Bertran de Born

Bertran de Born was a baron from the Limousin in France who became one of the major Occitan troubadours of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He was born in the 1140s and died by 1215. He wrote love songs of the kind called cansos, but his reputation rests on his political songs, the sirventes. His own life was entangled with the politics he sang about, since he took part in revolts against Richard I of England and later against Philip II of France. He married twice and had five children, and in his last years he entered a monastery as a monk. He belongs among the authors of the Occitan lyric tradition of medieval southern France, and his sirventes are the reason he is remembered beside the love poets of his time.