The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic by Andrea Moudarres;

Author:Andrea Moudarres;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Sparing Altamoro and the Limits of Warfare

After Rinaldo and Armida leave the stage for an undisclosed location, Tasso returns to the battle for Jerusalem by describing Goffredo’s slaying of Emireno, the commander of the Egyptian Army (GL 20.137–39). The last recognizable Muslim chief still on the battlefield is thus Altamoro, whom Tasso presents to the reader covered in blood, with his weapons irremediably damaged, and surrounded by scores of Crusaders (20.140). It is at this point that Goffredo orders his soldiers to spare Altamoro: “Grida egli a’ suoi: ‘Cessate; e tu, barone, / renditi, io son Goffredo, a me prigione’” [“He shouts to his troops: ‘Give over; and you, baron, yield yourself my prisoner; I am Godfrey’”] (ibid).93 Walter Stephens has shown the multilayered intertextual significance of Tasso’s decision—here, in allowing Goffredo to spare Altamoro—to break from the ending of Classical epics such as the Iliad and the Aeneid: unlike its predecessors, the Liberata emphasizes conjugal love over filial piety. I would add to Stephens’s discussion that Altamoro’s survival, much like Tasso’s ambiguous conclusion to the Erminia and Armida episodes, further undermines the argument that Tasso’s epic flatly affirms the ideology of a Catholic, universal, empire. More plausibly, Tasso allows Altamoro to return to Persia because (as noted earlier in this chapter) the Persian-centered Safavid Empire had throughout the sixteenth century been a thorn in the eastern flank of the Ottoman Empire, the most imminent and formidable Islamic threat to Christendom.94 It is true, then, that Tasso depicted a conflict between two enemies with universalist ambitions. But he did not write that conflict advancing a totalitarian Eurocentric world order. Such an outcome would have also been historically incongruous, since Saladin, the Sultan of Egypt, reconquered Jerusalem in 1187, less than a century after the First Crusade. Thus, rather than resolving its geopolitical enmities in a unified global monarchy, the Liberata hints at the tense coexistence of different religions, and multiple political actors, in the world arena.

Even before Altamoro replies to Goffredo’s exhortation to surrender, Tasso inserts lines that suggest a geographical limit to the Christian commander’s fame and, perhaps, undercut his authority: “ora ch’ode [Altamoro] quel nome, onde si spande / sì chiaro il suon da gli Etiòpi a l’Orse” [“now that he hears that name, the sound of which spreads itself so clear from the Ethiopes to the Bears”] (GL 20.141). First, the geographical and astronomical coordinates Tasso uses here draw a north-south line from Ethiopia to the North Pole (“l’Orse” are the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Minor, which point to the polar star). This is undoubtedly a vast territory, encompassing Europe, Ethiopia, Anatolia, and the Mediterranean Sea. But it is also a territory that largely coincides with the historical boundaries of Christendom during the Byzantine Empire, before the rise of Islam. Here, then, Tasso appears to be implementing the above-cited theoretical point he made in the Giudicio sopra la Conquistata, where he wrote that “il poeta, a guisa di geografo, gli figura quasi la forma dell’imperio e i confini delle provincie soggiogate da gl’infedeli.

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