For generation after generation Aquitaine had been ruled by a long line of Williams. The first Duke William, born in 752, was a childhood friend and loyal companion-in-arms of the Emperor Charlemagne, as well as a great warrior in his own right. Chansons of later centuries would embroider his feats with brilliant threads of mythology, recounting victorious deeds against terrible Saracen giants, transforming his life into legend. In plain fact, he fought bravely, reaping riches and honors until, at the age of forty-eight, he resolutely turned his back on the world and retired to a Benedictine monastery that he had built near Montpellier. After his death and canonization his retreat became known as—and today is still called—Saint Guilhem-le-Désert.
While by and large the heirs of the saintly Duke William were capable administrators, none equaled him in piety; indeed, some fell far short. Nevertheless, his line, mercifully assured by the periodic births of male children christened William, endured for over three hundred years.
Then, in the third decade of the twelfth century, through death, carelessness, or perhaps, as some claimed, the will of God, the reigns of the Williams abruptly came to an end.
There remained only a maiden of fifteen, a member of what people then called “the lesser sex.”
From that moment forward everything changed, not only for Aquitaine but for the whole of western Europe.
From their palaces in Poitiers and Bordeaux, the dukes of Aquitaine ruled, after a fashion, a domain that the chroniclers described in superlatives. “Aquitaine,” wrote Ralph of Diceto, “abounding in riches of many kinds, excels other parts of the western world in such wise that it is reckoned by historians as one of the happiest and most fertile among the provinces of Gaul.” Enclosing the two counties of Poitou and Gascony, the duchy was impressive enough to cover much of central and southwestern France, indeed its dominions spread over one-quarter of that modern-day nation. Behind its frontiers—Anjou and Brittany on the north, the wild barricade of the Pyrenees on the south, the Atlantic on the west, and on the east the Rhone ridges of the Massif Central—lay a territory not only larger but wealthier than that of the Frankish kings.
Its countryside was a richly ornamented tapestry of blues and greens and blacks, abundant dark forests and emerald pastureland crisscrossed by the silvery river waters of the Garonne, Charente, Creuse, and Vienne. Aquitaine means “land of waters,” a name dating back to the century before Christ, when the Romans pushed northward from their colony at Narbonne and conquered almost the whole of Gaul. Clustered thickly in the river valleys were villages and farms, walled cities and moat-ringed castles with their massive keeps jutting straight up to the skies. The land overflowed with fruit—cherries, plums, raspberries, the wild wood strawberry—and with acre upon uncountable acre of vineyards. In the autumn, when the oak forests turned russet, the grapes would be pressed into the ruby wines for which the region was famous, and then even the humblest peasants would drink joyously until their lips were stained carmine. Along the seaboard, the harbor towns of Bordeaux and La Rochelle did a thriving export business with the wine as well as salt, and in Bayonne fishing boats ventured forth upon the Atlantic toward the limitless horizon and returned with whale, herring, and porpoise, which would hang in salted strips in the marketplaces.
Despite the easy life made possible by a temperate climate and an abundance of crops, the peasants lived their lives under a blanket of anxiety, always conscious of the fact that they were expendable. Most of them, whether serf or free tenant, held their lands from a seigneur on a hereditary basis. With the social strata cemented into airtight compartments, they were born in thatched hovels and died there and were taxed and worked in the interim as the nobility deemed fit. Both men and women tilled the fields and tended the vines; they kept pigs and perhaps a goose or two, and they made cheese. Inside the village churches, they prostrated themselves on the naked stones and made their novenas to the Blessed Virgin or Saint Radegonde, beseeching these holy ladies’ intercession with an awesome God; but if the Lord failed to respond, they reverted to pagan superstition and summoned fairies and witches. When war came, as it did often, for the nobility regarded fighting as their chief occupation, their huts were burned, their vines trampled, their women raped. At such times they ate chestnuts and roots, and their children were found dead along the roads. their mouths stuffed with grass. It did not matter that the lands of their lords teemed with rabbit, squirrel, and crow, for the fate of the poacher, if caught, was death by hanging.
By contrast, life for those higher up the social scale was not merely agreeable, it exuded a grandeur unique for the times. True, the local lords were a pugnacious, fiercely independent lot given to continual petty squabbling, but in the late eleventh century Aquitaine enjoyed a peace and prosperity unknown to the rest of Europe. “When they set themselves to tame the pride of their enemies, they do it in earnest; and when the labours of battle are over and they settle down to rest in peace, they give themselves up wholly to pleasure.” The Aquitainians lived for pleasure; it was the ideal that they pursued, the principle for which they were willing to sacrifice nearly everything. The southern lords vied with each other to establish splendid miniature courts in their castles. Refusing to hoard their gold in coffers, they used the income from their lands to purchase luxuries and hold great feasts until they won the reputation of being lavish, ostentatious, and, a principal virtue, hospitable. To outsiders, especially to the northern barons, who were bearded, unkempt, and unwashed, the luxury and elegance of the southerners, with their shaved faces and long, parted locks, appeared effeminate. The foppery of the easygoing, free-spending Aquitainians never ceased to astonish their contemporaries, and critics in subsequent centuries would still be decrying their flamboyance. “Nowadays,” scornfully wrote Geoffrey of Vigeois about 1175, “the meanest would blush to wear such clothes. Rich and precious stuffs are woven, whose colours suit each man’s mood; the borders of the clothes are cut into little balls and pointed tongues, until their wearers look like devils in a painting.”
If the men appeared devilish to Prior Geoffrey, the women inspired even greater horror and caused Aquitaine’s sober neighbors to murmur that the whole of the duchy was no better than a huge brothel. While feudal times were not the best in which to be born female, still the position occupied by the women of Aquitaine was, everything considered, remarkably high. Perhaps because the power of the Church was relatively weak there, its customary puritanism and fierce misogyny had less influence, so that women came to expect, and receive, a place of prominence in society. Under the laws of the land they could inherit property in their own right, and some, on occasion, exercised great power as landowners. At their disposal were the means of elegance, and they took advantage of opulent fashions, cosmetics, and oriental perfumes to enhance their persons. Undoubtedly, their painted cheeks and charcoal-rimmed eyes, combined with their free and easy independence, supplied a basis for the charge that moral disorder was rife in Aquitaine. Unlike their counterparts in the northern countries, the women refused to be segregated among themselves or secluded in convents and, if discovered with a lover, they were neither shut up nor killed. While adultery in women was not actually condoned, it was not severely condemned either. In sex, sex roles, and religion, there was to be found a greater degree of tolerance in Aquitaine, a greater respect for the individual.
As the twelfth century began, a phenomenon akin to a new religion began to grow in Aquitaine, one that sprang naturally from their leisurely civilization and the flourishing position of women in their culture. The new century saw the arrival of the troubadours and, with them, the advent of love as a serious, all-consuming occupation. The poets of the southland wrote not for gain but for pleasure, not in cultured Latin but in the mellifluous vernacular of the langue d’oc, not for men but primarily for the women of the great castles and manors. Windy chansons de geste, with their lofty deeds and blood-and-guts machismo, awoke no echoes of glory in the hearts of these elegant baronesses and countesses, already semidivinized. They longed to while away their evenings with songs of love in which women were cherished, adored, and romantically seduced. Under their eager patronage, there flowered a new school of poetry that touched on subjects never before covered by verse; one day the sweet new lyrical style of the troubadours emerging from the salons of these bluestockings born before their time would culminate in Petrarch and Dante.
That such a radically different type of poetry should suddenly bud and then take firm root in the popular imagination of all classes was not at all accidental. For the very first troubadour was no low-born minstrel wandering the dusty Poitevin roads in search of a meal but the most powerful lord in the land.