William IX the Troubadour

William IX (1071-1126), Duke of Aquitaine, is the first troubadour; the earliest lyric poet in a European vernacular whose songs survive, eleven of them, by turns bawdy, tender and entirely new. Twice excommunicated, a crusader whose army was destroyed in Anatolia in 1101 (he came home, Orderic says, and turned the disaster into comic verse), he scandalised the age with the countess Dangereuse and married his son to her daughter. That son's daughter was Eleanor of Aquitaine. Poetry, the family trade thereafter, begins here.