Uc de Saint Circ

Uc is perhaps most significant to modern historians as the probable author of several vidas and razos of other troubadours, though only one of Bernart de Ventadorn exists under his name.

This identity fits with Uc's status as the "inventor" of troubadour poetry as a distinct type and his life in Italy (possibly due to exile during the Albigensian Crusade).

Uc was born in the town of Thégra to a minor nobleman, Arman, lord of Saint-Circ-d'Alzon, a village which no longer exists but was in the vicinity of Rocamadour.

[1] According to one version of his vida, Uc non fez gaires de las cansos ("never accomplished much with his songs"), apparently because he was "never really in love with a lady".

[5] While the biographer commended his lyrical and melodic compositions, he probably regarded his fifteen cansos out of a total forty-four poems as unusually low.

[9] In Un sirventes voill far, Uc demonstrates a hatred of the emperor, accusing him, a "monster of heresy", of believing in neither immortality nor paradise.

[10] Furthermore, he intends to humiliate France and the Church and so the Crusade against him in Apulia is justified because selh qu'en Dieu non cre non deu terra tener: "he who does not believe in God should not reign".

[12] Late in his life, at the da Romano court, Uc became a representative of the academic prose style then coming into fashion.