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This is part of an authorized online posting of Harvey Reid's important book, "The Troubadour Chronicles," published in May 2020. It is available in paperback from this web site or from Amazon.com.
“In the Autumn of 1824, in an abbey of Italian Benedictines, was found a series of musical instruments, which belonged to the age of the Lower [Byzantine] Empire… these instruments were all found to be in a good state of preservation; and several of them were most magnificently ornamented. Among others, was a cythara, formed of ivory; the chords of which were gold, mounted by rosettes of diamonds.” [Thos. Busby “Concert Room & Orchestra Anecdotes” (1825) p.199] Chapter 7: Arabic Roots of the Troubadour ArtsA great deal of evidence supports the claim that the troubadour art form– singing rhythmic, rhymed, lyric songs accompanied by stringed instruments with fingerboards– existed and flourished in the Arabic world long before it arrived in Europe, and even earlier in Chinese, Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures. Controversy and uncertainties abound, and casual, search-engine investigation is hampered by the fact that a number of now-antiquated words were used to refer to what we now call the Arabic, Moslem, Islamic or Muslim world; including Moorish, Arabian, Byzantine, Saracen, Oriental, and Musulman or Mussulman. The Arabic world was large and diverse even a thousand years ago, and sweeping statements, especially about orally-transmitted music, are almost guaranteed to be either platitudes or in some kind of error, so we’ll tread cautiously. Lyric poetry, rhyming and guitar-family instruments did seem to have been virtually unknown in Europe before a certain point, yet they were all well-documented as basic ingredients in Arabic musical practice long before they appeared on the other side of the Mediterranean. Scholarly discussion of troubadour art has unfortunately taken place mostly within the confines of either language or music, and academia has not chosen to see them as elements of something larger. In 1765 Thomas Percy pondered at length but dismissed the theory that was circulating even then that the ideas of romance and chivalry had Arabic origins, and in 1762 Richelet mused over the possible “barbaric origins of rhyme” in his “Origin of Rhyme.” Arguments surrounding this idea will likely not end conclusively, especially among Anglo and Euro-centric people who are reluctant to yield their myths, songs, tales or other cherished cultural territory to Muslims. In “The History of the Empire of the Musulmans in Spain and Portugal” George Power explained that deeper things than music, including widespread cultural concepts, likewise had their origins in Islamic culture, especially the forms that evolved in Islamic Spain. These included the ideas of chivalry, romance and gallantry, together with the concept of a complete and successful man embracing martial arts and war as well as fine art and an abstract, emotionally idealized mindset that has come to be known as “romantic.” It wasn’t enough for the Muslim men to have wealth, power and military success; they also reportedly craved this romantic passion, which was directed toward women but with a connection to art that has lingered in both Western and Islamic civilizations’ images of manhood ever since. Europeans (especially the men) devoured the “Arabian Nights,” (originally “One Thousand and One Nights”) with alluring characters like Sinbad, Ali Baba, and Aladdin. They savored ideas like sorcery, magic, genies, destiny and fate, and compelling images like a powerful caliph sending his eunuchs to deliver to his enemies or rivals the severed heads of a dozen of their family members, while settling back on silk pillows to enjoy some lovely poetry and oud songs from his beloved slave girls. In today’s Islamophobic Western society, it’s a tantalizing idea that we might owe large parts of our musical and literary heritage to a culture that so many are not interested in, and even feel outright hostility toward. Thomas Warton said in 1771, “that peculiar and arbitrary species of fiction which we commonly call Romantic, was entirely unknown to the writers of Greece and Rome. It appears to have been imported into Europe by a people, whose modes of thinking, and habits of invention, are not natural to that country. It is generally supposed to have been borrowed from the Arabians.” In his definitive 2002 “A History of the Lute From Antiquity to the Renaissance” Douglas Smith says plainly (p.20), “The Westerners adoption of the Muslims’ most esteemed musical instrument and its eventual ascendancy to preeminence in Europe are incontrovertible facts… medieval Christian and Muslim lute-playing technique was identical, as was the instrument itself for a long time after Europeans embraced it.” Establishing a linear historical timeline is not really possible, but it is very helpful to get some perspective on the origins of the Western European version of the songwriting troubadour, because modern incarnations are so similar. Discussions of the Golden Age of Troubadours from 1100 to the late 1300s focus on the poetry, and shy away from speculation about where the music, skills and instruments came from, or even that the ideas involved were imported and not native to Europe. Since it is still not accepted in musical academia that singing and playing an instrument at the same time is a valid form of music, worthy of “formal study” in a music academy, historians have not bothered to trace its roots and evolution, instead focusing their attention on just the words or instruments, or on instrumental styles or techniques of playing and composing. The simplistic explanation is that interaction between Christian and Muslim societies, largely catalyzed by the large-scale wars between the two cultures, brought about the flow of a huge number of ideas into Europe from the Middle East, including language, art, food, medicine, philosophy, science and technology. It is commonly said that the Crusades “set the stage” for the Renaissance, the French word for “rebirth.” Technologies, commodities, scientific and artistic ideas steadily spread all over Europe in untraceable but unmistakable ways as all sorts of people with all sorts of motives carried them around. Hannibal invaded Europe with his elephants in about 200 B.C., and tensions between European and Arabic societies have been high ever since. The Muslim takeover of Spain in the year 712 involved ten to fifteen thousand soldiers invading Andalusia, pushing out the Visigoths who had been ruling the mostly Christian population since the fall of the Roman empire. The Arabic advances, led by Abderahmen, were eventually stopped at Narbonne, about 50 miles past the modern border between Spain and France, when Charles Martel and his army won the vitally important Battle of Tours in 732, and repeated their victory at Avignon soon after. Martel’s grandson Charlemagne consolidated the new European “Frankish” territory, though the border moved around a bit. The first Arab invaders in Spain were Berbers, who were North Africans, sometimes called Libyans or Saharans, and they didn’t bring deep musical culture from the Middle East and Persia with them initially. Sources say it wasn’t until a century or so later when the Abassid caliphs brought the music, particularly when Caliph ‘Abd al-Rahman (Abderame) I introduced a female singer-lutenist named al-‘Aifa’ from the East. Caliph Abou-Nasser-Mohammed-al-Farabi (870-950) was called the “Arabian Orpheus,” and Omar II Elzemagh (682-720), an early ruler of Muslim Spain, was an author and a great a friend to the arts and learning. Large-Scale Forces at Work William Manchester has detailed vividly how bleak the Middle Ages were for almost everyone in Europe, including the wealthy, who didn’t even always have fresh food or warm houses. Much of Europe was notably stagnant for a very long time after the fall of the Roman Empire, which earned this period the name “Dark Ages.” Manchester explains that for a period of nearly 1000 years, through the reigns of 111 popes (there have been 266 so far), there were no important new ideas. People did what their parents did, used the roads that existed, ate what their people ate, used the same tools, recipes and building materials, and worked at the same occupations. Life itself was short, averaging as little as 35 years at one point. Clothing, music, and most aspects of life were boring and unadorned, violence and war were common, work was tedious, and most food was tasteless and often rotting. Nearly the only flavor additives available were salt, honey and smoke, and most seasonings we accept as normal in food were not available to a commoner in Europe even 500 years ago. It is a dramatic story that explorers, Crusaders and travelers like Marco Polo, together with the establishing of the fabled Silk Road, brought a long list of novelties like silk, gunpowder, spices, sugar, coffee, garlic and tea to Europe, where they were eagerly devoured. Columbus and other explorers of his era were looking for spices because they had no flavors or refrigeration, and the only food preservation techniques were pickling, smoking and salting. A few centuries later, one of the vital commodities was sugar, and it became a key part of the entire North American slave trade. Europeans wanted sweeteners for their tea and desserts, and their hunger for sugar and tea alone led to the incredible statistic that at its height, the British East India Company accounted for as much as 5% of the GDP of the entire British empire, according to historian Henry Hobhouse. Europe also got things like gypsies, chess, gunpowder, playing cards, and apparently new forms of troubadours, lute music and rhyming during the Middle Ages, a time when there was staggeringly little creativity or innovation within Europe itself. It’s naïve to assume that Christians and Muslims lived in closed societies, or that we can be certain whether ideas, people or objects did or didn’t cross various borders during any period in history. Cultural ideas sometimes move from one society or neighborhood to another, and sometimes they don’t. Whether or not there were significant numbers of Arabic troubadours entering Southern France before or during this period isn’t certain, but we have to assume that regional borders were somewhat permeable to individuals, particularly to charming and entertaining musicians. Some historians claim that there was constant activity across the Pyrenees Mountains, between what is modern France and Spain, around the end of the first millennium, including trade, tourism, and even numerous religious pilgrims. In Sicily also there was a long history of musical interaction between Muslim and Christian ideas that led to a rich lute-playing tradition there. More than a few sources say that touring Arabic singers, musicians and storytellers commonly visited Christian towns and villages in northern Spain, southern France and Italy. Douglas Smith asserts that as early as the 9th century, Arabic musicians in Spain were known to be using some European melodies, indicating that there was two-way cultural communication. In “A History of Arabian Music” Henry George Farmer said, “a great deal more than the instruments themselves was borrowed. The roving Arab minstrel was the chief means whereby these oriental instruments became known, and he passed on at the same time a new type of music. He may, indeed, have been the originator of the wandering minstrel class that spread all over Europe.” It is also important to realize that in feudal Europe, income disparity was at a peak, and our modern image of happy peasants playing cool music may not have happened that much. Commoners had short lives, and may not have had leisure time or money at all, let alone a way to either buy instruments or obtain tools and materials to make them. Many of the medieval stringed instruments we know about were quite elaborate, and it’s hard to imagine a medieval stonemason or farmer working all day and then relaxing by playing their inlaid lute, made from ebony, ivory and exotic tropical woods. There may have been all sorts of singing, strumming and rhyming people in Europe for a long time, but if they didn’t leave a trail of surviving evidence we can’t know much for certain about them. Early British Isles Influences The harp was established in the British Isles long before anything in the guitar family, though it took a number of forms, including the rote, rotta, telyn, psaltery, chrotta and a number of other odd names. No doubt it’s possible to make a strong case that it also did not originate there, and may have come in from Roman influences or even earlier from the Middle East or Africa. The stories of how adept the Phoenicians were at sea travel in the distant past leads to speculation that they could have easily carried almost any idea, including musical ones, to any place on Earth. Historians keep finding new evidence that early people, including Vikings and northern Europeans as well as Middle Eastern cultures, were much better at navigation and long-distance travel than we realized in the past. The legendary Ulfberht Viking swords from around the year 900 were recently determined to have been made in Scandinavia from Syrian and not Swedish iron ore, which means that trade routes between the two areas existed earlier than most people realize, probably overland or by river through what is now the Ukraine and Poland. All through the Middle Ages the tin mines in Cornwall, England remained a magnet for traders, and it is thought that the origins of this trade were thousands of years older, deep in the Bronze Age, since tin was a key ingredient for hardening the more common copper. The shores of Ireland were barely 160 miles away and the Celtic-flavored French coast of Brittany even closer, so that even a simple storm could have sent traders to the wrong shores. If people were moving around, so was at least some of their music. Guitars, Ouds and Lutes Europeans were not commonly playing instruments that looked like a guitar or lute before about the year 1100; at around this time they started showing up in many locations and began to spread steadily around Europe, as we’ll investigate further in Chapter 11. This is again a critical element of our troubadour story. The primary stringed instruments in mainland Europe before that time were various types of harps, joined by a variety of simple percussion and wind instruments. The Vikings had bone flutes and a number of horns, and some small harps. The ancient Celts similarly seemed to have had mostly drums and horns, especially a horn called the carnyx. There was also a lot of chanting and vocalizing, but prior to the time of the Crusades, there were essentially no violins, keyboards, lutes or guitars in Europe. The idea of using a horsehair bow to play stringed instruments is also believed to be an Arabic idea, though it was long associated with the music of nomads and shepherds more so than high art, and also has a long history in Africa. A British Isles version of the violin called the crwth (pronounced ‘crooth’) appeared rather early, inviting speculation about how and when the musical bow and other ideas, including rhyme, arrived into the British Isles. The Welsh had particularly deep bardic traditions of music and poetry, though they played the harp and crwth and nothing in the guitar family. The Druids played a mysterious role in early Celtic history, but they made a point of secrecy, avoiding written documents and only relying on oral histories, so it is hard to be sure what they did or knew. Before the Crusades, Arabic folk music as well as Islamic classical music was spread over a very large area stretching from Persia and Turkey to Morocco in Northern Africa. The world at that time was extremely regional, so there were always local variants of everything, and once again it isn’t accurate to make broad statements about entire continents, nor can we examine everything in detail. The flow of musical information and ideas undoubtedly followed trade routes, being occasionally interrupted by wars and rivalries between societies. The earlier Arabic stringed instruments, lyrics and playing styles undoubtedly provided foundational materials and ideas for what came to be known as European troubadour music and modern guitar playing. It is not hard to see a connection and to understand that the transmission of troubadour knowledge to Europe was substantially a consequence of the increasing contact that Europe was having at that time with Arabic nations, which intensified as a result of the Crusades. Let’s back up and look more closely at what we know of the Arabic musical world of roughly 1500 years ago. Music in Muslim Culture In Western and Christian society, we use the terms B.C. and A.D. to demarcate the eras before and after Jesus, and Muslims sometimes speak of the “Days of Idolatry” and the “Days of Ignorance” that preceded Mohammed, followed by the “Orthodox” time and “The Golden Age.” The Prophet Mohammed was born in 571, but it was not until 40 years later when started to receive his Revelations and began writing the Koran. Mohammed’s name was written in the Arabic alphabet, and there is no correct way to spell it in English, so I have arbitrarily chosen Mohammed rather than Mohammad or Muhammad, Muhammed, Mahomet or the other common spellings. Mohammed himself seems to have been conflicted about the value of music, and Muslim clerics and leaders have gone back and forth ever since the 7th century on what music is to be celebrated and what should be shunned. Mohammed’s cousin Al-Nadr ibn al-Harith, who introduced the oud and the song type known as the ghina’ to Mecca, was a leading poet-minstrel of the day who briefly became a rival to The Prophet. Mohammed was himself considered to be a sha-ir or “poet-soothsayer” before he began his religious endeavors. Invasions by Turks in the 1100s, followed by the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in the 1200s brought art and science to a screeching halt there, leaving Spain, then called Al-Andalus, as the brightest cultural light in the Arabic music world. The hotbeds of Spanish music were Toledo and Malaga, in South and Central Spain, though there are reports of copious music in Seville, Grenada and Cordoba. The ruling dynasties known as the Murawids (11th century) and the Muwahhids (12th century) both moved into Spain from Morocco, pushing many things northward toward France. In the year 1015 the writer Ahmad ibn Muhammed al-Yamani visited Malaga and reported, “Around me, the strings of lutes, tunburs, and other instruments vibrated from all directions, and voices blended in singing… [music] was uppermost in the concerns of the people in that region.” He then described the lovely singing of a slave girl. For quite a few centuries, possession of southern Spain went back and forth, though ultimately, the successive conquerors were supportive of music and musicians. Courts and palaces all over Spain in those centuries were said to be overflowing with skilled minstrels, and the dominant form of music seemed to be the singing oud and lute players. King al-Mu’tamid ibn ‘Abbad (1040-1095) was considered to be among the finest poets of his day, and he even wrote some early heavy-metal lyrics: “The strings of her lute wounded by the plectrum caused me to shiver as if I had heard a melody played by swords on the neck tendons of the enemy.” The ubiquity and sophistication of Muslim troubadour music in Spain created perfect conditions for the cultural seeds of this society to blow across the Pyrenees into Southern France, though there was much more war than cultural exchange. Farmer says, “In Al-Andalus, music and poetry belonged, not so much to a special class as in the East, but to the people at large….” In 1283 Zakariyya said that at Shilb “every inhabitant displayed an interest in literature, and that one could find even ploughmen capable of improvising in verse.” The growth of powerful groups of Spanish Christians in the 1100s likely also helped get the music to France, since the music didn’t have to jump religions as well as countries, genders and languages. Guitars and Troubadours Invade Europe Spain remained under Muslim control for over 700 years, which helps explain why the guitar’s history is so deeply rooted there, though many questions arise as to why the troubadour arts flourished on one side of the Pyrenees mountains and took so long to cross over. Over centuries, conflicts often mellow, and people who live along the borders, especially children, usually get tolerant and friendly with their neighbors, though the animosity and mutual penchant for cruelty and retaliation between the two sides of this long conflict are considerable. We can’t know how much or how quickly the ideas of rhymed verse, romantic love poetry, and the playing of fretted instruments percolated into southern European culture during this time, though it is quite possible that there was much more of it everywhere than was documented. Travel long ago was by ship, wagon, horse or on foot, and even if the mountain routes were hard to travel and well-defended, Spain and France also share a coastal border. Sailors might well have carried instruments with them in and out of the coastal regions either as part of commerce or smuggling. It might have been difficult for the cultures to mix, since Arabic people were visually identifiable, with darker skin, different religions, clothing, customs and languages. It is hard to imagine singing slave-girls mixed with the sailors, or even anyone trying to tune a lute on a ship in the Mediterranean, since the climate in that region is extremely dry during much of the year. That would be damaging to elaborately-made wooden instruments, helping to explain the popularity in that region of the smaller, unadorned gitterns and citoles. Andalusia returned to Christian control in 1236 after 522 years of Muslim rule with the Spanish Reconquista, and at that time Cordoba was possibly the largest city in the world, with estimates ranging from 100,000 to a million inhabitants. At its peak it was probably ten times the size of London or Paris. This time coincided with the flowering of the Occitan troubadours in southern France, though if or exactly how troubadour music made its way from Spain into France amid the vicious warfare is admittedly hard to picture. The population of Cordoba fell to 20,000 by the 18th century. George Power claimed that at the battle of Toloza alone, two hundred thousand Muslim soldiers were killed, and that the victorious Christian army cooked their food for several days using only the lances and arrows of the fallen for firewood. The conflict between the Castilians and the “Musulmans” was substantial, and the arts likely had to take a back seat to carnage for an extended period. Where lute players singing rhymed poetry fit into that scenario is hard to picture. Huge numbers of Europeans participated in religious wars for over 200 years, and they showed up in Asia Minor, the Middle East, and even Egypt, where they undoubtedly learned things while warring against the Muslims. Soldiers in wars have always come home with new cultural and musical ideas, either learned directly in other countries, or from other soldiers from different parts of their own army. It would have been much easier to buy or plunder an astrolabe or a compass from a distant and hostile culture than an oud or an oud player, though a wealthy Crusader could have purchased or confiscated instruments. He wouldn’t need to make drawings and take measurements of an Arabic musical instrument so he could make one at home– a Muslim Heritage web source makes the claim that anyone could have basically walked into a music store in an Arab city at that time and bought a nice instrument. “The visiting traders, scholars and pilgrims could easily buy such artifacts and take them home. There is also evidence that at the time of Ibn Rushd (d.1198) there was an industry, which manufactured musical instruments, some of which were exported, most probably to non Muslims, via Muslim-controlled Europe.” I'm trying to raise issues, questions and awareness in the world of modern troubadours... I want people to find this in web searches and to read it. I don't have a way for you to comment here, but I welcome your emails with your reactions. Feel free to cheer me on, or to disagree... Chordally yours, HARVEY REID ©2021
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