[In the following essay, Quint discusses the religious aspects of Gerusalemme liberata, which, he argues, celebrates the triumph of the Counter-Reformation.]

In 1553, six years before Tasso first began to sketch the poem that was to become the Gerusalemme liberata, the Catholic monarchs Philip II and Mary Tudor acceded to the throne of England, after the Protestant reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The event was celebrated in an encomiastic oration, De vestituta in Anglia religione (“On the restoration of religion in England”), by the minor Modenese humanist, Antonio Fiordibello. In one passage Fiordibello searches for a precedent to the achievement of the new English rulers.

Quorum igitur Regum, Imperatorumque res gestae tam amplae unquam ac tam magnificae & gloriosae fuerunt, ut sint cum vestrae hujus actionis pietate, amplitudine, gloria comparandae? Admirari solent plerique vel maxime res a Gottjfredo Boemundo, & Balduino clarissimis Ducis gestas, qui cum ingentibus olim copiis ex his occidentis partibus in Asiam profecti, victis ac superatis Christiani nominis hostibus, urbem Hierosolima, & sanctissimum illud Christi liberatoris nostri sepulcrum receperunt. Et sane illi optime de Christiana Republica meriti fuerunt, neque adversus hostes res ulla unquam a Majoribus nostris gesta est gloriosor atque praeclarior. Verum meo quidem judicio factum vestrum gloriosius est, atque praestantius. Illi enim Christianis hominibus, si qui peregrinari Religionis caussa vellent, ad Christi Sepulcrum iter patefecerunt. Vos tantae huic nationi aditum ad caelestem patriam & ad Christum ipsum aperuistis. Illi loca illa quae fuerunt tanquam nostrae Religionis incunabula, Ecclesiae reddiderunt. Vos Ecclesiae, magnam ipsius & nobilem in primis partem, quae amissa fuerat, reddidistis: Postremo illi res eas maxima Barbarorum quidem illorum, sed tamen hominum caede gesserunt: vos hosce populos, qui propter ipsorum ab Ecclesia disiunctionem jam perierant, ad vitam revocatis. Et si autem tantem rem sine exercitu, sine vi, sinc armis, pietate tantum & consilio, atque auctoritate perfecistis.¹

(The deeds of what kings or emperors were ever so great, magnificent and glorious that they can be compared, for piety, greatness, and glory to this act of yours? Most frequently and especially admired are the exploits of Godfrey, Bohemund, and Baldwin, those most famous of commanders, who once marched out of these western regions into Asia, and having defeated and overcome enemy armies in the name of Christianity, recovered the city of Jerusalem and the holiest sepulchre of our saviour Christ. And truly they were the most deserving of merit from the republic of Christendom, nor were any more glorious or outstanding deeds of prowess ever performed against enemy forces by our ancestors. Even so, in my judgment, this action of yours is the most glorious and outstanding. For they opened the way to Christ's sepulchre for those Christians who wished to make a pilgrimage for the sake of religion: you have opened the entrance to the celestial homeland and to Christ Himself for this great nation. They restored to the Church those places that were, so to speak, the cradle of our Religion. You restored to the Church her own great and especially noble part, which had been lost to her. Finally, they performed their exploits with a great slaughter of those peoples who were indeed barbarian pagans, but nonetheless men: you have recalled to life this English people, who, because of their separation from the Church, were perishing. Moreover, you have accomplished so great a deed without an army, without force, without weapons, but with such great piety, wisdom, and authority.)

For Fiordibello the heroism of the First Crusade finds its modern equivalent in Philip and Mary's reclamation of England for Catholicism, in the efforts of the Counter Reform to recover the territories of the Church lost to heresy. The armed struggle against the Moslem infidel is superseded by the reconversion of Protestants. Fiordibello describes this reconversion as a purely spiritual process of persuasion, and praises it for its lack of violence or coercion—thus glossing over its political character and failing to anticipate the events that gave Bloody Mary Tudor her sobriquet.

This linking of the crusades with the reunification of the Church, suggesting that the reunification is indeed a new crusade, is shared by the ideology and fiction of the Gerusalemme liberata. Tasso's epic portrays the taking of Jerusalem by the knights of the First Crusade under the leadership of Goffredo (Godefroi) of Boulogne. But Goffredo finds himself fighting on two fronts. Before he can conquer the Moslem defenders of Jerusalem, he must restore unity in his own ranks, particularly with regard to the hero Rinaldo, whose defection and eventual return to the Christian army imitates the model of Achilles and gives the poem its generally Iliadic shape. Goffredo's task is spelled out from the first octave of the epic:

Il Ciel gli diè favore, e sotto a i santi
segni ridusse i suoi compagni erranti.(2)

(Heaven favored him and he brought back his errant comrades beneath his holy banners.)

The “santi/segni” refer both to the army banners that indicate allegiance to Goffredo's command and to the cross that is displayed upon the banners: the political errancy of Goffredo's recalcitrant knights is equated with a spiritual, religious error. The equation becomes explicit in one episode of the Liberata, Argillano's revolt against the authority of Goffredo's captainship in canto 8, where a series of topical and literary allusions draw an analogy to the Protestant schism of Tasso's own day. The epic thus depicts a double crusade: against the infidel outside the Church, against disunity and potential heresy within. Moreover, the link that the poem makes between Argillano's rebellion and the disobedience of Rinaldo draws us to a further level of topical allusion involving Tasso's patron, the Este duke of Ferrara, and his relationship with the papacy, the Church in its guise as a temporal, political power.

The seeds of Argillano's revolt in canto 8 are planted when a party of scouts returns to the crusader camp with the report (8.47-56) that a corpse missing both its head and right hand has been found, believed to be that of Rinaldo, whom Goffredo banished three cantos earlier for his unruly violence and insubordination. The belief is false and is the result of a deception engineered by the pagan Armida (10.53-56): the corpse is one of Rinaldo's own victims whom she has clothed in the hero's discarded armor. She has, moreover, planted one of her servants disguised as a shepherd near the body; he hints (8.55) that Rinaldo was killed by soldiers from his own Christian army. That evening the diabolic fury Aletto (Allecto), following plans made at the opening of the canto with her fellow devil Astragorre (1-4), appears in a dream to Argillano, an Italian soldier and compatriot of Rinaldo. In the dream (59-62) he sees the trunk of Rinaldo's body which bears the hero's head in its left hand: the head speaks and tells Argillano that he was murdered by Goffredo, who plans to kill Argillano and his companions as well. Argillano addresses the Italian troops and, after voicing indignation at their common subordination to the foreign Frankish captain, discloses the contents of his dream, accusing Goffredo of having envied the “valor latino” (67) of Rinaldo. The ensuing rebellion spreads (72) to include the Swiss and English soldiers as well. Informed of the uprising, Goffredo prays to God, protesting his abhorrence of civil strife (76), and then goes to meet the mutineers unarmed. Divinely inspired, his face resplendent with celestial majesty, Goffredo is able to restore order to the army simply by his speech and presence. He pardons all except Argillano, who is turned over to him for execution.³

A series of literary models and topical allusions give the episode a layer of contemporary political meaning. The dream vision of Aletto in the guise of the mutilated Rinaldo is drawn from Dante's headless figure of Bertran de Born, who appears among the sowers of discord and schism in Inferno 28.112-142. The Dantesque emblem of the lacerated body-politic is appropriate to the dramatic situation of Argillano's revolt against the head of the Crusader forces. Bertran's placement, moreover, in a canto whose central character is Mohammed (28-63) and which alludes to Fra Dolcino (55-60) suggests that, already for Dante, the crucial body-politic in question is the body of the Church, threatened by heretical schism. This idea is confirmed in Tasso's episode when, according to the plan announced by Astragorre at the beginning of canto 8 (3), Argillano's rebellion spreads first to the Swiss, then to the English troops: to the sixteenth-century Protestant enemies of Rome.

An anti-Protestant polemic may underlie the Virgilian imitation in the episode as well. Conflated with the mutilated ghost of Hector who appears to the dreaming Aeneas in book 2 (268-297) of the Aeneid, the apparition of Aletto to Argillano more clearly recalls the passage of book 7 (415f.) where the same fury assumes a disguise to visit the sleeping Turnus and to instill in him the furor of battle, leading to the war in Italy that takes up the second half of Virgil's epic. Tasso's choice of this model for his episode of rebellion is logical enough: it is Virgil's great depiction of how the irrational violence of war is instigated, and the Virgilian fury is easily assimilated with Christian devils. But I would suggest that this choice was mediated by a recent anti-Lutheran tract of Girolamo Muzio, L'Heretico infuriato, published in 1562. Muzio was a humanist at the court of Urbino, where between 1557 and 1558 he had been a teacher of the young Tasso, at that time the thirteen year old school companion of the ducal heir, Francesco Maria della Rovere.⁴ Muzio wrote the Heretico infuriato against a certain Matthew of Jena, the Protestant Matthaeus Iudex, who in 1561 had published a pamphlet urging the emperor Ferdinand I to march on Rome and overthrow the pope.⁵ At the beginning of his tract, Muzio explains its title:

Si meraviglierà peravventura alcuno veduto il titolo di questo Libretto, che essendo tutti gli heretici non solamente infuriati, ma indiavolati, io ad un particulare habbia dato nome di infuriato. Là onde di questo avanti tute le altre cose mi par conveniente che io render ne debbia la ragione. Dico adunque che in leggendo gli scritti di colui, à cui per rispondere mi son mosso, mi si rappresentò alla mente quella infernal furia descritto da Virgilio, la qual co'l suo mortifero suono accese à prender le arme i villani di Latio contra la nobiltà di Troia. Che non altramente un certo Mattheo giudice professor (come egli si scrive) della Academia di Ihenna città di Sassonia autor della scrittura, di ch'io parlo, come spinto dalle ardenti facelle di una delle furie infernali, va fremendo, furiando, & arrabbiando per armar contra noi ogni condition di persone.⁶

(Someone may perhaps wonder on seeing the title of this little pamphlet that, inasmuch as all heretics are not only furious, but diabolically possessed, that I should have given the name of furious to one in particular. Wherefore I think it fitting that I should give the reason for this before turning to other matters. I say, therefore, that in reading his writings, which have moved me to write a response, there was represented to my mind that infernal fury described by Virgil, which with her deadly trumpet blast kindled the peasants of Latium to take arms against the nobility of Troy. For not otherwise does a certain Matthew the judge and professor, as he titles himself, of the Academy of Jena, a city in Saxony, and author of the writing of which I speak, as if prompted by the burning torches of one of the infernal furies, go ranting, raving, and raging to arm against us men of all conditions.)

Muzio associates Virgil's Allecto with the diabolic inspiration of Protestantism and views the Italian war of the Aeneid as a Lutheran Peasants' Revolt; he expresses a typical Counter Reform horror at the prospect of Protestantism setting the lower orders against their aristocratic social betters. Tasso similarly depicts Argillano's rebellion as a mutiny of the “vulgo folle” (74, 82). And he portrays Argillano as the recipient of a new spiritual inspiration—“gli spira / spirto novo di furor pieno” (62)—that equates the individual inspiration by which the Protestant claims authority outside the community and consensus of the Church with the suggestion of the devil: it is contrasted with a genuine working of the Spirit, the new and unwonted warmth—“un novo inusitato caldo” (77)—that Goffredo feels in response to his prayer.⁷ Moreover Argillano proposes a deviation from the Crusaders' goal that spells out the nature of his schism in typological terms.

          o pur vorrem lontano
girne da lei, dove l'Eufrate inonda
dove a popolo imbelle in fertil piano
tante ville e città nutre e feconda,
anzi a noi pur? Nostre saranno, io spero,
ne co' Franchi commune avrem l'impero.

(8.69)

(or shall we rather wish to travel far from Goffredo's power, where the Euphrates washes the land, where it nourishes and makes fruitful so many towns and cities on the fertile plain for a people unused to war—let it be for us instead? They will be ours, I hope, nor will we share our dominion with the Franks.)

Urging the Italians to leave Jerusalem to the Franks and to carve out a kingdom of their own, Argillano would lead them into the plain watered by the Euphrates—what appears to be the plain of Shinar (Sennaar) of the bible (Gn. 10:10)—the site first of Babel and its tower, later of Babylon. It was a commonplace for sixteenth-century Catholics and Protestants to accuse each other of building Babylon, the earthly city of confusion, in opposition to Jerusalem, the true Church; both exploited the biblical analogy that had been decisively reshaped by Augustine in his discussion of the two cities in book 14 of The City of God. Tasso may here again follow Muzio, who in chapter 20 of his treatise, identifies Babylon with Saxony, the home of his Lutheran adversary:

Et questa dottrina è nata & nutrita in Alamagna; Et principalmente in Sassonia; donde ho detto essere uscito il libro di questo spirito infuriato; et quindi come una peste appigliando vassi per lo mondo. Questa è adunque quella a superba, & quella temeraria; Questa è quella meretrice, che va fornicando co'Prencipi della terra rimovendogli dal vero culto di Dio; Questa è macchiata del sangue de' Santi, & de propheti, i quali stati sono oppressi da' Prencipi, & da popoli, che procurato hanno di distrugger la Catholica Fede. Questa è fatta habitation di dimonii, & ricetto di tutti gli spiriti immondi; Et questa è la gran Babilonia, che è caduta. Babilonia significa confusione: e dove fu maggior confusione? dove sono più travagliati e perseguitati i Catholici che in quelle parti? dove vissero mai tante heresie in un tempo? … Caduta è la gran Babilonia; caduta è dalla religione; caduta dalla devotione, & dalla vera fede. … La gran Babilonia, la natione fra le Christiane grandissima, et che unita era insieme propriamente come una Città, hora è in se divisa fra Catholici, & heretici; & gli heretici fra loro.⁸

(And this Protestant doctrine was born and nourished in Germany; and principally in Saxony, whence as I have said issued the book of this furious spirit, and thence, catching like a plague, goes travelling through the world. This is therefore that proud and bold woman, this that whore, that goes fornicating with the Princes of the Earth, removing them from the true worship of God; this is she who is stained with the blood of the saints and prophets, who have been oppressed by the Princes and by the people who have endeavored to destroy the Catholic Faith. She has made herself the habitation of devils and the haven of all unclean spirits; and this is the great Babylon that is fallen; Babylon signifies confusion: and where was there ever greater confusion and where are Catholics more travailed and persecuted than in those regions? Where did so many heresies ever exist at one time? … Fallen is the great Babylon, fallen from religion, fallen from devotion, and from the true faith. … Great Babylon, the largest among Christian nations, and which used to be unified like one city, now is divided against itself between Catholics and heretics, and the heretics among themselves.)

Argillano's exhortation to seek out a Babylonian realm by the Euphrates is thus inscribed by the language of Renaissance religious controversy. The secessionist alternative he offers reinforces the analogy between his revolt and Protestant schism.

As a fomenter of rebellion, Argillano has a prior history of participation in civil strife:

nacque in riva del Tronto e fu nutrito
ne le risse d'odio e di sdegno;
poscia in essiglio spinto, i colli e'l lito
empiè di sangue e depredò quel regno,
sin che ne l'Asia a guerreggiar se 'n venne
e per fama miglior chiaro divenne.

(8.58)

(he was born on the banks of the Tronto and raised amid quarrels of hatred and wrath; then, cast into exile, he filled the hills and shore with blood, and plundered that realm, until he came to do combat in Asia and became renowned with a better fame.)

Argillano's experience is one too often repeated in Renaissance Italy: an exile from his faction-torn city who becomes a bandit and scours the surrounding countryside. The city here is Ascoli Piceno. Located on the banks of the Tronto, it was subject to frequent civil violence and outbreaks of banditry in the sixteenth century. Tasso may have modelled Argillano upon a particular historical bandit, Mariano Parisani, who was active around Ascoli in the 1560s. In 1561 Parisani went into exile from Ascoli after having killed three fellow citizens: a woman cousin, her husband, and her eighty-year-old father-in-law. For the next five years Parisani preyed upon the territory of Ascoli as the leader of a formidable troop of bandits. After defeating several papal forces sent against him, he finally left the region altogether and served as an honored mercenary in the employ of the dukes of Savoy and Tuscany.⁹ Parisani's career is strikingly parallel to that of Tasso's Argillano, the bandit who turns his prowess to a better military cause. But Argillano has not, in fact, put his strife-ridden past behind him.

The real significance, however, of Tasso's topical allusion lies in the fact that Ascoli belonged to the States of the Church and that its bandits fought against papal troops: it casts Argillano's rebellion as another similar revolt against papal authority. This reading overlaps with the anti-Protestant overtones of the episode: when the revolt spreads to the Swiss and the English the idea seems to be that opposition to the temporal power of the Church is the first dangerous step towards heresy and schism. Conversely, Protestantism is reduced to a purely political problem, a defiance of Rome that is equivalent to the acts of seditious bandits in the Papal States. Yet here, as was the case in Fiordibello's oration, the political problem is given what appears to be a spiritual solution: the sole presence and persuasion of Goffredo are enough to quell Argillano's mutiny. Tasso adds, however, a marvelous supplement at the very end of the episode: legend has it that a winged warrior was seen shielding Goffredo and brandishing a sword still dripping with blood:

sangue era forse di città, di regni
che provocar del Cielo i tardi sdegni.

(8.84)

(it was perhaps the blood of cities and kingdoms that provoked the delayed anger of Heaven.)

Goffredo's spiritual defense may possibly contain force after all, though it is a force transferred to God and his angel of wrath.

Implicit in this reading of Argillano's rebellion as political allegory is the identification, at some level, of Goffredo with the authority of the papacy; the unity that he seeks to maintain in the Crusader forces is the unity of the Church. Peter the Hermit has described what will be the nature of Goffredo's office at the beginning of the Liberata:

Ove un sol non impera, onde i giudici
pendano poi de' premi e de le pene,
onde sian compartite opre ed uffici,
ivi errante il governo esser conviene.
Deh! fate un corpo sol de' membri amici,
fate un capo che gli altri indrizzi e frene,
date ad un sol lo scettro e la possanza,
e sostenga di re vece e sembianza.

(1.31)

(Where there is not one ruler, on whom depends the determination of rewards and punishments, by whom are allotted tasks and duties, there government must be unstable. Ah, make one single body of loving members, make a head that directs and checks the others, give to one alone the sceptre and power, and let him undertake the role and guise of king.)

Here, too, Tasso's language derives from the polemics of the Counter-Reform; as head of the Crusader body-politic, Goffredo resembles not only king, but pope, the Vicar of Christ who on earth assumes the headship of the Church which is the body of Christ.¹⁰ Writing a confutation of Luther's arguments, Gaspare Contarini asserts:

Denique sicuti est unum Christianorum corpus, cuius nos membra sumus, ita etiam esse in Ecclesia unum Pontificem, à quo haec unitas contineatur in terris. Nam multitudo principatus mala, & quae unitati valde officiat … Unius erge Ecclesiae unum caput, unusque rector.¹¹

(Therefore just as there is one body of Christians of which we are the members, so is there also one Pontiff in the Church, by whom this unity may be kept together on earth. For a multiple sovereignty is evil and is greatly detrimental to unity. … Of one Church, therefore, there should be one head, one ruler.)

The idea was a commonplace, but a Calvin would challenge it, arguing that the pope was “neither appointed leader of the Church by the Word of God, nor ordained by a legitimate act of the Church, but of his own accord, self-elected” (“certe non verbo Dei constitutum, non legitima ecclesiae vocatione ordinatum ecclesiae principem fuisse, sed volontarium, et a se ipso lectum”).¹² Tasso begins his poem with God himself choosing Goffredo as captain of the army; he sends down Gabriel, the bearer of his Word, in a scene that recalls the Annunciation (1.13-17). When Goffredo is subsequently elected by a council of his peers under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit (32) we are meant to think of a papal election in the College of Cardinals.

Argillano's rebellion against Goffredo's duly constituted authority is not an isolated episode in the Liberata. Argillano is a mirror-figure of the poem's central hero, Rinaldo, in whose name he leads his revolt.¹³ He repeats Rinaldo's own earlier act of insubordination against Goffredo: Rinaldo's refusal to submit to Goffredo's judgment in canto 5 (42-44) after he has killed the insulting Norwegian prince, Gernando. On that occasion Tancredi persuaded Rinaldo not to fight Goffredo “e con piaghe indegne de' Christiani / trafigger Cristo, ond'ei son membra e parte” (5.46: “and with unworthy wounds upon Christians to wound Christ, of whom they are members and limbs”). Argillano's rebellion thus inflicts the civil strife and wounds on the Christian body politic which Rinaldo had been on the point of inflicting himself. Conversely, Rinaldo's eventual decision to leave the Crusader camp in exile is much like the schismatic departure from Jerusalem that Argillano will later urge upon his followers.¹⁴ The two characters are further linked by the issue of Italian political subjugation. Possessed by the devil, the proud Gernando scorns Rinaldo who was born “ne la serva Italia” (5.19), and Gernando's death at Rinaldo's hands is a kind of vindication of Italian honor against the northern “barbaro signor.” (This idea was more forcefully articulated in an earlier version of the poem that survives in manuscript. The character Gernando was formerly named Ernando and was the prince of Castile: the episode was explicitly directed against Spanish hegemony over Italy before Tasso prudently revised it.)¹⁵ But when Argillano makes a similar patriotic gesture, it is he who is depicted as diabolically possessed, inciting the Italian troops to rebel against their Frankish captains and a “popolo barbaro e tiranno” (8.63), to avenge affronts that would make Italy and Rome burn with scorn and anger for a thousand years—“tal ch'arder di scorno, arder di sdegno / potrà da qui a mill'anni Italia e Roma” (64).

Argillano is thus a stand-in for Rinaldo, one who discloses the more serious dangers and consequences of the hero's actions, of Rinaldo's assertions of (Italian) independence from Goffredo's rule. And Argillano is also a fall-guy, punished by the poem so that Rinaldo can be forgiven and rehabilitated. In fact, Goffredo demands that Argillano be handed over for justice in the same breath with which he pardons the absent Rinaldo (8.80-81): the hero is welcomed back to do submission to Goffredo (18.1-2), while the revolt of the minor character is sternly put down. The repentant Argillano will later escape from prison to be killed in battle by the pagan warrior Solimano (9.87)—it is probably significant that Solimano beheads him. Rinaldo escapes this fate by killing the same Solimano (20.107) in the poem's final battle.

Argillano and Rinaldo are further, and perhaps most significantly, linked by topical allusion. Rinaldo is the fictional ancestor of the Este dukes of Ferrara, the last of whom, Alfonso II, was Tasso's patron. Ferrara was papal fief, and the Este ruled the city as knights of Saint Peter and vassals of the Apostolic See. Thus Rinaldo's relationship to Goffredo, no less than that of Argillano, the rebellious bandit from Ascoli Piceno, can point to a contemporary conflict between a refractory dependent subject and the Church as a temporal, territorial power. Read as topical allegory, Rinaldo's differences and eventual reconciliation with Goffredo maps out a sufficiently ambivalent relationship between the Este and the papacy. In fact, the recent history of that relationship had been far from easy.

The Este grievances with Rome are neatly listed in a document drawn up for Alfonso II in 1578, entitled “Scrittura onde appaiono i ragionevoli sospetti che Sua Altezza ha di continuo potuto haver che i Pontefici de suoi tempi fossero per muoversi contra di lei” (“Document in which appear the reasonable suspicions that His Highness could continually have had that the popes of his time were about to move against him”).¹⁶ This memorandum notes the various disputes, conflicts, slights, and accusations that Alfonso had endured from the papacy, listing them year by year and month by month from 1562 up to the present of 1578, and labelling them in the margin under various reappearing categories: “saltworks,” “precedence,” “reprisals,” “borders” (with the neighboring papal territory of Bologna), “war,” “imputations,” “complaints,” etc. The first two of these were the major source of irritation and discord between the two powers. The saltworks of Comacchio were a major sector of Ferrara's economy, but they constituted competition for the papal saltworks at Cervia. Pius IV and Pius V forbade the production and transport of salt through the duchy to Lombard markets, prohibitions that Alfonso defied, continuing the salt trade unabated while sending ambassadors to negotiate endlessly before ecclesiastical courts in Rome. The other major issue dividing the Este from the papacy was their precedence controversy with the Medici; it became their overriding diplomatic concern during the decades of the 1560s and 1570s, and it had international repercussions.¹⁷

The controversy dated back to 1541 when Duke Ercole II claimed for his ambassador a place of greater honor at the papal court than that accorded to the Florentine ambassador of Cosimo I de'Medici: for while the Este could trace their lordship back to the feudal twelfth century, the Medici banker-princes had only recently been ennobled. A diplomatic battle ensued, waged by both ducal houses with elaborate negotiations and hefty bribes. In the 1560s, jurisdiction to determine the question was claimed both by the Emperor Ferdinand, who favored the Este, and by the pope, Pius IV, who was pro-Medici. It was the latter's successor, Pius V, who in 1569 named Cosimo Grand Duke of Tuscany, raising him to a higher rank and to the titles of “Serenissimo” and “Altezza,” and thus guaranteeing him precedence over Alfonso II. The pope was partly moved to his action by his irritation over the issue of the saltworks. Alfonso reacted by refusing to join the Holy League created by Pius in 1570 to fight the Turk—the “Scrittura” makes the unlikely charge that instead the pope “escluse la persona del Signor Duca di Ferrara essendo ella stata proposta per Generale della Lega contra gli infideli” (“excluded the person of the Lord Duke of Ferrara who had been proposed to be the General of the League against the infidels”)¹⁸—and the bad blood created by the affair contributed to the emperor's absence from the league as well. Thus Tasso, the poet of the First Crusade, wrote under the patronage of one of the few major Italian courts that did not participate at Lepanto.

There was a third question, not mentioned in the “Scrittura,” that lay ominously in the background of Este relations with the papacy. The same Pius V had on 23 May 1567 issued a bull that forbade illegitimate family lines from inheriting feudal titles in papal domains. The bull seems to have been aimed particularly at Alfonso, who was widely (and, as it turned out, correctly) believed to be sterile—so the Medici ambassador to Ferrara, Bernardo Canigiani, reported in December of the same year¹⁹—and who had no legitimate collateral heirs. The very future of the Este in Ferrara was menaced, and, in fact, after Alfonso's death in 1597 the duchy would be swallowed up into the States of the Church. The threat was real, but, as the omission from the “Scrittura” suggests, it does not seem, as some modern scholars have maintained, to have been a central objective of Este diplomacy in the decade following 1567, the period when Tasso was composing his poem. Only in the second half of the 1580s did Alfonso begin to make vain attempts to obtain legitimacy for first one, then another, bastard cousin.²⁰

Relations between Ferrara and Rome were thus strained, and Alfonso sought alliances with other powers to play off against his papal overlords. The Este were also dukes of Modena and Reggio, which they held as imperial fiefs, and Alfonso's marriage in 1565 to Barbara of Austria, the daughter of Ferdinand I, brought him closer into the sphere and protection of the Hapsburg Empire. But the Duke sought other alliances in the north as well. In 1575 the Venetian ambassador Emilio Maria Manolesso reported, mildly scandalized, that Alfonso had gone to the great trouble of learning German, “lingua che non s'impara per dilettazione, come quella che è barbarissima” (“a language that isn't learned for pleasure, because it is most barbarous”), and that he maintained close relations with the Lutheran duke of Saxony.²¹ But those in the know, Manolesso continued, thought that the duke had no other goal in his friendship with the German Protestants except to use the fearful prospect of their descending upon Italy as a weapon against the pope and Florence. The Florentine ambassador Canigiani recounts actual threats against the pope voiced by Ferrarese courtiers. On 12 July 1568, he wrote back to Cosimo I:

La causa dei sali a Roma si sente che non va a modo del Duca con tutti gli ufitij fatti da l'Imperatore, dal re Cattolico, da molti Cardinali, et in persona dal Signor Don Francesco: e comincerò a creder, che quanto costoro bravano che hanno tanta ragione, e' dichino al solito le bugie et credirsele. Ma il bello è che di questi che trescono, et servono chi tresca al segreto si lasciono uscir di bocca che questo papa stuzzicando un principe si grande et parente di Imperatore et di tanti re et principi grandi, va cercando che e' si chiami quaggiu uno sciame d'Ugonotti: hor vegga l'Eccellenza Vostra Illustrissima con che armi noi vogliamo difender il torto, et far filar Sua Santità che secondo me è un modo di scacciar benevolenza di tutti i principi Christiani: pero io non so che di bocca di Sua Eccellenza esca tal cosa, ne somigliante, et anche non so quanto io lo credessi.²²

(One hears that the cause of the saltworks in Rome is not going according to the Duke's wishes, with all the good offices done for him by the Emperor, by the Catholic King of Spain, by many cardinals, and in the person of Signor Don Francesco d'Este: and I begin to think, that as much as they may boast that their cause is so just, they're telling lies as usual and believing them. But the beauty of it is that these intriguers and their servants are secretly letting out that this pope, irritating so great a prince, and a relation of the Emperor and of so many great kings and princes is looking to have him summon down here a swarm of Huguenots: now let Your Most Illustrious Excellency see with what weapons we here want to defend the wrong, and make His Holiness behave, which to my way of thinking is a way to lose the benevolence of all Christian princes: however I don't know whether this or similar things come from the mouth of His Excellency the Duke and I also don't know how much I believe it.)

And Canigiani writes again to Cosimo on 16 January 1570, when the Este were seeking allies in other Italian princely courts to oppose the new title of Grand Duke granted the Medici ruler:

Domenica mattina vidi in corte l'Ambasciatore Guerrino [Guarini] tornato di Savoia et non si può penetrare cosa di sua risposta onde io conietturo che la non sia per costoro secondo l'intenzione, che me ne farebbono un cantar da stordirmi, maxime il Bentivoglio, che vorrebbe poter accender fuoco fra il papa et l'Imperatore, parendoli che in tutta Europa non sia soldato suo pari per servir sua Maestà et si lascia scappare di far calare sciame di Luterani se questo papa stuzzica et simile velenose vanità, con che mi faranno un tratto scoppiar delle risa.²³

(Sunday morning I saw at court the Ambassador Guerrino [Guarini] returned from Savoy, and one can't find out anything about his answer, from which I conjecture that it isn't according to their intention, for they would make a song out of it to send me into a stupor if it were, especially Bentivoglio, who would like to be able to light a fire between the pope and the Emperor; it seems to him that in all Europe there is no soldier his equal to serve his imperial Majesty, and he lets out that he would bring down a swarm of Lutherans if this pope keeps causing irritation and similar poisonous vanities, which at a moment will make me burst with laughter.)

A swarm of Huguenots, a swarm of Lutherans. These anticipations of another sack of Rome, the first carried out in 1527 by the Lutheran mercenaries of the emperor Charles V, suggests how the resistance of the Este to papal power could seem to ally itself with Protestant heresy. And the Este, in fact, had played a role in 1527, allowing the imperial army to cross through their territory on its way down the peninsula, for which they were still being blamed by the papacy forty years later.²⁴ There was, moreover, real discussion at the imperial court in 1568 of a new military campaign against Rome: of the kind promoted by Matthaeus Iudex seven years before.²⁵ Entering into the causes of friction between emperor and pope was their respective backing of Ferrara and Tuscany in the precedence controversy. Canigiani is dismissive, but his friend Tasso may have taken the loose talk in Ferrara seriously, and with some reason. His epic doubles the insubordination of the Este avatar Rinaldo with the crypto-Protestant revolt of Argillano.

If at home in Ferrara the Este could assume an aggressive posture towards Rome, they publicly sought reconciliation and a return to the favor of the pope. On 22 July 1569, their ambassador at Rome, Francesco Martello, received a long letter of instructions, outlining the arguments he was to use to ingratiate the Este to Pius V.²⁶ The burning issue was the precedence controversy, and Martello was ordered to read or present to the pope a “succinct abstract” (“succinto estratto”) of nineteen pages, entitled “Servitij fatti dalla serenissima casa di Este alla Santa Sede Apostolica principiando l'anno 773 per tutto l'anno 1474” (“Services rendered the Holy Apostolic See by the most serene house of Este beginning in the year 773 through the year 1474”).²⁷ By heeding this document, Pius was to see “the many and signal services that these Princes have done the Church, exposing their own persons, and how they have continued to aid and serve her always with every readiness, and often to their notable detriment: and with the loss of their own lives and also of many of their dominions” (“quali et quanti siano i segnalati serivitij che questi Principi hanno fatto alla Chiesa con esporsi le persone proprie, et qualmente habbiano continuato di soccorrerla et servirla sempre con ogni prontezza, et spesso con notabile detrimento: et con perdita delle vite proprie et anche di molti stati”).²⁸ In return, the document itself proclaimed, earlier popes had given the Este “privileges with widest concession of every tax and every sort of jurisdiction so that they could repair to them according to their needs, and also created them Grand Dukes (“Duchi Magni”), equal to any other Grand Duke, as grand as he might be” (“privilegij con amplissima concessione d'ogni datio et d'ogni sorte di giuriditione affinche potessero ripararsi secondo il bisogno et anche li criarono Duchi Magni al pare di ogn'altro Magno per magno che possa essere”).²⁹ It continues with a list of sixty-nine episodes from the dynastic history of the Este, all attesting to their services, primarily military, to the Church. The list is drawn from and offers a kind of pre-publication preview of Giovan Battista Pigna's Historia dei Principi d'Este, the major work of literary propaganda produced for the Este during the precedence controversy: a book that, Pigna himself wrote to a Ferrarese ambassador in Rome, was similarly to be presented to the pope as witness to how greatly “the predecessors of His Excellency have been devoted to the Apostolic See and perpetual defenders of the Church” (“i predecessori di Sua Eccellenza siano stati divoti della sede apostolica et perpetui difensori della Chiesa”).³⁰ But between the letter to Martello and the first printing of Pigna's Historia in November, the perfidious Pius had declared in favor of Cosimo on 24 August 1569 and given him the title of Grand Duke that Alfonso claimed for himself.

Defeated, the Este waited until Pius' death in 1572 to renew their suit with his successor Gregory XIII. Alfonso now hoped to have Cosimo's title revoked or at least to be awarded the same rank himself. A delegation was sent to Rome on December 18 which included Tasso and Battista Guarini, later the author of the Pastor fido. On December 31, Guarini presented before Gregory and the papal court an accomplished Latin oration that was subsequently published.³¹ This was a typical “obedientia” oration in which a new pope was to receive congratulations on his accession and a pledge of obedience from the foreign prince.³² Guarini used the occasion to take up again the theme of previous Este service and military assistance to the Apostolic See, this time with the elegant variation of recalling the occasions when such aid had been rendered to popes with the name of Gregory:

Si quis enim diligenter annales praeteritorum temporum contempletur, in nulla alia quamvis numerosa, et altius repetita serie, quam in hac una Gregoriorum certe nobilissima, tot Pontifices unquam reperiet, qui maiore nec animorum consensu, nec temporum concursu, vel huius familiae fidem atque observantiam amplexi fuerint, vel inde beneficia tam ipsorum quam ad Ecclesiae dignitatem spectantia, aut plura certe aut praestantiora retulerint.³³

(If anyone should diligently contemplate the annals of past times, in no other series, however numerous or often repeated, as in this most noble one of Gregories will he ever find so many pontiffs, who with a greater consensus of minds, or on more frequent occasions, have embraced the faith and observance of this family, or received from them more numerous or more outstanding services worthy of their own dignity as much as of the dignity of the Church.)

Guarini invokes the cases of Gregory V, Gregory VII, Gregory IX, and Gregory XI, each paired with their respective Este lords and auxiliaries. The series of odd-numbered Gregories irresistibly leads to the present Gregory XIII, whom Guarini assures of Alfonso's devotion:

Haec igitur Romanorum Pontificum, et Estensium Principum constans ac illustrissima series, tam arcto beneficiorum vinculo, tot superatis seculis ad nostra usque tempora couservata, si quid possunt divina in rebus humanis vestigia ad excitandas hominum mentes Alfonsum II Principem nostrum non obscure quidem admonere videtur, ut praeter eum, quem tibi summo Pontifici, tuisque immortalibus meritis debet, excellenti quodam et longe omnium maximo honore et reverentia veneretur: te vero Pater optime ut quorum munus et nomen refers, eorum etiam benevolentiam erga hanc familiam tam de Christiana Republica benemeritam imiteris.³⁴

(Therefore, this constant and most famous series of Roman Pontiffs and Este Princes, conserved together through so many centuries to our present times by a binding chain of beneficial services seems—if traces of divinity in human affairs can do anything to excite the minds of men—clearly indeed to admonish our Prince Alfonso II that, beyond that which he owes you, supreme Pontiff, because of your immortal merits, that he should venerate you with the greatest and most outstanding honor and reverence: you, indeed, excellent Father, as you carry on the title and name of those popes, will also imitate their benevolence towards this family so worthy of merit from the republic of Christendom.)

The quid-pro-quo is clearly spelled out: Este devotion and service in return for papal favor in the disputed areas of the saltworks and precedence, particularly in the latter. What most struck Guarini's audience was his audacious reference to Alfonso by the Grand Ducal title of “Serenissimo.”³⁵

Just what service Alfonso really had to offer Gregory became clearer when the duke himself came to Rome to see the pope in January 1573. The Florentine ambassador in Rome, Alessandro de' Medici, wrote to Cosimo that the duke of Ferrara had come

oltre tutte l'altre cagioni, con disegno di procurar d'entrar nella Lega, dove, quando gli sia concesso, offerisce al Papa di tirarvi anche l'Imperator, sperando con la presenza sua, et con tal offerta non solamente consequir questo suo intento, ma guadagnarvi ancora l'animo di Sua Beatitudine, per l'effetto di tutti li altri desideri suoi.³⁶

(beyond all other reasons with the design of procuring entrance in the [Holy] League, where once it is conceded him to enter, he offers to the Pope to draw in the Emperor, too, hoping with his presence, and with such an offer not only to make good his present intent, but also to gain the mind of His Blessedness in order to effect all his other desires.)

Alfonso was now willing to enter the Holy League he had earlier spurned and promised to guarantee imperial participation as well. The Medici ambassador thought this offer to be a weak bargaining chip, and, in fact, nothing came of it.³⁷ Alfonso and his delegation returned empty-handed from Rome, and the differences between Ferrara and the Church remained unresolved.

The Este did not obtain a reconciliation with the papacy, but their poet appears to offer an idealized version of such a reconciliation in the submission that Rinaldo does to Goffredo. Goffredo has been instructed by a divinely-inspired dream (14.13-14) that he needs the Este knight as much as the latter needs him, and when Rinaldo comes to renew obedience to him, Goffredo rises from his throne to meet him halfway (17.97.7-8). He urges that bygones be bygones:

Ogni triste memoria omai si taccia
e pongansi in oblio l'andate cose.
E per emenda io vorrò sol che faccia,
quai per uso faresti, opre famose.

(18.2.3-6)

(Henceforth let every unhappy memory be left unspoken, and let past events be placed in oblivion. And to make amends I shall only wish that you do those famous deeds which you would be wont to do.)

The scene is a much revised version of Achilles' reconciliation with Agamemnon and return to battle in book 19 of the Iliad—there it is Achilles who relinquishes his anger, and Agamemnon who acknowledges his fault and makes amends. But inscribed in this traditional epic plot of commander and chief warrior is the identification of Rinaldo with the Este and Goffredo with papal power and authority: it suggests here a vision of the dukes of Ferrara settling their quarrel with the papacy and resuming their vaunted role as defenders of the Church. This identification is made quite explicitly in the earlier prophecy of Peter the Hermit, who urges the recall of Rinaldo to the army in canto 10 and predicts, in Virgilian accents, the future part that both Rinaldo and his Este descendants will play as champions and upholders of papal might:

Ecco chiaro vegg'io, correndo gli anni,
ch'egli s'oppone a l'empio Augusto e 'l doma;
e sotto l'ombra de gli argentei vanni
l'aquila sua copre la Chiesa e Roma,
che de la fera avrà tolte a gli artigli;
e ben di lui nasceran degni i figli.
          De' figli i figli, e chi verrà da quelli,
quinci avran chiari e memorandi essempi;
e da' Cesari ingiusti e da' rubelli
difenderan le mitre e i sacri tempi.
Premer gli alteri e sollevar gli imbelli,
difender gli innocenti e punir gli empi
fian l'arti lor: così verrà che vole
l'aquila estense oltra le vie del sole.
                    E dritto è ben che, se 'l ver mira e 'l lume,
ministri a Pietro i folgori mortali.
U' per Cristo si pugni, ivi le piume
spiegar dee sempre invitte e trionfali,
ché ciò per suo nativo alto costume
dielle il Cielo e per leggi a lei fatali.
Onde piace là su che in questa degna
impresa, onde partì, chiamato vegna.

(10.75-77)

(Lo, I see him clearly, as the years course by, oppose and conquer the impious emperor, and I see his Este eagle shelter beneath the shade of its silvery wings the Church and Rome which he has wrested from the claws of that beast, and his sons and descendants will be born worthy of him. Hence the children of his children and those born from them will follow his famous and memorable examples, and they will defend papal mitres and the holy temples of God from unjust and rebellious Caesars. To subject the proud and aid the unwarlike, defend the innocent and punish the wicked, these will be their arts: and thus it will come about that the Este eagle will fly higher than the course of the sun. And it is just, if it sees the truth and the light, that it should put its deadly thunderbolts in the service of Peter. Where there is combat for the sake of Christ, there it must ever spread its wings unconquerable and triumphant, for this is the inborn custom that the fatal laws of Heaven have assigned it. Wherefore it is the pleasure of Heaven that Rinaldo be recalled to this worthy enterprise from which he departed.)

Rinaldo, who will defeat Frederick Barbarossa, the oppressor of the Church, will be followed by other Este rulers who will sustain the papacy against the emperor during the Investiture Controversy and otherwise lend their support to Rome. The logic of the last octave conflates the present crusade with the future defense of the Church: it is because the Este are divinely destined to be the protectors of the papacy that Rinaldo should be brought back now into Goffredo's service. Tasso's fiction, which draws here upon the same sources as Pigna's Historia, repeats the Este diplomatic line that ascribed to the family a special relationship to the Church, a relationship that Alfonso would offer to renew in 1573, pledging military service that he had earlier withheld from the Holy League.³⁸ For Tasso the Este become the chosen ministers of papal power, just as, in the fiction of the poem, Rinaldo has been elected by Providence to be the “essecutor soprano” (14.14.4) of Goffredo's orders. This exaltation of the Este as champions of the Church is given prominence by the position of Peter's prophecy at the end of canto 10, at the very midpoint of the Liberata. The plot and structure of the poem hinge upon the divinely sanctioned return of the errant Rinaldo under Goffredo's command, and in the same way Heaven seems to have decreed the continuation of the historical partnership between the pope and his Este vassals.

If the Liberata thus gives voice to an official line of Este propaganda, Tasso's attitude towards his patrons remains sufficiently ambivalent. Alfonso must presumably have been gratified to see reflected in the story of Rinaldo his family's claims to be the special military servants of the papacy—and thus entitled to special papal consideration. But he would have found less to his liking—had he been able to decipher them—the poem's encoded linkings of Rinaldo to Argillano and of Argillano to heretical schism: the suggestion that the Este quarrels with Rome might ally them with the Protestant enemy.³⁹ Moreover, for all the benevolence that Goffredo shows to the penitent Rinaldo, he remains in charge of the situation, and it is Rinaldo who must do submission to him. Tasso may plead for the return of the Este into the good graces of the pope, but reconciliation is based on their acknowledging and bowing to the Church's higher authority. The depiction of this submission may have given some satisfaction to the poet, whose resentment at his own subordination and powerlessness vis-à-vis his Este patrons should not be excluded from the political equations of his epic. Tasso may have chosen to identify with his patrons' “patron”—the feudal overlord of the dukes of Ferrara.⁴⁰ There is no necessary contradiction here: Tasso may enjoy portraying the Este's humiliation and still advocate their cause. Within this sado-masochistic dialectic, moreover, it is possible to identify with the rebellious son as well as with the punishing paternal authority, and Tasso can sympathize with his Este hero and with the local Italian political interests he represents when he shows Rinaldo upholding Italian independence and nationalistic honor against the arrogant foreigner Gernando. But by suggesting that behind Rinaldo lurks Argillano, the spectre of lawlessness and Protestant heresy, Tasso argues for the subordination of those local interests to papal rule. By the same token, the identification of Goffredo's supreme power with the Church allows for an Italian nationalism of another kind. A sixteenth-century Italian poet aiming to revive the imperialist formula of Virgilian epic could find in the papacy the only peninsular power with genuinely international claims. In the last chapter of the Prince, Machiavelli had himself looked, perhaps with mere utopian wishful thinking, to a ruler who could use the power of the Church to unite Italy and drive out her foreign conquerors.

The Liberata thus celebrates the triumph of the imperial, Counter-Reform papacy: this is the significance for the larger poem of the specific topical allusions that gather around Rinaldo and Argillano. The peculiar trick of these allusions is to portray the two rebels against Goffredo's authority literally as political subjects of the Church, inhabitants of papal domains. This does not necessarily reduce the universal political concerns of the epic to provincial squabbles in Central Italy, but rather transforms all members of the ideal Church imagined by the epic into similar subjects: this Church is conceived as much as a temporal political power as a spiritual institution, and indeed these two identities become confused and inseparable in the poem as they do in the Papal States. The resulting political picture turns Tasso's First Crusade into an emblem of the Church Militant, whose quest for souls is finally indistinguishable from the imperialist conquest of new territories and dependent subjects.

Notes

1. Fiordibello's text can be found in Jacobi Sadoleti, Opera quae extant omnia (Verona, 1758), 2:435.

2. Gerusalemme liberata, 1.1.7-8, in Tasso, Opere, ed. Bruno Maier (Milan, 1964).

3. There is an epic model for Tasso's episode in the mutiny of Julius Caesar's army in the fifth book of Lucan's Pharsalia (237-374). There are no direct verbal echos, but the scenario is the same: the general faces the rage of the mob, puts an end to rebellion merely by his undaunted words and countenance, and demands the execution of the ringleaders. We might be surprised that Tasso should model the pious Goffredo on Lucan's Caesar, who is the clear villain of the Pharsalia. Yet Goffredo plays this same Caesar elsewhere in the Liberata. His interview with Armida in canto 4 recalls the meeting of Caesar and Cleopatra in book 10 of the Pharsalia (80f.)—though Goffredo, unlike Caesar, proves impervious to feminine wiles and charms. His speech to the Crusader army before the climactic battle in canto 20 (14-19) is closely modelled on Caesar's speech to his troops in book 7 before the battle of Pharsalia, while the Egyptian Emireno's speech (25-27) imitates the corresponding speech of Lucan's Pompey (369-373). The identification of Goffredo with Caesar, Lucan's enemy of republican liberty, suggests just how authoritarian is the political thought of Tasso's poem: a celebration of an imperial papacy. It suggests a reading of the Pharsalia against the grain, but perhaps one that is no more odd than Tasso's revision of the Iliad: for Goffredo is also modelled upon Agamemnon, an Agamemnon who is in the right while Rinaldo's Achilles is in the wrong.

4. Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso (Turin and Rome, 1895), 1:30-31. Solerti, 45, also cites a 1566 letter of Muzio to the poet Francesco Bolognetti in which the former describes his long-entertained idea to write an epic about the First Crusade. For Muzio's career as an anti-Protestant propagandist, see Friedrich Lauchert, Die italienischen literarischen Gegner Luthers (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1912), 653-665.

5. On Matthaeus Iudex and his oration, see Johannes Janssen, History of the German People at the Close of the Middle Ages, trans. A. M. Christie (London, 1905), 8:92-95.

6. L'Heretico infuriato (Rome, 1562), proemio.

7. Andrew Fichter has remarked on Argillano as an enthusiast in the Protestant mold in his Poets Historical (New Haven and London, 1982), 147.

8. L'Heretico infuriato, chap. 20. For another example of the Babel-Babylon typology applied to German protestantism, see Robertus Bellarminus, Opera omnia, ed. J. Fevre (Paris, 1873), 9:533.

9. On Parisani, see Giuseppe Fabiani, Ascoli nel cinquecento (Ascoli Piceno, 1957), 1:299-300. Fabiani, 358, notes the possible connection between Tasso's Argillano and the civil strife endemic to sixteenth-century Ascoli, but he does not identify Argillano with Parisani. See also the study of sixteenth-century banditry in the papal states by Irene Polverini Fosi, La società violenta (Rome, 1985), 54-56. In addition to Parisani, Polverini Fosi, 56, mentions the 1571 plan of the captain Odoardo Odoardi to make a company of 500 or 600 “uomini pericolosi” from among the Ascolan bandits and exiles and to send them, in the wake of Lepanto, to fight for Venice against the Turks: here, too, there is a parallel to the crusading Argillano.

10. Tasso's discussion of the head-body metaphor in his prose allegory of the Liberata has been extensively analyzed by Michael Murrin in The Allegorical Epic (Chicago and London, 1980), 102-107. Murrin follows the poet and reads this figure of the body-politic in primarily moral terms. The reading that I am advancing here has been anticipated in Robert Durling's discussion of the Liberata in his essay, “The Epic Ideal,” in The Old World: Discovery and Rebirth, ed. David Daiches and Anthony Thorlby (London, 1974), 118-125.

11. Gaspar Contarenus, Opera (Paris, 1571), 580.

12. Calvin, Responsio ad Sadoleti Epistolam (1539), in Joannis Calvini Opera Selecta, ed. Peter Barth (Munich, 1926), 1:485-486.

13. Riccardo Bruscagli has argued that both of the major protagonists of canto 8, Argillano and more especially Sveno, are mirror-figures of Rinaldo. See his chapter, “Il campo cristiano nella Liberata,” in Stagioni nella civiltà estense (Pisa, 1983), 214-222. It might be added that Argillano and Sveno are themselves linked by the fact that both are killed in battle by Solimano.

14. On the theme of exile in the Liberata, see Sergio Zatti, L'uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano (Milan, 1981), 15. Argillano's exile from Ascoli can be added to Zatti's examples. See also Zatti's remarks on Argillano, 30-31.

15. The episode of “Ernando” in an early manuscript version of canto 5 is reprinted by Lanfranco Caretti at the back of his edition of the Gerusalemme liberata (Milan, 1979), 538-540. Caretti, 655, dates the manuscript to 1565-66.

16. Modena, Archivio di Stato (hereafter ASM), Archivio Segreto Estense, Casa e stato, busta 512.

17. Venceslao Santi gives an excellent account of the precedence controversy and of the propaganda war it generated in “La precedenza tra gli Escensi ed i Medici e l'Historia de' Principi d'Este di G. Battista Pigna,” Atti e memorie della R. Depusazione di Storia Patria Ferrarese 9 (1987): 37-122.

18. The passage is labelled in the margin: “12 Ag. 1570 lega.”

19. See Canigiani's letter to Cosimo of 12 December 1567: “quasi che ei sia poco atto a la generatione, della quale opinione io so che è anche intrinsecamente il Cardinale da Este, et qualche donna che io conosco: pur sarà quel che dio vorra.” Florence, Archivio di Stato (hereafter, ASF), Archivio Mediceo del Principato, f. 2890. See also the somewhat later report of the Venetian ambassador, Emilio Maria Manolesso, to the senate in 1575: “La commune opinione è che sia inabile a generate”; Relazioni degli ambasciatori veneti al senato ed. Arnaldo Segarizzi (Bari, 1912), 1:42. Alfonso's doctor in 1589 secretly informed the Medici of a congenital defect that rendered the duke sterile but of which Alfonso seems to have been himself unaware. See Alfonso Lazzari, “Il duca Alfonso II nelle note segrete del suo medico particolare,” in idem, Attraverso la storia di Ferrara: Profili e scorci (Rovigo, 1953), 349-351.

20. Santi, 81, n.t., corrected the assertion of Solerti, 1:179, that Alfonso's visit to Rome was aimed at regulating the line of succession in the duchy of Ferrara, but Solerti's contention, which goes back to Muratori, has been repeated by more recent writers, including Fabio Pittorru in his Torquato Tasso: L'uomo il poeta, il costegiasto (Milan, 1982), 96-99; Pittorru's lively and popular biography otherwise makes many acute and helpful observations about the poet. Alfonso may have been too vain to think that he could not produce an heir: in any event, his principal diplomatic concern in 1572-73 was the precedence controversy. In the diplomatic correspondence from Rome to Ferrara from 1567 to 1575—the period of the composition of the Liberata—the one reference I have found to the bull of Pius V is in a group of notes and memoranda sent by the ambassador, Giulio Masetti, on 18 July 1573: “Il S. Cardinal Bobba ha havuto la cura d'ordine di Nostro Signore di riformare e moderar la bolla di Pio V contra li bastardi”; ASM, Archivio Segreto Estense, Ambasciatori, Roma, busta 87, 387-II-41. Canigiani in a letter of 31 July 1570, reports rumors that Alfonso's brother, the Cardinal Luigi d'Este, was considering giving up his cardinalship in order to marry and produce an heir; ASF, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, f. 2892. For Alfonso's later maneuverings in the 1580s, see Luciano Chiappini, Gli estensi (Varese, 1967), 309-313.

21. Manolesso in Relazioni, 1:45.

22. ASF, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, f. 2891.

23. Ibid., f. 2892.

24. In the minutes of the letter sent from Ferrara to Francesco Martello on 22 July 1569 are included instructions on how to excuse the Este of responsibility for the events of 1527; this passage is labelled in the margin of the document as section 7. See the “Minuta della lettera di xxij di Luglio al Martello,” ASM, Archivio Segreto Estense, Casa e stato, busta 512.

25. Janssen, 8:85. Feelings against Rome in the imperial court ran high again in 1570, and Pius' deciding the precedence controversy in favor of Cosimo contributed to the emperor's ire; see ibid., 91.

26. “Minuta,” as cited in n. 24.

27. ASM, Archivio Segreto Estense, Casa e stato, busta 512.

28. This passage of the “Minuta” is labelled section 5.

29. “Servitij,” as cited in n. 27.

30. Cited by Santi, 104.

31. The oration has been reprinted, along with Guarini's preparatory drafts and a detailed description of the historical context, by Ermelinda Armigero Gazzera in Storia d'un ambasciata e d'un orazione di Battista Guarini (1572) (Modena, 1919).

32. One can compare the orations by the famous orator Marc Antoine Muret pledging the obedience of the French monarchy to the newly elected Pius IV, Pius V, and Gregory XIII: see M. Antonii Mureti Opera Omnia, ed. David Ruhnkenius (Leyden, 1789), 1:45-51, 107-117, and 173-179. The same Muret had been in the employ of the Este as well and wrote obedience orations on their behalf to Pius IV (1:95-99) and Pius V (1:100-107). I am indebted to Eric MacPhail for drawing my attention to these texts.

33. Gazzera, 39.

34. Ibid.

35. Ibid., 28-29. The Medici ambassador in Rome, Alessandro de' Medici, reported back to Cosimo that the pope was displeased and that he would allow the oration to be published only if the offending title of “Serenissimo” were removed: “che se gli concedera quando levano dell'oratione il titolo di Serenissimo, altrimenti no.” Letter of 23 January 1573, ASF, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, f. 3292.

36. Letter of 17 January 1573, ASF, Archivio Mediceo del Principato, f. 3292.

37. Ibid.

38. See Santi, 112-116, on Tasso's possible debt to Pigna's predecessor Girolamo Faletti, author of a Genealogia Marchionum Estensison et ducum Ferrariae.

39. Here one might consider Pittorru's suggestive attempts, 173-192, to reconstruct the causes of Tasso's imprisonment in 1579. He conjectures that Tasso may have accused his patrons of heresy during his frequent visits to the Ferrarese Inquisition in the later 1570s. The Este locked him up.

40. This pattern of simultaneous filial revolt and identification with the father is well studied by Margaret W. Ferguson in Trials of Desire (New Haven and London, 1983), 54-136, and by Zatti, esp. 107-114. Zatti describes Tasso's resentment and paranoid response to his powerless position at the Este court, and speaks of Tasso's resistance to the “leggetirannica del principe-padre” (113). Given this strategy of appealing to a higher authority or father over the law of the more immediate father, it is worth noting that Tasso's epic punishes Goffredo himself: he is wounded in canto 11 for fighting before Jerusalem in opposition to the plan of God, the “Padre eterno” (1.7). The importance of this central episode is studied by Fredi Chiappelli in Il conoscitore di caos (Rome, 1981).