Wolfram von Eschenbach was the greatest of the medieval German narrative poets. Very little is known about his life, but it is generally accepted that he belonged to a Bavarian family of the lower nobility, that he may have served a Franconian lord, and that for the better part of his creative period he enjoyed the patronage of the great medieval German Maecenas Hermann I, landgrave of Thuringia. He probably died between 1220 and 1230.