Paladins and Captains: Chivalric Clichés and Political Persuasion in Early Modern Italian War Poems

Between the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, the wars that plagued the Italian peninsula were narrated to city audiences by many singers of tales who performed their poems in the piazzas and sold them in print. Their texts were very successful and were capable of influencing – and even of creating – public opinion. Their success was due partly to the increased eagerness for news in that dangerous period, and partly to the enjoyable nature of the poems, which usually took the form of the romances of chivalry. Many authors, indeed, composed texts both on legendary medieval wars and on real contemporary ones. Like the former poems, which narrated the battles of the Christians against the Pagans, the latter often openly sided with one of the powers in conflict. They were not meant simply to inform the audience, but also to persuade it, encouraging its identification with the good ‘us’ against the evil ‘them’, thus carrying out a crucial propagandistic function. These poems deployed all the linguistic, stylistic, and structural features developed by the epic tradition of the singers of chivalric tales, to the point that they can share identical formulae and themes. This chapter investigates the relationship between history and literature, chronicle and novel, information and fiction, news-reporting and story-telling in these war poems.