crusading excursions to Spain, including one, in 1119, as part of a broad-based alliance that attempted to turn back the fundamentalist Almoravids, who had invaded al-Andalus in 1091. While that campaign was successful (William himself was apparently present in 1120 at the defeat of the Almoravids at Cutanda), the war was ultimately lost and the magnificent library of Córdoba burned.
Such circumstances witnessed the birth, or at least the definitive molding, of the Provençal lyric that was to become the focal point, from a Europeanist’s perspective, of the courtly and lyric culture of medieval Europe. And for the next several generations of troubadours, the cultural ambience would be far from removed from the kind of knowledge of Andalusian culture William had had. The courts of Barcelona, Aragon, and Castile maintained their wealth of Andalusian trappings, reinforced by refugees seeking havens from the fundamentalist reforms taking place in al-Andalus, and these same courts were the often-visited havens of some of the best-remembered troubadours: Guiraut de Borneil, Arnaut Daniel, Peire Vidal, Marcabru, Raimbaut d’Orange, and Peire d’Auvergne. Perhaps, in part, they appealed so to these men for the same reasons that such a world of cultural symbiosis
