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Guillem orGuilhem Figueira orFigera was aLanguedocianjongleur andtroubadour fromToulouse active at the court of theEmperor Frederick II in the 1230s.[1] He was a close associate of bothAimery de Pégulhan andGuillem Augier Novella.[1]
The son of atailor and a tailor by trade, as a result of theAlbigensian Crusade, he was exiled from his homeland and took refuge inLombardy, 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 theOccitan language, however, and it was not until the time ofDante Alighieri that Italian got a significant vernacular literature of its own.[2]
In 1228, Guilhem denied the efficacy of thecrusade indulgence and blamed the death of "good"King Louis VIII, who died ofdysentery at thesiege of Avignon, on the false indulgence which had drawn him out of the safety ofParis.[3] His most famous work, thesirventes contra Roma ("sirventes againstRome", actually entitledD'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 famoushymn about theVirgin Mary and was therefore memorisable to the masses.[6]
Guilhem attacked the papacy not only for the Albigensian Crusade and thecruel sack of Béziers, but also for the failures of theFourth andFifth Crusades, papal imperialism, and the moral failings of the clergy.[7] He alleged that avarice was the motive of the Crusades, which in his mind were directed only at theGreeks, fellow Christians.[4] The singing of Figueira'ssirventes was outlawed by theInquisition in Toulouse,[4][8] though the 1274 inquisition which condemned a burgher of Toulouse on the basis of knowing theRoma tricharitz does not refer to the third stanza of Guilhem'ssirventes, but to a vernacular work calledLa Bible.[9] On the basis of his language, such as the use ofmatrem fornicationem (mother of fornication) to describe Rome, even modern scholars have labelled him aheretic.[10]
Guilhem fled to Italy in 1229 or 1230. In Italy, Guilhem was free to criticise thePapacy and the Crusade however much and in whatever way he pleased. He attacked the Pope for his Crusade against Frederick, his new protector, and encouraged peace in Christendom in order to help theCrusades abroad in theHoly Land.[11] In an earlier work,Totz hom qui ben comensa e ben fenis, dated to 1215–1220, he had encouraged Frederick's decision to take up the Cross in the Holy Land.[12]
Among Guilhem's other surviving works are thesirventesNom laissarai per paor (post-1216), which criticises the Church's false preaching, andDel preveire maior, which urges the pope and emperor to make peace and send a force to save the Holy Land from theKhwarezmians who hadtaken Jerusalem (1244).[13]
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