Arnaut de Mareuil

Who is Arnaut de Mareuil?

Arnaut de Mareuil was a troubadour, composing lyric poetry in the Occitan language. Twenty-five, perhaps twenty-nine, of his songs, all cansos, survive, six with music. According to a contributor to the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica, Arnaut de Mareuil surpassed his more famous contemporary Arnaut Daniel in "elegant simplicity of form and delicacy of sentiment". This runs against the consensus of both past and modern scholars: Dante, Petrarch, Pound and Eliot, who were familiar with both authors and consistently proclaim Daniel's supremacy

His name indicates that he came from Mareuil-sur-Belle in Périgord. He is said to have been a "clerk" from a poor family who eventually became a jongleur; he settled at the courts of Toulouse and then Béziers. He apparently loved the countess Azalais, daughter of Raymond V of Toulouse, married to Roger II Trencavel, and Arnaut's surviving poems may be seen as a sequence telling of his love. Alfonso II of Aragon was his rival for Azalais's affections, and according to the razó to one of Arnaut's poems, the king jealously persuaded her to break off her friendship with Arnaut. He fled to Montpellier, where he found a patron in count William VIII. Arnaut's cantaire and jongleur was Pistoleta.