V

Bradamante is only a parody of weakness, yet her initial acquiescence to the custom of the castle casts her into an inferior role. She feels the legacy of the past that weighs on the present. She bears the burden of

social order, absorbing Ullania's threat and recasting it in terms of an individual who confronts the strange custom of the Tower of Tristan. As a result, the Tower of Tristan is more than the product of a jealous husband for one whom Gardner called the king of court poets. In Latin institutum means practice, custom, usage, habit. In the Renaissance the word was common in the titles of educational treatises. Bradamante's struggle against custom, in the symbolic context of Tristan's tower, becomes one of individual power against institutions great and small—the court, bureaucracy, but also the church, the state, and even the foreign power of France.

Having defended Ullania, Bradamante views a series of political paintings that picture the foreign invasions of Italy, which climaxed in the 1527 sack of Rome. These panels elevate a sympathetic or ironic moment in the battle of the sexes into a more general image of the way past injustice threatens to replay itself in the future. "The ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong," writes Michel de Certeau, "lend a political dimension to everyday practices."^[43] For the castle's founder Clodione is also the ancestor of those French invaders who threaten Italy in the illuminated panels that decorate the Tower of Tristan. His father Fieramont is said to be the first French king to conceive of invading Italy (OF 33.8).

As the keeper of the Tower of Tristan guides Bradamante and her companions through future history, Ariosto makes his point perhaps too boldly: there will be no permanent French conquest of Italy, he says, because France has no roots in Italian soil ("che non lice / che 'l Giglio in quel terreno abbia radice," OF 33.10). Only those outsiders like Pipin and Charlemagne who come to assist Italy, not to invade her, will find joy ("lieto successo") because they come not to offend ("che venuto non v'è perché l'offenda," OF 33.16). The same ambiguity that adheres to one who was disgraced by his jealous passion—while following a code of honor in combat—attaches to the French nation. The panels cast the French as the potential saviors of Italy, yet their invasions bring ruin.

The panels are at once sanguine and shrill because Ariosto was writing in the twilight of Italian liberty when he added the Tower of Tristan episode to the Furioso . From our historical distance—and we did not witness the effect in 1512 of Alfonso d'Este's cannon at Ravenna (OF 14.2)—the 1527 sack of Rome is the most important international event of the period between the second and third editions of Ariosto's poem. Ariosto added a condemnation of Rome's disaster to his final edition (OF 33.55), but from another perspective, the passage is merely one more panel in a castle known for its odd French custom, another lament for the harpies of war (OF 34.1), another scene of looting. The view from Ferrara was ambiguous. There, general principles did not deter local opportunism. Duke Alfonso assisted the foreign armies descending on Rome by constructing a pontoon bridge of boats.^[44] Ferrante Gonzaga led the Italian troops. His mother, Isabella d'Este, who had once followed the progress of the Furioso with a passion, was in Rome at the time, staying in the Palazzo Colonna. She was shipping loot during the worst excesses of the occupation.^[45]

Rome was culturally vulnerable long before Count Charles de Bourbon made his ruinous entry during June of 1527, leading Lutheran mercenaries sharked together by Charles V and accompanied by Spanish tercieros and contingents of disaffected Italians. The disorder of the church, the violence of local squabbles, the verbal abuse within her walls made Rome a place to avoid for men of such different temperament as Luther, who stayed briefly in 1508, and Erasmus, who lambasted the pomp and vitriol of Roman customs in his Ciceronianus (1528, recalling his sojourn of 1506). During the sack of Rome, the ministers of Charles V interpreted the city's misfortune as divine punishment for her corruption. The task of rebutting them fell to the beleaguered Clement VII's papal nuncio to Spain, Baldassare Castiglione. As he stood before the emperor at Valladolid, Castiglione had already invented his lost Italy, the land of learning and civility that would be the pattern of aristocratic chivalry for the world's imagination, a shield against the ruins of time.

He argued that no matter how unworthy her society, Rome's institutions, symbols, and tradition were too sacred to be abused.^[46] But the profiler of the elegant and eloquent courtier failed in his purpose. He could not dissuade Charles V from permitting the march on Rome.

Francesco Guicciardini's History of Italy provides another compelling gloss on the way Italy's political vulnerability forced Italians during Ariosto's last years to recognize the mutability of social mores. For Guicciardini, the disaster of Rome left everything open to question. His re-visionary history asserts that when, a generation earlier, Charles VIII descended to claim the kingdom of Naples, he taught Italy a lesson that Guicciardini's prose spells out: foreign invasions produce permanent disorder because they introduce new fashions and customs.

Charles entered Asti on the ninth day of September of the year 1494, bringing with him into Italy the seeds of innumerable calamities, of most horrible events and changes in almost the entire state of affairs. For his passage into Italy not only gave rise to changes of dominions, subversion of kingdoms, desolation of countries, destruction of cities and the cruelest of massacres, but also new fashions, new customs, new and bloody ways of waging warfare, and diseases which had been unknown up to that time . Furthermore, his incursion introduced so much disorder into Italian ways of governing and maintaining harmony, that we have never been able to re-establish order , thus opening the possibility to other foreign nations and barbarous armies to trample upon our institutions and miserably oppress us.^[47]

The narrator of Guicciardini's History no longer accepts his society as a given, but recognizes that it is composed of institutions and customs. Rocked by history, he looks at his own land and he sees the Other. Whatever is, is wrong. Things were different in the golden age, the era before 1494. The History makes those years seem impossibly distant.

The poet, like the historian, struggled against modernity. But Ariosto's relationship to the glorified past was different from Guicciardini's—and not only because he wrote chivalric fiction. He perceived

the past as he did any source of constraint. When Bradamante confronts a wicked custom, she is, like the world-weary Ariosto, hardly surprised that such behavior should exist. The complicated custom Bradamante must manipulate fits the image of political intrigue, and the historical context of Ariosto's late additions suggests that what upended the tradition of chivalry—the culture's term for all good custom—was a crisis in the management of the state brought about by the daily threat to the geopolitical integrity of Italy. The culture was under pressure as well. Renee of France, the woman who had married the duke's heir Ercole and would become duchess of Ferrara a year after Ariosto's death, refused to learn Italian or give up her French ways. Her Protestant sympathies would soon be manifest. Before he died, Alfonso d'Este had already noted her inability to adapt to the customs of the country.^[48]