The Cansó de la Croza/Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise, though preserved as a single work, is the record of two different Occitan poems composed by two very different authors. The poems were joined together, probably in Toulouse some 50 years later c. 1275, so that it now appears as a chronological whole.
The first part is the work of Guillaume de Tudèle, who was a Master of Arts and a clerk in minor orders. He seems to have combined knowledge of the chanson de geste with interest in geomancy and may have had some early success as a jongleur. His main period of activity was between 1190 and 1214. He travelled from the Kingdom of Navarre to Montauban, apparently being present at the marriage of Count Raimond VI of Toulouse to Éléanore d' Aragon in 1199. Leaving Montauban, probably, despite Guillaume's claims to foresight, only when it was menaced by the crusading army in 1211, he found refuge in Bruniquel where, under the protection of Raimond VI's brother, Count Baudouin, he became a canon at Saint-Antonin and so, in a small way, he profited from the results of the crusade. His part of the Chanson was probably composed between c. 1210 and 1213/14. Although it is not without criticism of the crusaders (his is the record of the massacre of the citizens of Beziers in 1209), he takes a sympathetic view of the church and of the crusade and is largely favourable to the crusade's effective leader, Simon de Montfort.
The second part of the Chanson, from the autumn of 1213 on, was the work of a still unknown poet whose language and viewpoint are entirely distinct. The second part was composed in what has, until recently, been regarded as probably a Toulousaine dialect. Whatever the mystery of its authorship, this second part is bitterly opposed to the crusade, to de Montfort and to leading churchmen; it is deeply loyal to the people and leaders of the south, most of all to the Counts of Toulouse, being particularly proud of the city, then the second in Europe, and of its people. There is no evidence that the second poet was a Cathar believer or even a supporter of any heretical views.
Though both parts are written with great poetic immediacy, the second part is composed with an even greater ability to evoke the reality of events and this is combined with passion and an eloquent sense of real drama. The two poems follow a largely similar verse form divided into rhyming sections (laise) of unequal lengths, of which there are 130 in Guillaime's part and another 84 in the second part. The Chanson, as a whole, covers events from 1208 to 1219 and the laise extracted here are taken from 143-145 in the second part of the Chanson and are the main part of the debate held before Pope Innocent III at the Fourth Lateran Council in Rome during the period November to December, 1215.
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