Rinaldo conquista l’Oriente: figure antiche e storia contemporanea nella Trabisonda (1483)

The article proposes a reading of the chivalric poem entitled Trabisonda (printed in Bologna in 1483) against the background of the relations between the Italian peninsula (and Europe) and the East in the second half of the fifteenth century. In the context of the Turkish offensive against the West since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the propaganda content in the Trabisonda exploits Carolingian chivalric matter. The poem evaluates the political situation and strategies of the West against the enemies (within the work, the pagans). It echoes the anti-Turkish propaganda in favour of a crusade. Once the Ancient Christian empire fell in the hands of the Turks, Trabisonda (or Trebisonda) is given back to the Christians (at least in the fiction of the poem), the restitution having been obtained despite the pusillanimous and personalistic management of the power attributed to Charlemagne. Trabisonda represents the possibility of defeating the enemy pointing straight at the heart of his empire, and of recovering all those commercial and then military outposts that the Christians had lost from the fall of Constantinople onwards.