William IX of Aquitaine
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William IX of Aquitaine (October 22, 1071 – February 10, 1126, also Guillaume or Guilhem d'Aquitaine), nicknamed the Troubador was Duke of Aquitaine and Gascony and Count of Poitou as William VII of Poitou between 1086 and 1126. He was also one of the leaders of the crusade of 1101 and one of the first medieval vernacular poets.
His Occitan names were Guilhèm IX duc d'Aquitània e de Gasconha and Guilhèm VII comte de Peitieus.
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[edit] Life and Family
William was the son of William VIII of Aquitaine by his third wife Hildegarde of Burgundy. His birth was an event of great celebration, but at first he was considered illegitimate by religious authorities because of his father's earlier divorces and his parents' consanguinity. This obliged his father to make a pilgrimage to Rome soon after his birth, where he sought and received papal approval of his marriage and children.
He inherited the duchy at the age of fifteen, upon the death of his father. In 1088, at the age of sixteen, William married his first wife, Ermengarde of Anjou (the daughter of Count Fulk the Contrary). Ermengarde was beautiful and well-educated. She also suffered from severe mood-swings, vacillating between vivacity and sullenness. She would also nag her husband, and had a habit of retiring in bad temper to a cloister after an argument, cutting off all contact with the outside world, before suddenly making a reappearance in the court as if her absence had never occurred. Such behaviour, coupled with her failure to conceive a child, led William to send her back to her father and have the marriage dissolved (in 1091).
In 1094 he married Philippa of Toulouse, the daughter and heiress of William IV of Toulouse. By Philippa, William had two sons and five daughters, including:
- William X of Aquitaine, his heir.
- Agnes of Aquitaine, who married (1) Aimery V of Thouars; (2) King Ramiro II of Aragon.
- Raymond of Poitiers, who became ruler of the principality of Antioch, a Crusader state.
He was excommunicated twice, the first time in 1114 for an alleged infringement of the Church's tax privileges. His response to this was to demand absolution from the Bishop of Poitiers at swordpoint, just as the Bishop was at the point of pronouncing the anathema, and swore to kill the Bishop if he did not absolve the Duke. Bishop Peter, surprised, pretended to comply. When the Duke, satisfied, released him, however, the Bishop calmly completed reading the excommunication, before calmly presenting his neck and inviting the Duke to strike. William hesitated for a moment, before sheathing his sword: "Oh no. I don't love you enough to send you to paradise".
He was excommunicated a second time for 'abducting' Viscountess Dangereuse (Dangerosa in Occitan), the wife of his vassal Aimery I de Rochefoucauld, Viscount of Châtellerault - the lady herself appears to have been a willing party in the matter. He installed her in the Maubergeonne tower of his castle in Poitiers (leading to her being known as 'La Maubergeonne'), and, as related by William of Malmesbury, even painted a picture of her on his shield.
His wife, understandably, was enraged on her return to Poitiers from Toulouse to discover a rival woman living in her palace. She appealed to her friends at court and to the Church; however, no noble could assist her (since William was their feudal overlord), and whilst the Papal Legate Giraud (who was bald) complained to William and told him to return Dangereuse to her husband, William's only response was, "Curls will grow on your pate before I part with the Viscountess."
Humiliated, Duchess Philippa chose in 1116 to retire to the Abbey of Fontevrault, where she was befriended, ironically, by Ermengarde of Anjou, William's first wife. Philippa did not remain there long, however; the abbey records state that she died on the 28th of November 1118.
Relations between the Duke and his elder son William also became strained - although it is unlikely that he ever embarked upon a seven-year revolt, in order to avenge his mother's mistreatment, terminating only with his capture by his father, as Ralph of Diceto claimed - records flatly contradict such a thing (Ralph claimed that the revolt began in 1113, at which point young William was thirteen, and the Duke's liaison with Dangereuse not yet begun). Father and son improved their relationship, however, after the marriage of the younger William to Aenor of Châtellerault, Dangereuse's daughter by her husband, in 1121.
William was readmitted to the Church around 1120, after making concessions to it. However, he was after 1118 faced with the return of his first wife, Ermengarde, who had upon the death of her friend Duchess Philippa stormed down from Fontevrault to the Aquitainian court, demanding to be reinstated as the Duchess of Aquitaine - presumably, in an attempt to avenge the mistreated Philippa. In October 1119, she suddenly appeared at the Council of Reims, being held by Pope Calixtus II, demanding that the Pope excommunicate William (again), oust Dangereuse from the ducal palace, and restore herself to her rightful place. The Pope "declined to accommodate her"; however, she continued to trouble William for several years afterwards, thereby encouraging him to join the Castilian forces fighting the Moors in Spain.
In 1122, he lost Toulouse, Philippa's dower land and now rightfully the domain of his eldest son, to Alphonse-Jourdain, the son and brother of the two previous usurpers. He did not trouble to reclaim it.
An anonymous 13th century biography of William, forming part of the collection Biographies des Troubadours, remembers him thus:
- "The Count of Poitiers was one of the most courtly men in the world and one of the greatest deceivers of women. He was a fine knight at arms, liberal in his womanizing, and a fine composer and singer of songs. He travelled much through the world, seducing women."
[edit] Military life
William invited Pope Urban II to spend Christmas 1095 at his court. The pope urged him to take the cross and leave for the Holy Land, but William was more interested in exploiting the absence of Raymond IV of Toulouse, his wife's uncle, to press a claim to Toulouse. He and Philippa did capture Toulouse in 1098, an act for which they were threatened with excommunication. Partly out of a desire to regain favor with the religious authorities and partly out of a wish to see the world, William joined the Crusade of 1101 (mortgaging Toulouse back to Bertrand of Toulouse, the son of Raymond IV from whom it had been claimed by William), an expedition inspired by the success of the First Crusade in 1099.
He arrived in the Holy Land in 1101 and stayed there until the following year. His record as a general is not very impressive. William fought mostly skirmishes in Anatolia and was frequently defeated. His recklessness led to his army being ambushed on several occasions, with great losses to his own side. In September 1101 his entire army was destroyed by the Turks at Heraclea; William himself barely escaped and, according to Orderic Vitalis, he reached Antioch with only six surviving companions.
Later on in his life, William joined forces with the kingdoms of Castile (an old ally) and León. Between 1120 and 1123, Aquitanian troops fought side by side with queen Urraca of Castile, in an effort to conquer the Moors of Cordoba and complete the Reconquista. During his sojourn in Spain, William was given a rock crystal vase by a Muslim ally that he later bequeathed to his granddaughter Eleanor. The vase probably originated in Sassanid Persia in the 7th century.
[edit] Poetry
William's greatest legacy to history was not as a warrior but as a poet. He was the first known troubadour, or lyric poet employing the Romance vernacular called Provençal or Occitan. Eleven of his songs survive (Merwin, 2002). They are attributed to him under his title as Count of Poitou (lo coms de Peitieus). The topics vary, treating sex, love, women, his own sexual prowess, and feudal politics. His frankness, wit and vivacity caused scandal and won admiration at the same time. He is among the first Romance vernacular poets of the Middle Ages, one of the founders of a tradition that would culminate in Dante, Boccaccio, and Villon. Ezra Pound mentions him in Canto VIII:
- And Poictiers, you know, Guillaume Poictiers,
had brought the song up out of Spain
with the singers and viels...
William was a man who loved scandal and no doubt enjoyed shocking his audiences. He also composed a song about founding a convent in his lands, where the nuns would be picked from among the most beautiful women in the region, or from the best whores, depending on the translation. While this confirms William's lusty persona, it also makes a joke about the penitentiary convents for prostitutes founded by the charismatic preacher Robert of Arbrissel. (Bond, xlix) In fact, William granted large donations to the church, perhaps to regain the pope's favour. He also added to the palace of the counts of Poitou (which had stood since the Merovingian Era), later added to by his granddaughter Eleanor of Aquitaine and surviving in Poitiers as the Palace of Justice to this day.
One of William's poems, possibly written at the time of his first excommunication, since it implies his son was still a minor, is partly a musing on mortality: Pos de chantar m'es pres talenz (Since I have the desire to sing,/I'll write a verse for which I'll grieve). It concludes:
- I have given up all I loved so much:
chivalry and pride;
and since it pleases God, I accept it all,
that He may keep me by Him.
- I enjoin my friends, upon my death,
all to come and do me great honour,
since I have held joy and delight
far and near, and in my abode.
- Thus I give up joy and delight,
and squirrel and grey and sable furs.
He died on February 10th, 1126, age 55, after suffering a short illness.
[edit] Works online
- Complete works (external link)
- Works, translated by James H. Donalson (external link)
[edit] External Link
William IX, William X and Eleanor of Aquitaine The House of Aquitaine and its relations with the Houses of Toulouse, England and France.
[edit] Bibliography
- Biographies des troubadours ed. J. Boutière, A.-H. Schutz (Paris: Nizet, 1964) pp. 7-8, 585-587.
- Bond, Gerald A., ed., transl. intro. The Poetry of William VII, Count of Poitier, IX Duke of Aquitaine, (Garland Publishing Co.:New York) 1982
- Duisit, Brice. Las Cansos del Coms de Peitieus (CD), Alpha 505, 2003
- Harvey, Ruth E. The wives of the 'first troubadour', Duke William IX of Aquitaine (Journal of Medieval History), 1993
- Meade, Marion. Eleanor of Aquitaine, 1991
- Merwin, W.S. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 2002. pp xv-xvi. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ISBN 0-375-41476-2.
- Owen, D.D.R. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen and Legend
- Parsons, John Carmi. Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and Lady, 2002
- Verdon, J. La chronique de Saint Maixent, 1979.
- Waddell, Helen. The Wandering Scholars: the Life and Art of the Lyric Poets of the Latin Middle Ages, 1955
[edit] See also
- Dukes of Aquitaine family tree
- Provençal literature
- Smythe, Barbara. Trobador Poets: Selections from the Poems of Eight Trobadors, including William IX, Duke of Aquitaine.
| Preceded by: William VIII |
Duke of Aquitaine | Succeeded by: William X |
| Count of Poitiers |
