Garcia Soares
Trovador medieval

Biographical Note:

In the attributive item that accompanies his two songs it’s stated that he was brother of Martim Soares, a character that most researchers identify with the homonym troubadour. That being correct, he would then have performed his poetic activity between the decades of 1230 and 1260. This chronology, however, apparently contrasts with the placement of his songs in the songbooks, which leads Resende de Oliveira1 to doubt that the aforementioned Martim Soares was in fact the troubadour and to suggest, then, that Garcia Soares would be a later author, that is, from the final 13th century and beginnings of the next. However, he didn’t find any individual in that epoch bearing that name with a brother named Martim Soares. On the other hand, José Augusto Pizarro resumes the traditional identification, and suggests that the brothers Martim and Garcia Soares Ribeiro could possibly be identified as these two troubadours2.
Anyway, given that we don’t know neither the family name nor the bulk of Martim Soares’s biography (he’s not in the Books of Lineages, which prevent us of knowing the names of his brothers), the identification of Garcia Soares is still an open matter.

References

1 Oliveira, António Resende de (1994), Depois do espectáculo trovadoresco. A estrutura dos cancioneiros peninsulares e as recolhas dos séculos XIII e XIV, Lisboa, Edições Colibri.

2 Pizarro, José Augusto (1999), Linhagens medievais portuguesas: genealogias e estratégias 1279-1325, vol. II, Porto, Centro de Estudos de Genealogia, Heráldica e História da Família da Universidade Moderna, p. 76, nota 48.
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