Guillem or Guilhem Figueira or Figera
was a Languedocian jongleur and troubadour from Toulouse active at the court of the Emperor
Frederick II in the
1230s.[1] He was a close associate of both Aimery
de Pégulhan and Guillem
Augier Novella.[1]
The son of a tailor and a tailor by trade, as a result of the Albigensian
Crusade, he was
exiled from his homeland and took refuge in Lombardy, where he eventually made his way to
Frederick's court.[2] In Italy he and Aimery, a fellow
exile, helped to found a troubadour tradition of lamentation for the "good
old days" of pre-Crusade Languedoc.[2] The exiles' native Lombard
successors continued to employ the Occitan language, however, and it was not until the
time of Dante
Alighieri that
Italian got a significant vernacular literature of its own.[2]
In 1228, Guilhem denied the efficacy
of the crusade indulgence and blamed the death of
"good" King
Louis VIII, who
died of dysentery at the siege of Avignon, on the false indulgence which had drawn him
out of the safety of Paris.[3] His most famous work, the sirventes
contra Roma ("sirventes against Rome", actually entitled D'un
sirventes far), was a strong reprimand for the papacy, its violent
character probably engendered by the circumstances of its composition: Guilhem
wrote it while he was in Toulouse besieged by the Crusaders in 1229.[4][5] It was set to a famous hymn about the Virgin Mary and was therefore memorisable to
the masses.[6] A famous passage goes:
Treacherous
Rome, avarice ensnares you
So that you shear too much wool from your sheep;
May the Holy Ghost who takes on human flesh
Hear my
prayers
And break your beaks,
O Rome! You will never have truce with me,
Because you are false and perfidious
With us and with the Greeks![7]
...
Rome,
to the Saracens you do little damage
But to the Greeks and Latins massacre and carnage;
In the bottom of the abyss, Rome, you have your seat
In
hell.[8]
Guilhem attacked the papacy not only
for the Albigensian Crusade and the cruel
sack of Béziers,
but also for the failures of the Fourth and Fifth Crusades, papal imperialism, and the moral
failings of the clergy.[9] He alleged that avarice was the
motive of the Crusades, which in his mind were directed only at the Greeks, fellow Christians.[4] The singing of Figueira's sirventes
was outlawed by the Inquisition in Toulouse,[4][10] though the 1274 inquisition which
condemned a burgher of Toulouse on the basis of knowing the Roma tricharitz
does not refer to the third stanza of Guilhem's sirventes, but to a
vernacular work called La Bible.[11] On the basis of his language, such
as the use of matrem fornicationem (mother of fornication) to describe
Rome, even modern scholars have labelled him a heretic.[12]
Guilhem fled to Italy in 1229 or
Among Guilhem's other surviving
works are the sirventes Nom laissarai per paor (post-1216), which
criticises the Church's false preaching, and Del preveire maior, which
urges the pope and emperor to make peace and send a force to save the Holy Land
from the Khwarezmians who had taken Jerusalem (1244).[15]
References
- Graham-Leigh, Elaine. The Southern French Nobility and the
Albigensian Crusade. Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2005. ISBN 1-84383-129-5.
- Siberry, Elizabeth. Criticism of Crusading, 1095-1274. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985. ISBN 0-19-821953-9.
- Throop, Palmer A. "Criticism of Papal Crusade Policy in Old French and Provençal." Speculum, Vol. 13, No. 4. (Oct., 1938),
pp 379-412.
Notes
1. Graham-Leigh, 30.
2. Graham-Leigh, 32.
3.
Throop, 392.
4.
Throop, 383.
5.
Siberry, 7.
6.
Siberry, 9.
7.
Throop, 384 and n1.
8.
Throop, 384 and n2.
9.
Graham-Leigh, 33.
10.
Graham-Leigh, 36.
11.
Siberry, 8.
12.
Throop, 388 n3. Siberry, 7,
says his statements "resemble" those made by heretics.
13.
Throop, 398.
14.
Siberry, 65. The first line
("All men who star well and finish well") indicates that Guilhem
emphasised that Frederick's good intentions must lead to an actual Crusade.
15.
Siberry, 163, 180-181.
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