Rerouted before ruined

Claim (verbatim)

The Albigensian crusade (1209-1229) is the standard caption for the end of the troubadours, and it is usually read as a production collapse. This conjecture claims the record shows relocation and re-genring before it shows silence. The war decades themselves are loud - the sirventes surges exactly when the canso's patronage economy stumbles, because outrage found sponsors when praise no longer could - and the following generation's careers move wholesale to the courts of Italy and Iberia: Uc de Saint Circ to Treviso, Aimeric de Peguilhan to the Este and Malaspina circles, Sordello into Italian service, later Cerveri de Girona at the Catalan court and Guiraut Riquier at Alfonso X's Castile. The mechanism is patronal rather than demographic: composition followed solvent courts, and Occitan courts stopped being solvent for praise-poetry a generation before poets stopped existing. If that is right, the crusade's signature in the countable record is a geography shift and a genre shift, both large, rather than an immediate output cliff - and the eventual thinning of the tradition is the slow downstream effect of losing the home market, not the direct effect of the war. BEdT records places of activity, dates and genres per poet and per piece, so both shifts are arithmetic on the instrument.

Prediction clause (verbatim)

Prediction: among BEdT poets with datable activity, the share of the post-1229 cohort with attested career phases outside Occitania will be at least double that share in the pre-1209 cohort (primary clause: the two-fold relocation ratio between cohorts; the verdict follows it). Secondary: among datable pieces, the sirventes share in 1209-1249 at least doubles its 1160-1200 share. Cohort assignment follows BEdT floruit fields under a pinned rule - a poet spanning a boundary joins the cohort holding the majority of his dated span. The test voids if either cohort has fewer than 40 datable poets.

Kill-dataset (verbatim)

Kill: BEdT per-poet dates and places of activity, plus per-piece genre and dating fields - cohort geography shares and genre-mix shifts across the crusade boundary.

Novelty / leakage triage

anticipated in the literature — this exact test has never been run

The post-crusade migration to Italian and Iberian courts (Uc de Saint Circ to Treviso, Aimeric de Peguilhan to the Este, Sordello, later Cerveri de Girona and Guiraut Riquier) and the wartime prominence of the sirventes are textbook narrative from Jeanroy to Paterson and Folena's account of the Veneto courts; but the narrative has never been run as cohort arithmetic, and since the pre-crusade generation also travelled (Marcabru to Spain, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras to Montferrat), the two-fold relocation ratio between pinned cohorts is a genuine un-run test rather than a restatement.

• A. Jeanroy, La poesie lyrique des troubadours, 2 vols. (Toulouse-Paris, 1934)
• L. Paterson, The World of the Troubadours: Medieval Occitan Society, c. 1100-c. 1300 (Cambridge, 1993)
• G. Folena, 'Tradizione e cultura trobadorica nelle corti e nelle citta venete', in Storia della cultura veneta, I (Vicenza, 1976)

Predictions

No prediction registered yet.