The Knight Who Went Mad for Love: Orlando Furioso

In 1516, in the northern Italian court of Ferrara, a poet named Ludovico Ariosto published a work that would outlast empires. He had begun writing it around 1506, when he was thirty-two, and it took him decades to perfect. The first edition, in forty cantos, appeared in April 1516; a second, lightly revised version came in 1521. But it was the third and final edition of 1532, containing forty-six cantos, polished with the stylistic advice of the humanist Pietro Bembo, that would become the version known to history. In total, the poem stretches to 38,736 lines, written in ottava rima—eight-line stanzas rhymed abababcc—making it one of the longest poems in European literature.

Orlando Furioso did not spring from nothing. It was a direct sequel to Matteo Maria Boiardo's unfinished Orlando Innamorato, published after Boiardo's death in 1495. Both poems drew on a much older tradition: the Matter of France, the legends of Charlemagne and his warrior-nobles, or paladins, one of whom—Roland—is known in Italian as Orlando. The Old French Chanson de Roland from the eleventh century had already told of his death. Boiardo had fused this austere, warlike tradition with the magic and romance of the Matter of Britain, the Arthurian legends. Ariosto inherited this blend but added something new: an ironic, humanistic tone that treated chivalric ideals with less solemnity than his predecessor had.

The poem's backdrop is a war between Charlemagne's Christian paladins and Agramante, the Saracen king of Africa, who has invaded Europe to avenge his father Troiano's death. Agramante, joined by allies including Marsilio, the King of Spain, and the boastful warrior Rodomonte, lays siege to Charlemagne in Paris. Amid this conflict stands Orlando, Charlemagne's most celebrated paladin—but he has forgotten his duty, consumed instead by love for the pagan princess Angelica.

The story opens with Angelica escaping the castle of the Bavarian Duke Namo, with Orlando in pursuit. Their paths cross through a string of adventures until Angelica finds a wounded Saracen foot soldier named Medoro, near death. She nurses him back to health, falls in love with him instead, and the two elope together to Cathay. When Orlando eventually discovers the truth—stumbling upon the secret garden where the lovers had once met—he is undone. Grief curdles into madness, and he rampages across Europe and Africa, destroying everything in his path. This is the frenzy the title promises: furioso, the Frenzy of Orlando.

The cure for his madness is as fantastical as the affliction. The English knight Astolfo mounts a hippogriff—a flying horse—and journeys to Ethiopia, then further still: he rides Elijah's flaming chariot up to the Moon itself, where everything ever lost on Earth is said to reside, including Orlando's wits. Astolfo captures Orlando's lost sanity in a bottle and carries it back down. Made to sniff its contents, Orlando is restored to reason—and, tellingly, falls out of love with Angelica in the same instant, for the poem suggests love itself is a species of madness.