I have preserved the most popular reading: but it seems that the old editions read Chiron instead of Charon, (and so too Panizzi). It was not the business of Charon, the ferryman of hell, to keep damned souls in the boiling deeps, but to transport such across them; whereas this is the office assigned by Dante to Chiron, with the centaurs, his companions, who in the seventh circle of hell, watch over lakes of boiling blood, in which are immersed sinners of the description of him in the text. See Dante’s Inferno, canto XII. ↩
“The fabulous history of these wars (Charlemagne’s) was probably written towards the close of the eleventh century, by a monk, who thinking it would add dignity to his work to embellish it with a contemporary name, boldly ascribed it to Turpin, who was archbishop of Rheims about the year 773. This is the book so frequently quoted by Ariosto.”
Ellis’s preface to Way’s Fabliaux.
Isabella, a lady eminent for her many virtues, daughter of Hercules, duke of Ferrara, sister of Alfonso and Ippolito, and wife of Francisco Gonzaga, lord of Mantua, the city situated on the Minclus “of Ocnus, mother hight,” to wit of Manto, the daughter of Tiresias, otherwise called Bianor, who, after the destruction of Thebes, is said to have fled to Italy, and established herself among the swamps of the Mincius, a place which she found favourable to the prosecution of the arts in which she had been initiated by her father. Here her son Ocnus is said, after his mother’s death, to have founded a small city which he called Mantua, in honour of her memory. Dante’s account of the wanderings and settlement of Manto, which, however, says nothing of Ocnus, and makes Manto a virgin, affords a good specimen of his powers of precise and picturesque local description.—See Inferno, canto XX l. 50, p. 101 of Cary’s translation, Bohn’s edition. ↩
Ariosto alludes to the victory gained by Gonzago, duke of Mantua, upon the river Taro, over Charles VII of France, and the expulsion of the French from the kingdom of Naples. ↩
I.e. I should embark on a more immeasurable sea than that traversed by the Argonauts: for Typhis was the pilot of the Argo. ↩
This was Beatrice, the wife of Ludovico Sforza, who lost his dukedom soon after her death; a circumstance which explains the remainder of the stanza. ↩
The Viscontis were lords of Milan, and the snake was the armorial bearing of the Viscontis and Milanese. ↩
From India to the straits of Gibraltar. ↩
That is to say, shall bear the same name of Beatrice. The one who was to wreathe her hair with Pannonia’s crown was Beatrice, daughter of Ferdinand, king of Naples, sister of Leonora, duchess of Ferrara, and wife of Mathias Corvinus, king of Hungary, i.e. Pannonia. The other lady alluded to was Beatrice d’Este, canonized at Rome. ↩
Richarda, wife of Nicholas d’Este, found herself in the situation ascribed to her in the text. Her son Hercules, dispossessed of his lordship by Lionello and Borso, was obliged to go into exile, and take refuge with Alphonso of Arragon, but in the end fully recovered his inheritance. ↩
The Hercules mentioned in the preceding note, took to wife Leonora, daughter of Ferdinand, king of Arragon, with whom he had taken refuge, which Leonora brought him the Alphonso, Ippolito, and Isabella, celebrated by the poet. ↩
Lucretia Borgia was a daughter of Pope Alexander VI, who was three times married, and took for her third husband Alphonso, duke of Ferrara. ↩
Renata was daughter of Louis XII of France, and Anne of Bretagne, and daughter-in-law of Lucretia Borgia, since she was married to Hercules the Second, her son, who was lord of Ferrara after the death of his father. ↩
Ada was the daughter of Otho, whom we read of as given in wedlock to Albertazo in the third canto, in which the other ladies mentioned in this stanza are also commemorated. ↩
Alphonso d’Este, duke of Ferrara; to whom the poet attributes the victory and subsequent capture of Ravenna, held for the pope by Fabrizio Colonna, the struggle being between French and Italians under this leader, and Spaniards and Italians under the command of Gaston de Foix; for, the French troops having given way, Alphonso coming up with a band of gentlemen, again turned the fortunes of the field. ↩
The insignia of knighthood conferred by Alphonso upon many of his young followers on the field of battle. “To win his spurs” was almost a proverbial expression; how applied to the Black Prince by our Edward III every one will remember. ↩
The golden oak was the bearing of Pope Julius II, who lost Ravenna; and the red and yellow truncheon, we are told, is to be considered as the symbol of Spain. Fabrizio Colonna surrendered to Alphonso on condition he should not be delivered up to his enemies the French; Alphonso resisted their solicitations to consign him to them, and afterwards set him free and restored him to the pope. ↩
In the original,
La gran colonna del nome Romano
Che voi prendeste e che serbaste intera,
a play upon the name of Fabrizio Colonna, which is necessarily sacrificed in an English translation. ↩
Of Gaston de Foix, the French general, who perished in the field.
