This recording offers something very new in Early Music recordings: the combination of 13th century troubadour in its original ambiente, and modern chanteur in the Langue d'Oc of today. The revitalization of this ancient language today makes this unusual combination possible; the texts are all original 13th century poems, yet when Claude Marti is singing these texts he is thinking of today’s Languedoc, striving once again after seven centuries, for its deserved cultural independence, which was lost in this Albigentian Crusade. We hope that this unusual combination of musical genres will offend the devotees of neither field, but rather will direct the attention to the continuity of this forgotten culture.
The Early Music Quartet revives here songs concerned with a devastating French invasion of Languedoc, which began in 1209 and which systematically destroyed in the cruelest manner the towns, chateaux and monasteries of the South, thereby breaking apart the old and established social structure which had provided Europe with its most advanced civilization after that of the Spanish Arabs. As Ibn Khaldûn (14th century) wrote in “The Muqaddimah": “A nation that has been defeated and has come under the rule of another nation will quickly perish." So it was with Languedoc, today a forgotten country of the Middle Ages.
This was the homeland of the troubadours, the cradle of culture in Europe, whose literature remains a cornerstone of Western lyric. Troubadour is the French word, French the conquerors’ language. In Occitanian the word is trobador. This language, which is a mixture of several Latin dialects and might as well be called Old-Provençal, Occitan or Langue d’Oc was an outgrowth of the vernacular Latin as spoken in the “Gallia Narbonensis” and in “Aquitania", with the Atlantic on the west, Italy on the east, the Central Massif on the north and the Mediterranian on the south: Gascogne, Limousin, Languedoc, Auvergne, Perigord and Velay are the areas where the language is spoken. At the time of trobadores the language was one with Catalonian, and even today the regional dialects clearly belong together, one language, not French and not Castilian.
It was the language of Frédéric Mistral who won a Nobel prize for literature in 1904, and it is the language of a large group of poet-singers today, the “Chanteurs Occitans”, who cultivate the chanson with political overtones in their own language; a group of modern trobadores who are carefully watched by a government fearful of their separatist tendencies.
Claude Marti is one of these chanteurs, certainly the best-known. During the day he teaches in a village school and during the summer season he sings nightly in concerts throughout the South. He is not a worldly man, and when he sings about minorities that have been forbidden cultural rights (L’Express observed recently that Japan has two university chairs for Occitanian and on for Provençal while France has none!) he is simply singing about himself and his own Occitanian minority.
The Early Music Quartet and Marti join hands on this recording. His living language, his identification with the same cause as his ancestors blend with the revival of the historical music and give life and immediacy to the collection of songs. The Early Music Quartet brings original trobador songs while Marti takes original trobador texts and sings them in his own musical style. No music has survived for the texts that Marti sings here, and although seven centuries lie between the original music of the trobadors and today, the power of the language convincingly bridges this hiatus. For it is not the musical style, it is the anger, despair and helplessness at the ravaging of the Languedoc, the frustration of a people subjected to a cultural starvation economy that unites the pieces on this recording; magnificent poetry which has outlived that forgotten war, the Albigentian Crusade.
This recording is not a song recital; it is an attempt to portray the art and the feelings of a civilization about to die.

THE ALBIGENTIAN CRUSADE
“KilI them all, God will recognize his own!”
There in Béziers, 22 July 1209 the crusading army murdered the entire population of the town, Christians and Cathars alike, took what there was to take and burned what would burn. The first action (campaign) of the army of Abbot Arnaud-Amaury de Citeaux was complete!
The events leading up to this slaughter are not complicated, they are simply ordinary political history. At the Council of Toulouse in 1199 the Cathars, a harmless, aescetic Paulician sect was declared heretical. In 1204 the new Pope, Innocent III decided upon active persecution of the heretics. Count Raimond VI of Toulouse (Languedoc) was not active in supressing them, and the Papel Legate, Pierre de Castelnau was successful in bringing about a Papel ban on the Languedoc. On 15 January 1208 Pierre de Castelnau was murdered, a crime unsolved to this day.
Innocent III then called for a crusade against Languedoc - how else might he exercise his power if his bann be ignored and his legate killed? Thus the highly cultivated, most civilized part of Europe was offered to the Northern brigands for the taking on the scanty justification that Raimond VI was insufficiently zealous in persecuting a small minority within his lands. The Abbot Arnaud-Amaury in Lyon began to organize an army which led to the disasterous rape of Provence and the Languedoc, which began the following year with the razing of Béziers.
After Béziers the crusaders, who included the most powerful barons of the North, moved on to Carcassonne, where the citizens were permitted to leave the city alive but naked, and all their belongings became the property of the French crusaders. But these were the lands of the Viscount Raimond-Roger Trencavel, and the counts of the North felt uncomfortable about taking them over from the hand of an abbot. Indeed, can the church take the lands from one count and give it to another? Burgundy and Nevers and Saint-Pol thought not, and decided to leave the crusade. Only one was found who in pious humility would accept the poisoned gift from Rome of such magnificent wealth - Simon, Count of Leicester und Montfort.
Simon thus became the leader of the crusade, and he supplemented his army after the departure of his more powerful colleagues with mercenaries from many places. Simon turned to the chateau of Bram. There he sent the defenders off in a long chain of human misery, blinded and with their noses out off, with a oneeyed man to lead them, off they went to Cabaret. In the wake of such cruelty, who would dare to defend his house, who would fail to open his gates to welcome the cleansing crusaders? Minerve: there he burned 140; Termes, Cabaret, Lavaur, where he burned between three and four hundred, Cassés and Castelnaudry, only sixty, and then a grand massacre at Moissac, and then Muret... on and on: Pierre de Vaux-Cemai: “Innumerabile etiam haereticas peregrini nostri cum ingenti gaudio combusserunt”. (Historia Albigensium, cap. LII).
In the Statutes of Pamier Simon set forth the organization of his conquests... what did it matter to him that much of the land belonged to the English crown, some to Philippe Augustus and 'some to Peter of Aragon. What did the law matter to him? He was master there now, hated and reviled and feared. Soon his army was to stage a sensational victory over Peter II of Aragon, who had returned from his own sensational victory over the Moors at Las Navas to aid Fiaimond VI of Toulouse. But Simon’s politics cf terror and cruelty were repaid during the long siege of Toulouse in 1217 by a stone which crushed his head. “Simon est mort, Simon est mort!"
Simon de Montfort was dead, but it was too late to turn back what he had done. Languedoc, weakened by ten years of tragic war, the cultivated house torn asunder, was never to regain its splendor. The war went on, lands fell to the French and here and there heretics were burned, monasteries plundered and people put in fear of life and property. One of the last stands, Montségur fell heroically as late as 1244, and the châteaux of Quéribus and Puylaurens survived for another ten years. All the while the Inquisition worked to intimidate all, especially the poets: The Abbot of Villemeir addressed the poets with a poem of his own, containing the refrain:
    E s’aquest no vols croyre vec te'l foc
    aizinat que art tos companhos
    Aras velh que m respondas en un moto en dos
    si cauziras el foc o remanras ab nos.
    If you don't wish to believe this,
    then look into the fire
    where your companions are burning
    and give me your response in one or two words,
    whether you want the fire too or will join us.
In the end it was Raimond VII of Toulouse who alone did not accept the new order. One by one the others, Olivier de Termes, the Count of Fois, Raimond Trencavel of Carcassonne and Béziers, and the rest, all were sufficiently intimidated to accept French rule, and so it has remained to this day. Raimond VII died 1249 powerless and defeated, nor was his lineage to be sustained.

LANGUEDOC
The history and culture of Languedoc had little in common with that of France. Its civilization was a peculiar mixture of Roman, Visigoth and Moslem, it had no clearly definable geographical boundaries beyond the sea und the Pyrenees. The Visigoth Septimania, called so after the seventh Roman legion, comprising the land round the cities of Narbone, Carcassonne, Elne, Béziers, Maguelonne, Lodève and Agde, corresponds roughly to the land that became known as Languedoc. Following its separation from Aquitaine in 817 it became a duchy. By the opening ofthe 13th century the authority of the house of Toulouse was recognized throughout half of Provence, at that time the wealthiest and most highly cultured area of what today is France.
But with the French invasion of 1209 the sun went down on the Languedoc and the dark ages descended. By the treaty of 1229 all the lands from Carcassonne to the Rhone went to the French, and after the death of the last of the Toulouse line, Jeanne, in 1271 the rest of the Languedoc went to the French Crown. (In 1274 Rome illegaly took the county of Venaissin, laying the basis for the Papal residence in Avignon during the Captivity.)
Improper rule and heavy taxation led the infuriated peasantry to rebellion 1382-83, which was harshly and cruelly put down. (Both Louis of Anjou, brother of Charles V, and the Duc de Berry can be blamed for much of this misery.) In 1790 Languedoc was simply erased from the map of France, being replaced by the several departements.

THE TRUBADORES
Pèire Cardenal was the arch-Satirizer of the period. He was born in Puy-en-Velay and served as a secretary to Raimond VI of Toulouse beginning 1204. Thus he was a young man at the outbreak of the war. He enjoyed a clerical education but chose to become a trobador. He lived through the war and the death of the members of the House of Toulouse, Raimond VI, Raimond VII and his daughter (died 1271). Cardenal was not a Cathar, remaining within the church all his life, yet he was outspoken against the French and the church. Very likely it was the Inquisition that compelled him to go into exile - he selected Montpellier, which at that time was a fief of the king of Aragon.
Cardenals satire was bitter in the extreme. His audience was educated and he himself frequently cited figures out of the literature - Blancheflor, Isolde, the Isengrim fables, etcetera. As was the custom, he modelled his sirventes after canzones, employing borrowed melodies, which gave him a subtile satirical tool: view the beautiful soave melody of Tartarassa and then regard the text!
Guilhem Augier Novella was born in Saint-Donat (Valence) in 1185 and became a minstrel at the court of Raimond Rogiers in Béziers. Following the execution of Raimond (10 November 1209 at the hands of the French) Guilhem went into exile in Italy, where he received the name “Novella”.
Pèire Bremond Ricas Novas was a Provençal trobador who worked from 1229 to after 1241. He worked at the court of Raimond VII in Toulouse.
Tomier and Palazi were two trobadores who wrote sirventes on James I of Aragon (1208-1276), the Count of Provence, Raimond-Bérenguèir IV (died 1245) the Count of Toulouse, Raimond VI (died 1222).
Guilhem Figuèira was from Toulouse, son of a tailor, and he was one himself. When the French occupied Toulouse (1229) he fled to Lombardy. He could write well and sing well, but, the vida tells us, he kept the company of whores and ribalds in the taverns rather than that of the courtiers. The vida omits mention of his most famous poem, Sirventes farai (record side 2). Such a devastating attack on the church may have prompted the writer of the vida to discredit him before history with the remark about his character: mere possession of a copy of this poem was succicient grounds in the fourteenth century in Toulouse, to come before the Inquisition!

GUILHEM DE TUDELA
Cançon de la Crosada
The text usually entitled Chanson de la croisade albigeoise (Song of the Albigentian crusade) - the original has no title, and the note Aiço es la cançons de la crosada contra’ls erètges d'Albigès was given to it by Fauriel in his edition of 1838 - is composed of two quite different, but successive works. The first part (2,772 lines) was written in a bad frenchified Occitan dialect by a Spaniard from Navarre whose native language must have been Basque: Guilhem de Tudèla. He was a priest who favoured the crusade, but not a fanatic and wrote his poem, which is almost nothing but a document, in the course of the events between 1210 and 1213.
The first extract given here tells the origins of the crusade, the second alludes to the taking of Lavaur (May 3, 1211), when the lady of the castle, Girauda, was thrown in a well and stoned to death, when the knights were hanged or beheaded and the heretics burnt at the greatest stake of the crusade.