The First Troubadours
Gone Medieval
History Hit
4.5 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 29 May 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
How could a love song become a political weapon? How were scandals, wars and crusades turned into some of the most influential poetry ever written?
The songs of the troubadours - celebrities in their day - helped define the emotional landscape of the Middle Ages and left a legacy that still echoes through European literature. Matt Lewis is joined by Professor Linda M. Paterson to explore the poet-musicians who shaped medieval ideas of courtly love, chivalry, gender, power and performance.
More:
Erotic Medieval Poet: Gwerful Mechain
Crusades Against Heretics (Albigensian Crusade)
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, |
| 0:07.7 | power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. |
| 0:13.2 | Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger and some of the world's leading historians, |
| 0:18.0 | as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life only on |
| 0:22.3 | History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries |
| 0:27.2 | with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. |
| 0:33.6 | Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. |
| 0:40.2 | Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. |
| 0:42.0 | Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. |
| 0:48.7 | We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the |
| 0:56.6 | printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve |
| 1:02.8 | into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories big and small that tell us how we got here. |
| 1:09.6 | Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval. |
| 1:17.4 | Let me start the way every good story should start. |
| 1:23.0 | With a duke, a warrior, a scandal maker and the first known troubadour, who all happened to be |
| 1:29.6 | the very same person. This is the great Lord William the 9th of Aquitaine, and he didn't |
| 1:36.4 | merely patronise poets or listen to songs. He was himself, the singer, the very first troubadour. |
| 1:46.9 | In 1086, William became the master of land so vast that eclipsed the holdings of the French king. |
| 1:53.2 | He was everything he might expect from a medieval prince, rich, feared, mobile, |
| 1:58.6 | militarily formidable. |
| 2:00.7 | His excellence in warfare was praised by chroniclers, |
| 2:03.0 | and his life took him across Aquitaine, into Iberian campaigns and eastward on Crusade. |
... |
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