Crusade song

A Crusade song (Occitan: canson de crozada, Catalan: cançó de croada, German: Kreuzlied) is any vernacular lyric poem about the Crusades. Crusade songs were popular in the High Middle Ages: 106 survive in Occitan, forty in Old French, thirty in Middle High German, two in Italian, and one in Old Castilian. The study of the Crusade song, which may be considered a genre of its own, was pioneered by Kurt Lewent. He provided a classification of Crusade songs and distinguished between songs which merely mentioned, in some form, a Crusade from songs which were "Crusade songs".

The Crusade song was not confined to the topic of the Latin East, but could concern the Reconquista in Spain, the Albigensian Crusade in Languedoc, or the political crusades in Italy. The first Crusade to be accompanied by songs, none of which survive, was the Crusade of 1101, of which William IX of Aquitaine wrote, according to Orderic Vitalis. From the Second Crusade survive one French and ten Occitan songs. The Third and Fourth Crusades generated many songs in Occitan, French, and German. Occitan troubadours dealt especially with the Albigensian campaigns in the early thirteenth century, but their decline thereafter left the later Crusades—Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth—to be covered primarily by the German Minnesinger and French trouvères.

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