Buoni e cattivi: Agnadello nelle guerre in ottava rima

Abstract

Charles VIII’s Italian campaign marked the beginning of the Italian Wars that ravaged the Italian peninsula. The dramatic events unfolding in the political arena exerted a profound influence on narrative poetry, with the guerre in ottava rima – poems about contemporary wars – becoming increasingly popular. How are figures of power represented in these texts? We know that traditional chivalric literature tends towards a ‘weak’ representation of the prince (e.g. the emperor Charlemagne), while the real heroes are the condottieri (the paladins). The aim of this chapter is to examine how this conventional representation of kings and warriors is adapted and modified in the guerre in ottava rima cycle by looking at texts that recount a particularly important and traumatic event: the battle of Agnadello (1509). Considering a wide selection of poems, anonymous and otherwise, written in the aftermath of the battle or many years after, pro-French and pro-Venetian, this chapter investigates their close relationship with chivalric literature: so close that, through a narration rich in codified and legendary elements, the battle of Agnadello gradually becomes a sort of ‘double’ of the battle of Roncesvalles. The protagonists of these poems constitute very interesting models of the prince and the commander: the ‘cristianissimo’ King Louis XII, a fine strategist, and the Venetian commander Bartolomeo d’Alviano, ‘feroce d’ingegno’, valiant but overly impetuous, the central figure in all the account