The invasion of 1494 by the French king Charles VIII, the first incursion by a foreign European power into Italy for many generations, was seen by many writers including Boiardo and the historian Guicciardini as a disaster. Boiardo broke off his Innamorato, claiming to be unable to continue with a narrative about French heroes while French troops conducted bloody warfare on Italian soil; Guicciardini considered it the beginning of ‘le calamità d’Italia’ [the calamitous woes of Italy]. The campaign of Charles VIII came to an end in 1495 with the disputed victory at Fornovo, but the political aspirations it unleashed remained alive. His successor, Louis XII, launched a new invasion in 1499, leading to the overthrow of the Sforza in Milan and a series of bloody battles and sieges at Alessandria and Novara. Louis’ campaigns culminated in the battle of Ravenna in 1512 which marked another Pyrrhic victory, this time for the French and their allies. Warfare between invading French, Spanish and Imperial troops would continue thereafter until well after the death of Ariosto in 1533. The wars of Italy, and in particular the involvement of the French as instigators, posed an unavoidable, almost insuperable challenge for the Carolingian narrative tradition. How to celebrate Charlemagne as Emperor of France and the French paladins as the great knightly heroes of that literary tradition when for the contemporary public the French king and his armies constituted only terrifying and hostile forces, whose behaviour was neither courteous nor heroic. In addition, some of the Italian states were close and constant allies of the French, others were consistently hostile or victims of their aggression, and yet others changed allegiance according to perceived interests or the military contract of the ruler. These differing perspectives and the changing political emphases can be traced in various ways in the poems written between 1494 and 1516, and are most especially evident in the characterisation of Charlemagne himself, the extent to which war constitutes the main narrative thread, and in how warfare is described in the poems. Charlemagne: an ambivalent figure

By long tradition, as previous chapters have noted, Charlemagne constituted the central figure of the epic narrative tradition named for him. Character¬ised as both King and Emperor of France (re di Francia), sometimes as Holy Roman Emperor (imperator romano), he is portrayed as the supreme ruler, the political and strategic heart of Christendom.