Troubadour (26 page)

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GLOSSARY OF MEDIEVAL WORDS

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Bailey
Courtyard of castle

Ballista
Siege engine, like a giant crossbow

Bastide
Fortified town

Consolamentum
Ceremony of being received into the Cathar faith

Believer
What would now be called a Cathar

Chansons de Geste
French songs about heroic deeds

Demesne
A lord’s lands, castle and property

Faidit
A lord who has lost his demesne

Fealty
Allegiance owed by subjects to their lord

Fief
A vassal’s source of income, land and labour

Hippocras
Spiced wine

Keep
The main tower of a castle

Mangonel
Wooden siege engine

Perfect
A man or woman who had received the consolamentum and lived according to the strictest rules of the Cathar belief

Rebec
A small stringed instrument played with a bow

Saltarello
A lively dance involving jumping or leaping

Seigneury
The position and authority of a feudal lord

Solar
A private or upper chamber in a medieval house

Suzerain
Sovereign or feudal lord over other kings or lords; overlord

Trebuchet
Wooden siege engine, like a massive catapult

Trencher
Platter, sometimes wooden, sometimes made of bread

Vassal
A free man who held land (fief) from a lord to whom he paid homage and swore fealty. A vassal could be a lord in his own right.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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Dr Susanna Niiranen, of the Department of History in the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, kindly read and commented on this novel. She specialises in the women troubadours of Southern France in the 12th and 13th centuries. Norman Allum was most helpful in the Languedoc.

And Alessandro Barbero, Claudia Grosso and Riccardo Pergolis all provided invaluable information on the court of Monferrato. In spite of their assurances that the court would have moved around, I have taken the view of the
Enciclopedia de La Repubblica
(Utet, 2003) that it would have been at Chivasso, because I needed it to be somewhere!

I am very grateful to Nicolas Gouzy and Véronique Marcaillou of the Centre for Cathar Studies in Carcassonne for their assistance and support.

I have read many books and articles about troubadours,
trobairitz
, Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade while researching this book. Among the most useful have been Yves Rouquette’s
The Cathars
(Loubatières, 1998), Jonathan Sumption’s
The Albigensian Crusade
(Faber, 1978), Stephen O’Shea’s
The Perfect Heresy
(Profile Books, 2001) and Laurence Marvin’s
The Occitan War
(Cambridge University Press, 2008). On troubadour life and poetry, Linda M. Paterson,
The World of the Troubadours
(Cambridge University Press, 1993), and F. R. P. Akehurst and Judith M. Davis (eds),
A Handbook of the Troubadours
(Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995), have been invaluable.

I’m grateful to the Bodleian and Taylorian libraries in Oxford and, as always, the utterly wonderful London Library.

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Also by Mary Hoffman

The Falconer’s Knot

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The Stravaganza Sequence:

City of Masks

City of Stars

City of Flowers

City of Secrets

City of Ships

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Bloomsbury Publishing, London, Berlin, New York and Sydney

First published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

36 Soho Square, London, W1D 3QY

Text copyright © Mary Hoffman 2009

Map illustration © Peter Bailey 2009

The moral rights of the author and illustrator have been asserted

Raymond Lévesque,
Quand les hommes vivront d’amour . . .
, used by permission of

Éditions Typo, 1989 © 1989 Éditions Typo and Raymond Lévesque

This electronic edition published in September 2010 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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A CIP catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4088 1337 9

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