No country for girly girls: the woes of Erminia.

We shall now leave Rinaldo to his as yet unknown fate, and turn to another young (and purely fictional) character in the story. Erminia is a young and beautiful girl, a blonde and on the Muslim camp – all three major female characters are, an intriguing fact which will be discussed later – who is a guest of King Aladdin.

Erminia joins him, at his invitation, / Erminia fair, who to his court did fly, / by Christian armies ousted from her reign / of Antioch, the king her father slain. (3.12)

Erminia, by Sebastien Leclerc. © The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014.

From above the walls of Jerusalem, Aladdin is watching a battle raging between his own men, led by Clorinda, and the Christians led by a most gallant and fierce knight. In a scene reminiscent of Homer’s Iliad (Helen formerly of Sparta and now of Troy does the same, pointing out various Greek heroes to the Trojans), Aladdin asks Erminia who that man is; she knows the names of all the main Christian knights from the siege of her own city,  This is her answer:

He is Prince Tancred. Would that he were mine / one day, my captive – and not dead, for I / want him alive that I may wreak a fine / vengeance on him and slake my rage thereby.

She is only telling half the truth, and her words are at best ambivalent, for she is really deeply in love with Tancred, who treated her with courtesy, and honoured her like a queen after Antioch fell to the Christian’s siege. In the end, he granted her her freedom plus all her personal jewellery and treasures. How could she not love him? But Tancred is in love with Clorinda. And Clorinda is a good friend of Erminia’s. And Erminia knows nothing of this love – and to be fair, neither does Clorinda, at first.

In Canto Six, Tancred is to fight in single combat with the major Muslim warrior, Argant. The two warriors are equally fierce and strong, and the event cannot be concluded in just one day. Argant is injured, but not seriously, and so is Tancred. Erminia wishes to go to Tancred and heal him with her arts; because, of course, she is a little bit of a witch, too:

 And since she by her mother had been taught / the secret virtues in all growing things, / and all that might through magic spells be wrought / to close a wound and soothe the pangs it brings / (lore which the custom of that country thought / fit for the noble daughters of its kings) …. / She yearns to nurse her lover, and to choose / some condign(1) way to serve his enemy / perhaps with noisome herb or cursed juice / to sprinkle him and poison him thereby. (6.67-8)

Erminia is reluctant to use such dark arts, although she yearns to heal Tancred. She debates the question of whether she should go to him for a while, but finally vain hopes and foolish daydreams of becoming his wife lead her to make a big decision: she will abandon Jerusalem and try to sneak into the Christian camp and inside Tancred’s tent. But how will she leave the city, whose gates are so scrupulously locked and guarded?

Erminia is not brave: she is the opposite of Clorinda, in many ways. A girly girl, she has only got time for love and for spending time with her dear friend, to whom she confides all her secrets  – they often share the same bed and keep chatting till the morning, as girl friends will do –  except the one that concerns Tancred. Erminia has free access to Clorinda’s room and things, and decides to dress up in her martial friend’s suit of mail, and thus disguised leave the city. At that moment, Erminia realises that perhaps it is better to be a warrior maiden than a cosseted princess:

How I envy her lot – not for her glory’s glow / nor for her beauty (womanish vanity), / but that no long gown clogs her steps / and no envious bower cramps her heart, / for she girds on her arms when exploits are her aim, / and rides out unrestrained by fear or shame. (6.82)

Eventually she squeezes herself into Clorinda’s armour and, feeling extremely uncomfortable and slightly ridiculous, for she soon realises that ‘the habit does not the priest make,’ she leaves the security of the city walls for the hostile world outside.

Erminia in Clorinda’s clothes flees Jerusalem, by Giambatista Piazzetta. Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

Her plan goes all awry: not only cannot she walk – much less swagger like a true warrior maiden – in the hot and heavy armour, but she is mistaken for Clorinda by a Christian knight whose whole family had been exterminated by her only that morning! Her maid and squire, who had been accompanying her all along, as befits a girl of noble family, flee, and her horse carries her to a nearby ancient forest, where she is lost and wanders all alone, crying and calling for help, but alas, to no avail…

In the end, after a night and a day wandering, scared and lonely and desperate, she comes across an idyllic scene: a family of poor but happy fishermen and shepherds, braiding baskets and playing the woodland whistles and singing. They take her in for a while, offering hospitality and friendship, and in a turn very common to romance, Erminia the princess is transformed for a while into a shepherdess.

The pastoral idyll, a very ancient tradition in romance (‘Dafnis and Chloe’ is the archetype for this genre, written in the 2nd century) was having a comeback in the late Renaissance, and Tasso himself wrote one of the most famous pastorals of all time, Aminta. Why did he choose to insert this sort of adventure in the midst of all the drama of war? Perhaps as a respite, or to gently remind the readers of his other work. The story of Erminia is not finished here though: more is in store for her as the affairs of Christians and ‘pagans’ take a more dramatic turn soon.

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(1) condign: fitting and deserved, esp. as punishment or retribution.

From Fact to Fiction

Historical fiction is generally based on historical facts, and the author will certainly have delved into sources, usually chronicles, history books, or studies about the time and the events of her or his temporal setting. I’ve mentioned before that Torquato Tasso’s source on the First Crusade was William of Tyre. This is an episode in Book One of William’s chronicle:

There was a certain infidel living in the city [Jerusalem], a treacherous and wicked man, who persecuted our people with insatiable hatred. This man was determined to devise some scheme that would bring about their destruction. One day, he stealthily threw the carcass of a dog into the temple court, a place which the custodian – and indeed the whole city as well – were most careful to keep scrupulously clean. Worshippers who came to the temple to pray the next morning found the mouldering body of the unclean animal. Almost frantic, they at once roused the whole city with their cries. The populace quickly ran to the temple, and all agreed that without question the Christians were responsible for the act. Need more be said? Death was decreed for all Christians, since it was judged that by death alone could they atone for such an act of sacrilege. The faithful, in full assurance of their innocence, prepared to suffer death for Christ’s sake. As their executioners, with swords unscathed, were about to carry out their orders, however, a young man, filled with the spirit, came forward and offered himself as the sacrifice. (William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, transl. and annotated by Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey, New York: Columbia University Press, 1943, vol. 1, p. 68)

William Hunter owned an Italian translation of William of Tyre’s chronicle. Interestingly, the translator Giuseppe Horologgi dedicates his translation to the then Duke of Lorraine, descendant of Godfrey. These pages contain the episode which inspired Canto Two in Tasso’s epic. Sp Coll Hunterian l.6.17, Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

There follows an exchange between the unnamed young man and the Christian community: he explains that it is better for a man to die than a whole people, and the Christians promise to offer his family the honour of “carrying the olive which signifies our Lord Jesus Christ” in solemn procession of Palm Sunday. William of Tyre concludes this episode thus:

“The young man then gave himself up to the chief men of Jerusalem and declared that he was the criminal. In this way he established the innocence of the other Christians, for, when the judges heard his story, they absolved the rest and put him to the sword. Thus he laid down his life for the brethren and, with pious resignation, met death, that most blessed sleep, confident that he had acquired grace in the sight of the Lord. (ibid., p.69)

This narrative is clearly the basis of the story in Canto Two. It is equally obvious that Torquato Tasso, inspired by this historical episode, took many liberties with it. He embellishes the truth, as he declared he would do in his introduction. He elaborates on causality and agents: the sacrilege is devised, planned and perpetrated by evil sorcerer Ismen (the ‘certain infidel’, ‘treacherous and wicked man’ of William of Tyre’s historical narrative) and wicked king Aladdin (another fictional creation) in order to exterminate the Christians of Jerusalem. He changes the object of sacrilege from a foul, rotting dog-carcass to an elevated, holy statue of the Virgin, thus providing another connection with classical epic[2]. He changes the martyr figure from a young man to the much more pathetic and attractive one of a young, beautiful virgin – but he keeps the young man character as a lover, inserting the element of romance into a typical narrative motif of Christian sacrifice. He changes the execution plan from a beheading to a burning (perhaps because his sixteenth century audience would be more familiar with it?) And he provides a happy ending to the episode, with the intervention of the fictional character of Clorinda, thus introducing one of the main characters of his epic into the story.

A historical fiction writer of today moves along those lines, more or less, in dealing with facts and transforming them into fiction. Nothing is lost, everything is put to good use for the narrative purposes, and history is transformed into something much more intriguing and satisfying.

 

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[1] William of Tyre, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, Volume One, translated and annotated by Emily Atwater Babcock and A.C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 68-9.

[2] The statue of a holy figure is a motif borrowed from classical epic: in the siege of Troy, Odysseus and Diomedes enter the city by stealth to recover the powerful wooden statue of Pallas Athene, which would guarantee protection to its owners. See Torquato Tasso, The Liberation of Jerusalem (Gerusalemme Liberata), translated by Max Wickert, with an Introduction and Notes by Mark Davie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 407.

 

Fair and Brave Maidens, Part Two

Previously on The Liberation of Jerusalem: The armies of Christendom have been gathered at Tortosa (Tarsus in ancient Syria) to conquer and liberate the Holy Land from the Muslims. God appoints Godfrey of Bouillon as their leader; under his guidance they shall conquer Jerusalem. King Aladdin of Jerusalem has hatched a plot to kill all Christians in the city by blaming them for stealing a statue of the Virgin Mary and placing in in his mosque. The beautiful and pious virgin Sophronia confesses (falsely) to the sacrilegious act, so she is led to the execution place when…

Olindo, the man desperately in love with Sophronia, hurtles himself through the crowd and shouts: “Not she, my  lord, stole it, but I.” He begs to take Sophronia’s place in the fire and die instead of her. King Aladdin, “incensed with rage and shame,” (for he knows very well they are both innocent, as he committed the sacrilege himself following the advice of evil sorcerer Ismen) orders that they both die.  The crowd, “heathens” and “faithful” alike, are shedding tears for the hapless youths about to be consumed by fire.

Sophronia and Olindo are about to be executed, when warrior-maiden Clorinda intervenes. By Sebastien Leclerc (1637-17140© The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014

But this is not the end:

While peril thus engulfs, them, see! A knight

(for such he seemed) appears, noble in guise,

towering in shape, so armed and strangely dight [=clothed, equipped]

that clearly from a distant land he hies.

Atop his crest, a tigress burnished bright

attracts the eyes of all, famous device,

device known as Clorinda’s badge of war.

This is no knight, but the fair and brave warrior-maiden Clorinda or Persia, who “all womanly / observances and skill she has desprized / since her unripest years.” Think of Clorinda as a combination of brave and honourable Brienne of Tarth, proud and fierce Arya Stark, and beautiful, wise, and clement Danaerys Targaryen. Clorinda is one of the very few women in this epic, and she is the best of them all. In Canto One, it has been mentioned that one of the Christian leaders, Tancred, is madly in love with her.

Clorinda is moved by the plight of the two young innocents; by just one good look at them she knows they can’t be guilty. It was surely the work of supernatural forces, she says. (She has also heard the stories about necromancer Ismen’s role in the affair). She offers her services to King Aladdin in exchange for their lives. The king is glad to oblige: Clorinda’s fame is great, and he makes her the commander of his whole garrison.

Now that your sword is joined to mine, I stand

consoled for troubles and afraid of none.

If a vast army joined me now, my hope

of victory would have no surer scope. (Canto Two, st.47)

Need we say more? Sophronia and Olindo are freed, and now finally Sophronia relents and accepts to marry Olindo, after all. A happy ending for this episode, but the troubles and tribulation of the population have only just begun.