Ri-found in translation: implicazioni ideologiche e figurative nell’evoluzione della leggenda carolingia dall’Historia Turpini all’ Historia de Carlo Magno y los doce pares de Francia

This paper examines the spread of the Historia Turpini in Spain where, between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, we witness a process of re-reading the text strongly conditioned by historical-social and ideological contingencies. In the literary field, the most significant example is represented by Nicolás de Piamonte’s Historia del emperador Carlomagno y de los doze pares de Francia (Seville, 1521); with respect to its source, the author inserts innovations that involve the characters, the motif of the Jacobean pilgrimage and the episode of Roncesvalles. Piamonte’s reinterpretation offers interesting keys for decoding some pictorial motifs, together with the ‘philological’ recovery of elements of the original Carolingian saga, often poorly documented in the literature, but which evidently enjoyed such notoriety as to favor their adoption; the re-reading of the text clearly refers to the historical phase inaugurated by the Reyes Católicos and continued with Charles V, in which the propaganda of the Jacobean pilgrimage in a hispanocentric key receives a significant contribution from Piamonte through the exaltation of places, objects and characters.