João Garcia de Guilhade
Trovador medieval

Biographical Note:

Portuguese troubadour, natural of Guilhade, a village in the parish of Milhazes (Barcelos, north of Portugal), and documented in the second and third quarters of the 13th century. The oldest reference of him in our possession is from a document, dated 1239, in which he bears witness to a donation to the OPorto cathedral by Dona Elvira Gonçalves de Toronho, at the time already the widow of the troubadour Dom Garcia Mendes d’Eixo. From this fact Resende de Oliveira infers1 that João Garcia de Guilhade should have been one of the knights serving the important Sousa lineage, which seems in fact to be confirmed by the appearance of his name next to Count Dom Gonçalo Garcia de Sousa (son of Dona Elvira and also a troubadour) in the royal inquiries of 1258.
Though his compositions we can also infer that he frequented the castillian court of Alfonso X, maybe following the initial path of Dom Gonçalo de Sousa, or even of his brother, Dom Fernão Garcia Esgaravunha (a path, in both cases, somewhat obscure at this stage). Still according to Resende de Oliveira, he should have returned to Portugal around the middle of the century, probably to Faria (not far from Milhazes) where his sons were raised, according to the mentioned inquiries, a fact that, moreover, is in plain agreement with the reference to that location that we find in two of his compositions. He’s still documented in the same region in 1270, confirming the will of a certain Lourenço Martins, husband of a certain Sancha Peres de Guilhade, probably his relative. Although he’s mentioned there simply as João Garcia, as Resende de Oliveira points out, it’s a curious document, given the relationship, that seems to have been very close, of the troubadour with the renowed minstrel Lourenço. However, the very frequent cases of homonymy at the time reccomend some prudence in the identification of this Lourenço Martins with the mentioned minstrel. The name João de Guilhade is yet mentioned in the royal inquiries of 1288, regarding the raising of a son of his in S. Salvador de Fornelos. We don’t know if he was still alive by that time but, that being the case, he would certainly be of an advanced age.

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.