CODAX, MARTIN

(fl. ca. 1230)

Nothing is known of the life of the 13th-century Galician TROUBADOUR and JONGLEURMartin Codax outside of the seven extant lyrics attributed to him. These songs are important as the earliest secular songs in Spain to survive with music. They are in the Galician-Portuguese dialect, which was the dominant language for secular literature in 13thcentury Spain.

Martin Codax seems to have been from the city of Vigo in Galicia, the area in that corner of northwestern Spain just north of Portugal. It has been suggested that he may have been connected with the court of Dom DINIS of Portugal. He is admired for writing feelingly about the sea of the Galician coast, but mainly his poems are good examples of the genre known asCANTIGAS DE AMIGO—poems in which male poets speak in the persona of a female speaker who yearns for her absent lover.A good example of the combination of these elements is the first stanza of the poem beginningOndas do mar de Vigo(“Waves of the Bay of Vigo”):

Waves of the bay of Vigo,

(Jensen 1992, 31.1, ll. 1–3)

Seven of these love poems survive, and most scholars agree that the poems are intended to work together as a cycle. Six of the seven lyrics survive with music in the unique Vindel manuscript—a single folded page discovered in Madrid in 1914 and now, since 1977, in the possession of the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York.

The poems consist of short stanzas with refrains, and make extensive use of parallelism.Musically, they are said to show some similarities to Galician folk songs as well as to Mozarabic hymns. They are of paramount significance to musicologists because of their early date and their unique status as examples of Spanish secular music.

■ Ferreira, Manuel Pedro.The Sound of Martin Codax: On the Musical Dimension of the Galician-Portuguese Lyric, XII–XIV Centuries. Lisbon: UNISYS, Impr. Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 1986.

■ Jensen, Frede, ed. and trans.Medieval Galician-Portuguese Poetry: An Anthology. Garland Library of Medieval Literature, 87. New York and London: Garland, 1992.

■ Pope, Isabel. “Medieval Latin Background of the Thirteenth-Century Galician Lyric,”Speculum9 (1934): 3–25.