Dating and historical circumstances:
The piece was composed after the fall of Damietta on 30 August 1221, and sometime in the summer of 1222, when John of Brienne, king of Jerusalem (the rey Johan of 13) left Acre for the West to raise future aid for his kingdom: he landed in Brindisi in October 1222 (Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 voll., Harmondsworth 1971, first published Cambridge 1951-1954, vol. III, pp. 173-175). − Frederick II had taken the cross in 1215, but Pope Innocent III had allowed him to postpone the crusade in order to settle affairs in Germany. In November 1220 he was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Rome by Pope Honorius III and in return Frederick had promised definitely to set out for the East the following spring (Runciman III, pp. 163-166); during the general consternation produced by the announcement of the fall of Damietta, Honorius was threatening Frederick with anathema for the delay standing in the way of the accomplishment of his vows, but was no longer doing so after the new oath that the Emperor proffered at Veroli between 12 and 23 April 1222, which everyone believed. Vincenzo De Barthomolaeis, «Osservazioni sulle poesie provenzali relative a Federico II», Memorie della Real Accademia delle scienze dell’Isituto di Bologna. Classe di scienze morali, sezione storico-filologica, serie 1, vol. 6, 1911-1912, pp. 97-124 (on pp. 102-103) argues that the piece was apparently composed before the meeting at Veroli, as otherwise Peirol would not have written lines 26-27, though this assumes that the news of Veroli had already reached the troubadour. Aston, pp. 9, 16-17 and 22, offers no terminus ante quem. The date of 1221 was called into question by Hill-Bergin 1973, p. 60, who argued that lines 16-18 and 21 sound posterior to the death of Philip Augustus – «unless the bon rey referred to is Louis VII». But would Louis VII really have been held up as an example of a great crusading king after the disaster of the Second Crusade? An old man by 1221, Philip had completed his crusading activities thirty years previously and was hardly in a position to undertake a new expedition, so it seems acceptable to see these lines as referring back to the days of the Third Crusade. − At the time of composition Peirol was on his way home to Provence from the Holy Land (lines 1-10), possibly at some Italian port, from where the song could have reached Frederick II in Sicily or Calabria or Puglia or Campania (De Bartholomaeis, «Osservazioni», p. 103). His visit to Jerusalem can only have taken place after the conclusion of the eight-year truce between El-Kamil and the Christians on 30 August 1221 (Kurt Lewent, «Das altprovenzalische Kreuzlied», Romanische Forschungen, 21 (1905), pp. 321-448, on p. 419); Lewent suggests that he may have been present at the final loss of Damietta on 7 September 1221 and have visited the Holy Land after the Christians vacated the city.