This is a story about a very special troubadour whose name I found in the archives of my local web analytics company and funeral home directory.

Uc de Saint Circ was a famous troubadour from Quercy in Southwest of France, who lived and created in the first half of 13th century. Yet, this is not the only reason why modern specialist value him Uc is perhaps most significant to modern historians as the author, who wrote biographies in the form of vidas and razos of other troubadours. Forty-four of his songs, including fifteen cansos and only three melodies, have survived, along with a manual. Some specialists place him high on the pedestal as poet, biographer, literary historian, and mythographer. They put him in A-list as a creator of troubadour poetry and the idealogical trappings with which it came to be associated.

Uc was born in the town of Thégra to a minor nobleman, Arman, lord of Saint-Circ-d’Alzon. His father’s castle, which was atop a cliff was destroyed by war in Uc’s time. Furthermore according to his vida, Uc was sent off to receive a clerical education in Montpellier. At Montpellier he learned to read and write and discovered “songs and poems and amazing stories of the worthy men and the worthy women who were living or had lived in the world”. It was through this education that he became a professional jongleur. Uc’s gained fame through the verses and music he exchanged with the Count of Rodez, under whom he probably served in the Albigensian Crusade, and through two songs exchanged with Raymond III of Turenne. Later, according to his vida, Uc went into Gascony, where he wandered around penniless. Eventually he gained settled down with Guillerma de Benauges, a countess and viscountess, who introduced him to senechal of Poitou Savaric de Mauleon, who in turn clothed and outfitted him.

According to his vida, he spent a considerable amount of time with Savaric in Poitou and the surrounding regions before heading into Spanish kingdoms of Catalonia, Aragon, and finally León. Around 1220 he moved east into Provence, where his vida says he was “with all the barons”, and into Lombardy and the March of Treviso.During his travels in Languedoc, Spain, Provence, and Italy he probably met many other troubadours. Eventually Uc is said to have settled down with a wife and children, after which he never composed songs. Uc’s association, in Italy, with the da Romano and Malaspina families is evident in his surviving poetry. It lasted forty years while he was in Italy.

According to one version of his vida, Uc never accomplished much with his songs, apparently because he was “never really in love with a lady”. While the biographer commended his lyrical and melodic compositions, he probably regarded Uc’s fifteen cansos out of a total forty-four poems as unusually low. He was reputed to be able to feign love and to praise and belittle women with ease, but after his marriage his poetic output ceased. Late in his life, at the da Romano court, Uc became a representative of the academic prose style then coming into fashion. In this vein he composed a collection of biographies of great troubadours. Most of these were written in Italy and the numerous historical errors they contain have been attributed to the time and distance between the lives and events they describe, for, judging by the Italian words which had crept into Uc’s vocabulary by the time they were written, he must have been in Italy a while before he began their composition.