Peire de la Caravana

Who is Peire de la Caravana?

Peire de la Caravana was an Italian troubadour in Lombardy in the late 12th and early 13th centuries. He was one of the earliest Occitan troubadours in Italy. He is famous for his sirventes.

Among his preserved works are the sirventes D'un serventes faire and La Paz de Costanza. Peire wrote the first encouraging the communes of northern Italy to resist German overlorship, which has been dated to as early as 1157. However, Peire incites the Lombard cities by harkening back to the fate of the baronage of Apulia who had resisted the Germans earlier:

Lombart, beus gardaz

Que ja non siaz

Pejer que compraz,

Si ferm non estaz!

De Pulla'us sovegna

Dels valens baros

Qu'il non an que pegna

For de lor maisos;

Gardaz non devegna

Autretal de vos!

This has led some to date it to 1194, when Henry VI conquered Sicily or as late as 1225, when the city-states of northern Italy renewed the old Lombard League in opposition to Henry's son, Frederick I of Sicily, Holy Roman Emperor.

Writing in Lombardy in the Occitan tongue under the nominal sovereignty of the German monarch, Peire took the opportunity to poke fun at the German language, writing in a famously debated passage: