History or fiction? Myth or fact? Cultural memory or deliberate appropria¬tion? Elite culture or popular entertainment? Oral or written, performed or read? Grand opera, street theatre or itinerant puppet shows? All of these interpre¬tations can be put forward when considering the long life of Charlemagne in Italian culture. This volume will be concerned with the presence of Charlemagne in the Italian literary tradition, both oral and written, and indeed within one particular genre, that of chivalric narratives in verse and prose. Yet even within that necessarily circumscribed focus, many of the approaches set out above will recur as the individ¬ual chapters consider the presentation of the Emperor and his exploits in texts dating from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. Before focussing specifically on the literary tradition, however, it is important to say something about the presence of Charlemagne more broadly in the history and culture of the Italian peninsula. For Charlemagne belongs both to the recorded history of Italy and to many different forms of culture including painting and sculpture, social customs and fashions, pol¬itics and ideology, music and theatre as well as literature. The focus of this volume is on the three centuries when the figure of Charlemagne was prominent in literary cul¬ture and the genre of chivalric epic, but the broader history of the Emperor in Italy which in this context extends from the late eighth century to the sixteenth provides the fundamental background to the Italian literary interpretations.

Charlemagne in Italian History

On Christmas Day in the year AD 800 Charlemagne was crowned Emperor in Rome by the Pope. This well-known and much rehearsed fact constitutes the key point and culmination of the historical Charlemagne's dealings with the states of the Italian peninsula, but it was to have far-reaching historical, political and eventually literary consequences. It re-established the concept of the western (later Holy) Roman Empire, ruled by an Emperor as overlord of Christendom and began a process of myth-making around both the role of Emperor and the figure of Charlemagne.

Charlemagne's involvement in the affairs of Italy began a quarter of a century before his coronation, and was repeatedly the result of appeals by successive Popes for aid against enemies and internal rivals. Thus Charlemagne conducted campaigns against the powerful duchy of Benevento, in 770 and again in 786.