1. Marcabru’s name, ‘career’ and patrons

There Is no external documentary record which features a ‘Marcabru’ who can plausibly be identified with our poet.’ ‘Marcabru’ was probably a nickname or stage-name, similar to that adopted by his contemporary, Cercamon, or those given to joglars, though it would be unwise to conclude from this that he was a ‘professional poet’, solely dependent for his livelihood on his art.

The only information available about Marcabru has to be deduced from allusions in the songs themselves. This is substantially the position in which the medieval biographers found themselves and, as others have observed, the debts which the vida in A owes to poem XX and that in K to XVIII are evident. Marcabru may have come from Gascony, but there is no other evidence to support this, and the traditional view of him as being of humble origins and illegitimate birth is without any historical foundation. It is interesting, however, that the biographer in A preserves an association of Marcabru with Cercamon: modern scholarship has shown that both poets were active at the court of William X and such a connection is historically very plausible, although it is not possible to confirm the notion that Marcabru served a period of poetic apprenticeship with Cercamon.

Furthermore, since fewer than twenty of Marcabru’s songs are datable, and many of these only approximately, they do not allow us to establish more than a patchy picture of the troubadour’s movements: see our chart. We do not take all references to historically attested figures as indications of a patron—poet relationship, nor all allusions to places as signs that Marcabru actually went there. In our view, there is no perceptible relationship between the chronology of Ms compositions and their style.

Our researches have, however, modified a number of elements and points of detail concerning the dating and circumstances of composition of the songs and the troubadour’s patrons. In general, our findings confirm the accepted view of Marcabru as active in the second quarter of the twelfth century in south-western France (Poitou and Aquitaine) and in northern Spain. As Boissonnade suggested earlier this century, it is not impossible that Marcabru’s earliest datable poem (VIII) was composed early in 1130, and very likely that it dates from before 1136.