page_title: Lanfranc Cigala
section_title: Love poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Lanfranc Cigala / Love poetry
context_page_description: Lanfranc Cigala was a Genoese nobleman, knight, judge, and man of letters of the mid thirteenth century. He remains one of the most famous Occitan troubadours of Lombardy. Thirty-two of his poems survive, dealing with Crusading, heresy, papal power, peace in Christendom, and loyalty in love. Lanfranc represented a tradition of Italian, Occitan-language trovatori who berated the Papacy for its handling of the Crusades.
  Lanfranc's surviving corpus consists of thirty-two poems, including seven cansos of courtly love; four religious cansos; three sirventes; two crusading songs; and one planh. Among the thirty works attributed to him are nine tensos composed with other troubadours: four with Simon Doria and one each with Jacme Grils, Guilleuma de Rosers, Lantelm, Rubaut, and an otherwise unknown "Guilhem".
context_section_description: Some of Lanfranc's work presaged the dolce stil nuovo, as when he wrote in his poem Quant en bon luec that ques amors pren en lejal cor naissenza (love is born in loyal hearts). His poetry idealised women and emphasised the need for loyalty. In another poem, Lanfranc praised the deceased countess of Este thus:
  . . . la vol dieus en cel far regnar,
  
  e si tot sai en reman dechaenza
  
  li saint angel la'n portaran chantan.
  Among the ladies (dompnas) Lanfranc celebrated in his poetry were Berlenda and one de Villafranca, on whose surname the poet composed many puns, as in Tan franc cors de dompn'ai trobat. This last woman may have been Alasia, the daughter of Guglielmo Malaspina. Lanfranc's only planh was composed for a lady named Luresana, whom Lanfranc called chan-plor. It begins Eu non chant ges per talan de chantar.
  In Francesco da Barberino's Flores novellarum, a collection of Boccaccian novellas, there is a short biography of Lanfranc in which the troubadour is torn by the "duties of hospitality" and the "claims of lady-service". This novella is taken as an example of the early date at which the scene was transferred "from the street to the human soul."
caption: Lanfranc in a 13th-century chansonnier
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