History
Middle Age
The beginnings of
Portuguese poetry go back to the early 12th century, around the time when the
County of Portugal separated from the medieval
Kingdom of Galicia in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula. It was in this region that the ancestral language of both modern Portuguese and modern Galician, known today as
Galician-Portuguese, was the common language of the people. Like the
troubadour culture in the
Iberian Peninsula and the rest of
Europe, Galician-Portuguese poets sang the love for a woman, which often turned into personal insults, as she had hurt her lover's pride. However, this region produced a specific type of song, known as
cantigas de amigo (songs of a friend). In these, the lyrical subject is always a woman (though the singer was male) talking about her friend (lover) from whom she has been separated - by war or other activities - as shown in the
Reconquista. They discuss the loneliness that the woman feels. But some poems also project eroticism, or confess the lover's meeting in a secret place, often through a dialogue she has with her mother or with natural elements (such could be considered a custom adapted from the pagan peoples in the region). Epic poetry was also produced, as was common in Romantic medieval regions (
Gesta de D. Afonso Henriques, of unknown authorship). With the Portuguese expansion south, poetry preserved some of these main characteristics -
cantigas de amigo were written even by kings, like
Denis of Portugal.