Folquet de Lunel (1244 – c. 1300) was a troubadour from Lunel (in the modern Hérault) in the Languedoc. He left behind nine recorded lyric poems, including five cansos, two partimens, and two sirventes. He also wrote one longer work, the Romans de mondana vida. Folquet's birth date can be known precisely because he tells us in his Romans, written in 1284, that he was forty years old at the time.
Folquet's earliest datable work is a partimen with Guiraut Riquier, dated to between 1264 and 1270. He presents Guiraut with a tricky question:
- Guirautz, don'ab beutat granda
- tota sol'aiatz
- en un lieg, e selh que.l platz
- jatz n'en autre, ses demanda
- que l'us a l'autre no fai,
- et amo.s de cor verai:
- si.l cavaliers se lev'a lieys jazer
- o ilh ab lui, cal li deu mais plazer?
Folquet, along with fellow troubadours
Guelphs), and lends support to
Aragones political ambitions in Italy. Like both his contemporaries Cerverí de Girona and
Paulet de Marselha, Folquet had nothing but praise for Peter,
James his father, and the Aragonese. The metre of the
sirventes is copied from the work
Bel m'es ab motz leugiers a far by
Sordello. Cerverí in his
Cobla en sis lengatges copied the same metre, either from Sordello or Folquet.
At some point during the ongoing Guelph-Ghibelline conflict Folquet travelled into Lombardy, where he heard firsthand of the popularity of Alfonso:
- Qu'entre.ls lombartz ausi contar
- que l'alaman e.l bromanso
- e.l roman, ses contrastar,
- volon a lui la lectio
- de l'Emperi; e Milan e Pavia,
- Cremona et Ast e ginoes an gran
- cor quel bon rey castellan recebran
- a gran honor, si ven en Lombardia.
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- When among the Lombards I heard
- that the Germans and the Brabançons
- and the Romans, without disagreement,
- wish for his election
- to the Empire; and Milan and Pavia,
- Cremona and Asti and the Genoese have a great
- desire the good Castilian king to receive
- in grand honour, if he ever comes to Lombardy.
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Folquet had returned to Lunel by 1274. There he entered into relations with
tornadas of both his religious and his (two)
courtly love songs. Scholarship is divided over whether the intended count was
Hugh IV, indicating that the songs are a product of Folquet's youth, or Henry II, making them a product of his maturity.
Sources
Riquer, Martín de
. Los trovadores: historia literaria y textos. 3 vol. Barcelona: Planeta, 1975.
