Guilhem Figueira

Guillem or Guilhem Figueira or Figera was a Languedocian jongleur and troubadour from Toulouse active at the court of the Emperor Frederick II in the 1230s.

[2] In Italy he and Aimery, a fellow exile, helped to found a troubadour tradition of lamentation for the "good old days" of pre-Crusade Languedoc.

[2] The exiles' native Lombard successors continued to employ the Occitan language, however, and it was not until the time of Dante Alighieri that Italian got a significant vernacular literature of its own.

[4] The singing of Figueira's sirventes was outlawed by the Inquisition in Toulouse,[4][8] though the 1274 inquisition which condemned a burgher of Toulouse on the basis of knowing the Roma tricharitz does not refer to the third stanza of Guilhem's sirventes, but to a vernacular work called La Bible.

[9] On the basis of his language, such as the use of matrem fornicationem (mother of fornication) to describe Rome, even modern scholars have labelled him a heretic.

[12] Among Guilhem's other surviving works are the sirventes Nom laissarai per paor (post-1216), which criticises the Church's false preaching, and Del preveire maior, which urges the pope and emperor to make peace and send a force to save the Holy Land from the Khwarezmians who had taken Jerusalem (1244).