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publics. According to Daniel Eisenberg, “the romances of chivalry are clearly the most expensive Spanish literary works” in the well-supplied library of Renaissance collector Hernando Colón in the first decades of the sixteenth century.²³

      The tales of Italian romanzo and Spanish books of chivalry became ingrained in the literary culture of these elites to the point that the two heroic traditions seem to have merged into one at some point—as they were one century later in the mind of Alonso Quijano.²⁴ The materiality of Italian chivalric poems and that of Spanish prose romance usually shows that both genres were meant to compete for the same readers. And a quick look at the transnational circulation of these books confirms that the two literary traditions were closer than we usually think. The first French translation of Orlando furioso, published in Lyon in 1543, is explicitly said to compete in the market with the French translation of Amadís.²⁵ In the same year, Bernardo Tasso, Torquato’s father, decided to translate the Spanish best seller Amadís de Gaula in Italian verse at the request of Ávila y Zúñiga and Francisco de Toledo—a member of the Alba family and the future viceroy of Peru.²⁶ Just as Bernardo translated the prose of Amadís in Ariosto’s ottava rima, the Spanish Vázquez de Contreras, years later, converted the stanzas of Orlando furioso into Spanish chivalric prose.²⁷ In the cultural world of the two peninsular aristocratic and military elites there existed a tight connection between Italian romanzo and Spanish chivalric fiction.

      The story of the first Spanish translation of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso confirms that the highest layers of European aristocracy were involved in the promotion and patronage of these genres. In 1549, Prince Philip of Spain arrived in Antwerp, accompanied by most of the Spanish nobility and a few Italian potentates, after a glorious journey—or felicíssimo viaje, as it was referred to in Spanish—throughout the European territories of the Habsburg composite monarchy. The voyage from Barcelona to Genoa, from Milan to Trento, from Augsburg to Brussels, was intended to introduce Prince Philip to the vassals and allies of the Austrian house in Europe in order to secure the loyalty of the social and political elites of those territories. When it arrived in the Habsburg Netherlands, Prince Philip’s itinerant court joined the retinue of his father, Charles V, in an atmosphere of political euphoria after the emperor’s triumph in Mühlberg and the recent death of Francis I of France in 1547. Just two weeks before Philip’s select entourage of the felicíssimo viaje entered Antwerp on September 11, 1549, the prosperous local printer Martinus Nutius, active in the city from 1540 to 1558, had published Orlando furioso traduzido en Romance Castellano, which would become one of the most frequently and successfully reprinted Spanish books of the sixteenth century. A member of a dispossessed hidalgo family from Navarre, the translator, Jerónimo Jiménez de Urrea, pursued a lifelong military career, mostly in Italy and Germany, which earned him the post of infantry captain and eventually a habit of the Order of Santiago. After the victory at Mühlberg and in the days of the felicíssimo viaje, his military service must have granted him some kind of access to the courtly circles of Emperor Charles and Prince Philip, since it seems that Urrea personally offered the latter a copy of his Furioso traduzido.²⁸ The book must have aroused much enjoyment from the courtly and aristocratic circles of the prince’s entourage. “Dear reader,” says the printer in one of the preliminary texts, “the main cause that has moved us to print the Orlando furioso in Castilian has been … the dearness and want of these books in the present kingdoms; to this we should add the requests of our friends and noble gentlemen from Spain and other nations, which we decided to heed first because they were fair, and also because they have helped us with the correction of the book” (Amigo letor, la principal causa que nos ha movido a imprimir el Orlando furioso en Romance Castellano ha sido … la carestía y falta que hay destos libros en estos reinos. Hase allegado a esto las rogarías de nuestros amigos y señores españoles y otras naciones las cuales hemos querido obedecer por parecernos justas, como por la ayuda que nos han dado en la correción del libro).²⁹

      The immediate market for Urrea’s Orlando traduzido is indeed the cream of the European high nobility, which gathered around Prince Philip in his continental tour of 1549, in the context of one of the most magnificent chivalric celebrations of Renaissance Europe in Mary of Hungary’s palace at Binche, in the Southern Netherlands. The courtly festivals that took place there in the summer and fall of that year were informed by the literary tales of Amadís and Orlando.³⁰ A jamboree of banquets, theatrical performances, dances, and, above all, elaborate jousts and “adventures” was designed in order to entertain those who still liked to think of themselves as belonging to the warrior class. In a world made of damsels, islands, enchantments, giants, and flamboyantly named knights, a cohort of grandees and titled aristocrats reproduced in the rituals of the court society the literary models provided by romance fiction, whether in verse or in prose. Romance fiction was actively used, collectively, in the elaboration of a transnational courtly sociability. Individually, reading or hearing chivalric tales was part of the “aristocratic bildung” of many noble houses and courts.³¹

      Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier has always been invoked in discussions of aristocratic education and noble sociability. From the very beginning in Castiglione’s handbook, Count Lodovico di Canossa asserts that “the principal and true profession of the Courtier must be that of arms.”³² These arms, however, have little to do with the dramatic transformations of warfare that were taking place just outside the walls of the Duke of Urbino’s palace and other such Renaissance courts. When Castiglione writes that the courtier, “born of a noble and genteel family,” should “know how to handle every kind of weapon, both on foot and on horse” but “be especially acquainted with those arms that are ordinarily used among gentlemen,” he is referring to the different modalities of courtly tournament and joust, as well as the aristocratic practice of duel. The courtier’s fighting skills have nothing to do with the real practice of warfare but with the ritualized sociability of courtly chivalry. Castiglione’s courtier, rather than a perfect soldier, must be “a perfect horseman in every kind of saddle,” an accomplished jouster, a virtuoso of stick throwing, bullfighting, juegos de cañas, hunting, and ball game.³³

      It has rarely been noted that the social model of the courtier, as far as arms are concerned, is precisely built against that of the soldier.³⁴ “We do not wish him,” said Count Lodovico, “to make a show of being so fierce that he is forever swaggering in his speech, declaring that he has wedded his cuirass, and glowering with such dour looks.”³⁵ And indeed what follows this passage is a courtier’s joke about a coarse soldier who, not being conversant with the codes of the palace’s sociability, arrogantly rejects a lady’s offer to dance.³⁶ Castiglione, moreover, despises even what constitutes the very definition of modern soldiering, that is, serving in war in exchange for a salary. “The true stimulus to great and daring deeds in war,” he says, “is glory, and whosoever is moved thereto for gain or any other motive, apart from the fact that he never does anything good, deserves to be called not a gentleman, but a base merchant.”³⁷ As opposed to the knight’s, a soldier’s identity is inextricably linked to money; it is constituted by it from the very etymology of the word soldado.³⁸ The opposition between the professional soldier and the amateur knight could not be stated more clearly. The court and the battlefield will generate not only two different patterns of social behavior but also two distinct, and many times opposed, literary cultures.

      Renaissance courtly sociability has indeed been described as a “shelter against the universal calamity of the Wars of Italy … a space aristocratically separated from the real world.”³⁹ Romance’s representations of combat were utterly anachronistic to actual fighting men, fit to be reproduced in the palace by a group of high-born jousters but far from the realities of Italy’s battlefields. Of course, the ritual mimicking of war in courtly practice remained an enjoyable theatrical recreation for the knights of the palace and played an important role in court society; but it could no longer be justified as a mirror, let alone training, for actual military practice. “The cult of the emblazoned individual heavy cavalryman” and the “glamorized choreography” of the celebrations at Binche and elsewhere were at odds with the newly massive, plebeian, and quite bloody character of Renaissance warfare.⁴⁰

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