The aristocratic troubadours of medieval France taught Led Zeppelin how to find the stairway to heaven, says Georgia Mann

As the 12th-century love story of Abelard and Heloise is being explored elsewhere in this edition of the Idler, I’m going to jump on the medieval bandwagon and look at how the troubadours of that bygone era gifted us the modern-day love song. Writing tunes about aphrodisiacs and seductions, the trobairitz (female aristocratic poet-composers) and wandering minstrels of the age blurred the sacred and the secular, leaving a legacy that has affected everyone from Wagner (more on which later) to Led Zeppelin, with songs such as “The Battle of Evermore” channeling knightly themes.

The notion of musical creation is bound up in the very word troubadour. The term comes from the Occitan verb trobar, meaning “to find” or “to compose”. The troubadours emerged in the late 11th century in Occitania, a region that encompassed Aquitaine and cities like Carcassonne, Bordeaux, Limoges, and Poitiers. These medieval singer-songwriters were breaking with tradition by opting to sing not in Latin, as was the norm, but in Occitan, the vernacular language of southern France. These weren’t songs about war or heroic exploits either. For the first time since the likes of Ovid, bards were now waxing lyrical about love, and they were doing it in a language everyone could understand.

As someone who struggled through the medieval poem Le Roman de la Rose (The Romance of the Rose) as an undergraduate, I’m not well placed to elucidate on the concept of courtly love. My main takeaway from tedious hours spent conjecturing about what the hell Guillaume de Lorris was on about, is that his extended allegorical dream in pursuit of a rose represented the torturous idea of female sexuality as something to be desired, pursued, but perhaps always best kept at a safe distance. That was also what many a troubadour was singing about; the unobtainable, but wildly desirable, lady fair.

Just how raunchy did a troubadour track get? Well of course they vary. One song imagines slipping a lady’s slipper off her foot, while a song by troubadour Guilhem de Peiteu is about how he can’t wait to get his hands under his lady’s cloak. Hip hop has become notorious for raps about turbo-charged promiscuity and the aforementioned Led Zeppelin were no slouches when it came to notches on bed posts – but could they top Guilhem’s claim to having a “chamber of joy” with 184 women for his pleasure?

I’m a big fan of the music historian Ted Gioia, who has said he believes “music is a force of transformation and empowerment, a catalyst in human life”. The troubadours were catalysts; they helped to transpose the sacred into the secular when it came to medieval music-making. Gioia explains: “Because the troubadours often sang about sex, many have assumed they had frequent love affairs. But this misunderstands the complex relationship between Christianity and the troubadour ethos, which are interlinked at every stage. Certainly there were seductions and indiscretions, but more often the troubadours preferred to sing about an unobtainable lady – for example, the wife of a noble – because this allowed them to express the most passionate feelings in a manner that was still compatible with the dictates of chastity … It’s hardly a coincidence that the cult of the Virgin Mary was at its height in European life during this same period. The secular and sacred often blur together in this music.”

So, who were the troubadours? To borrow some hip-hop terminology, the Original Gangster troubadour was the aforementioned Guilhem de Peiteu (1071-1127). He was the duke of Aquitaine, and kept court at Poitiers, so was the noblest of the troubadour tribe. Guilhem was a soldier as well as a poet, and went on the Crusade of 1101, most likely bringing Arabic influences back with him.

Not all troubadours were men; there were 20 noted female trobairitz. They came from noble families, but their songs diverged from their male counterparts in a major way. While the boys were full of highfalutin ideas of courtly love, the girls were altogether more direct. Meg Bogin, author of The Woman Troubadours, says of them: “The voices of the women troubadours are as complicated as the voices of real people, and as Earth-bound. They sound like women any of us could know. Unlike the men, who often wrote in the persona of the knight, the women wrote in no one’s character but their own.”

It’s impossible to over emphasise the importance of the trobairitz. They occupy a very special place in musical history as the first known female composers of Western secular music; all earlier female composers wrote sacred stuff. As Annie Lennox would later sing, these sisters were “doin it for themselves”.

The triple whammy of the Albigensian Crusade, The Hundred Years War and the Black Death helped bring the troubadourian party to a close. By that point, those proto-love songs had crossed borders. Dante Alighieri wrote about troubadour lyrics in his essay “On Eloquence in the Vernacular”; and the similar, 13th-century tradition of Minnesang developed in Germany, feeding directly into Wagner’s plot for Tannhauser, which is all about the lives and art of the lyrical minnesingers. So, next time you hear a Wagner aria or “Stairway to Heaven”, spare a thought for those 12th-century pioneers and their game-changing songs of seduction.

Georgia recommends Trouvères et Troubadours: Aux Origines de la Chanson from Ensemble Obsidienne (Bayard Musique).

This article is from Idler #109 May/June 2026 – out now.

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