Nothing is known of the life of the 13th-century
Galician TROUBADOUR and JONGLEUR Martin 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 as CANTIGAS 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
beginning Ondas do mar de Vigo (“Waves of the
Bay of Vigo”):
Waves of the bay of Vigo,
tell me whether you have seen my friend?
and, oh God, whether he will come soon?
(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.
Bibliography
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,” Speculum 9
(1934): 3–25.