ONE of the most popular and influential chivalric novels published in Renaissance Spain was the Historia del emperador Carlomagno y de los doce pares de Francia. This bestseller first appeared in Seville in 1521, with subsequent editions and sequels printed throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and beyond. The book begins by recounting the origins of the Frankish kings, the lineage of Charlemagne, and the background of the Twelve Peers. What follows is a second part, centered on the emperor's legendary military engagement with an infidel army led by the emir Balán and his giant son Fierabrás. This section of the narrative recounts the capture, negotiations, release and attempted conversion of knights and ladies from both camps, along with the love affair between Guy de Borgona and the sister of Fierabrás named Floripes. The last part of the novel deals with Charlemagne's storied entrance into Spain, after being visited by St James, where the emperor and his Peers battle Moorish kings and giants, and are later betrayed and ambushed at Roncesvalles.

The book is an adaption – by an unknown Spanish-speaking author named Nicolás Piamonte (or Piemonte) – of an early French work, Jean Bagnyon's La Conqueste du grand roy Charlemagne (c. 1478), that was itself based on medieval stories of Fierabrás from the Old French chansons de geste, combined with the twelfth-century Pseudo-Turpin Historia Caroli Magni. The latter was widely disseminated through Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Historiale, a work that was originally composed in the mid-thirteenth century, but remained popular and eventually circulated as a printed book. Scholarly interest in the Historia del emperador Carlomagno has, for the most part, been limited to considering its influence on the Golden Age masterpiece Don Quijote, in which the deluded knight famously attributes a potion for curing wounds to Fierabrás (1.17), and defends the novel in his argument with the Canon (1.48) – among other possible references to the legend of the Twelve Peers. In the pages that follow I will examine Piamonte's adaptation of the theme of conversion in the second part of his chivalric novel, through a number of scenes that portray the experience of changing faiths.