[513] This poem relates the adventures of Ciriffo and Il Povero Avveduto, bastards of two noble ladies, and gives the history of a crusade of Louis against the Soldan of Egypt. It was published as the work, as far as the first Book, of Luca Pulci, completed and restored by Bernardo Giambullari. "Il Ciriffo Calvaneo, diviso in iv. Canti, col primo Libro di Luca Pulci, ed il resto riformato per Bernardo Giambullari" (Roma, Mazzocchio, 1514). Luigi Pulci claims a share in it, if not the whole in the Morgante, xxviii. 118, 129.
[514] See Lettere di Luigi Pulci a Lorenzo Il Magnifico, Lucca, Giusti, 1868. Sonetti di Matteo Franco e Luigi Pulci, 1759. The sonnets are indescribably scurrilous, charged with Florentine slang, and loaded with the filthiest abuse. The point of humor is that Franco and Pulci undertook (it is said, for fun) to heap scandals on each other's heads, ransacking the language of the people for its vilest terms of invective. If they began in joke, they ended in earnest; and Lorenzo de' Medici, who had a taste for buffoonery, enjoyed the scuffle of his Court-fools. It was a combat of humanists transferred from the arena of the schools to the market-place, where two men of parts degraded themselves by assuming the character of coal-heavers.
[515] The poetical talents of the Pulci family were hereditary. Cellini tells us of a Luigi of that name who improvised upon the market-place of Florence.
[516] Turpin's Chronicle consists of thirty-two chapters, relating the wars of Charlemain with the Spanish Moors, the treason of Ganelon, and Roland's death in Roncesvalles. The pagan knight, Ferraguto, and the Christian peers are mentioned by name, proving that at the date of its compilation the whole Carolingian myth was tolerably perfect in the popular imagination.
[517] It has been conjectured by M. Génin, editor of the Chant de Roland, not without substantial grounds, that Gui de Bourgogne, bishop of Vienne, afterwards Pope Calixtus II., was himself the pseudo-Turpin.
[518] See Chanson de Roland, line 804, and compare Morg. Magg. xxvii. 79.
[519] See Ludlow's Popular Epics of the Middle Ages, vol. i. p. 412, and M. Génin's Introduction to the Chanson de Roland, Paris, 1851.
[520] See Génin (op. cit. pp. xxix., xxx.) for the traces of the Roland myth in the Pyrenees, at Rolandseck, in England, and at Verona; also for gigantic statues in Germany called Rolands (ib. pp. xxi. xxii.). At Spello, a little town of Umbria between Assisi and Foligno, the people of the place showed me a dint in their ancient town wall, about breast-high, which passes for a mark made by Orlando's knee. There is learned tradition of a phallic monument named after Roland in that place; but I could find no trace of it in local memory.
[521] The Song of Roland does not give this portrait of Charlemagne's dotage. But it is an integral part of the Italian romances, a fixed point in all rifacimenti of the pseudo-Turpin.