The Geography of the Enemy: Old and New Empires between Humanist Debates and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata

Andrea Moudarres

Venient annis secula seris, quibus Oceanus vincula rerum laxet, & ingens pateat tellus Tiphisque novos detegat orbes, nec sit terris ultima Thule. (Seneca, Medea 375–379)

Et alias oves habeo, quae non sunt ex hoc ovili: et illas oportet me adducere, et vocem meam audient, et fiet unum ovile et unus pastor. ( John 10:16)1

Introduction

The apparent containment of multiplicity in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata has often been considered a reflection of the crusaders’ victory over the Muslims and of Goffredo’s repression of the humanistic-chivalric lures epitomized by Rinaldo and his ill-fated doubles, Argillano and Sveno. Likewise, the domestication of romance and individualism in the epic structure of the poem supposedly mirrors the conversions to Christianity of the female characters in the enemy camp: Clorinda, who is also killed by her lover Tancredi, Erminia, and, above all, Armida, who in the last canto of the poem seems to experience an unlikely and sudden rebirth

1 “During the last years of the world,/ the time will come in which Oceanus/ will loosen the bounds, and a huge landmass/ will appear; Tiphys will discover new worlds,/ and Thule will no longer be the most remote land.” Medea 375–79. “I have other sheep who are not from this fold and I must bring them, and they will hear my voice and there will be one fold and one shepherd.” John 10: 16. Both passages are quoted by Christopher Columbus in his Libro de las Prophecías. See Christopher Columbus, The Book of Prophecies Edited by Christopher Columbus, ed. Roberto Rusconi, trans. Blair Sullivan (Berkeley and Los Ange- les: University of California Press, 1997), 290–91 and 296–97, respectively. Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are the editors’. 292 andrea moudarres from sorceress to God’s handmaiden. According to the overarching motif of this reading, the process that leads to the submission of unorthodox forces expresses an unapologetically Eurocentric vision of power relations, entrenched in the Catholic tenets of the Counter-Reformation. Despite the partly sympathetic portraits of some of the vanquished, Tasso’s solidarity with the enemies has been diagnosed primarily on psychological grounds as the reflex of a repressed inclination, while his superseding ideology has been branded as imperialistic in rather unmistakable terms.2 This perspective certainly highlights fundamental features of Tasso’s thought—both with regard to the religious conflicts that plagued the six- teenth century and to the revival of Aristotle’s Poetica—and effectively evokes the poet’s personal restlessness. However, an alternative analysis of the text in relation to its cultural background and to some of the opin- ions about the American Indians that he expressed in the Dialoghi can provide a complementary interpretation of Tasso’s political theology. In this essay, I argue that although the Gerusalemme liberata does reflect the temptation to picture a unified world under the “santi segni” (“holy stan- dards”) of a Christian Empire,3 it also deliberately exposes the precarious- ness of such global order, voicing the author’s dismay at the friend-enemy dichotomy fiercely enacted in the battle for Jerusalem.4 While Tasso was no harbinger of cultural relativism, the ideological thrust of his Christian epic does not appear univocal and reveals the underlying tensions that

2 See Sergio Zatti, L’uniforme cristiano e il multiforme pagano (Milan: Il saggiatore, 1983); idem, “Tasso e il nuovo mondo,” Italianistica 24: 2–3 (Maggio/Dicembre 1995): 501–521; and idem, “Dalla parte di Satana: sull’imperialismo cristiano nella ‘Gerusalemme Liberata’,” in La rappresentazione dell’altro nei testi del Rinascimento, ed. Sergio Zatti (Lucca: Maria Pacini Fazzi Editore, 1998), 146–182, which re-elaborates the substance of the argument previously articulated by adopting the opposite perspective of Satan’s speech in canto 4; David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Prince- ton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 214–247. See also Franco Cardini, L’invenzione del Nemico (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 2006), 186–194; Timothy Hampton, Writing from His- tory: the Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 81–133; and Paul Larivaille, Poesia e ideologia. Letture della “Gerusalemme Liberata” (Naples: Liguori, 1987), 111–129. 3 Gerusalemme liberata 1.1. Hereafter cited as GL. Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme liberata (Milan: Rizzoli, 1996). All translations are from Torquato Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered, ed. and trans. Ralph Nash (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987). 4 Among the scholars who express a more skeptical view of Tasso’s apparent efforts to suppress the romance component of the Liberata, see Barbara Fuchs, Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 24–34; JoAnn Cavallo, “Tasso’s Armida and the Victory of Romance,” in Renaissance Transactions: Ariosto and Tasso, ed. Valeria Finucci (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 77–111; Francesco Erspamer, “Il ‘pensiero debole’ di Torquato Tasso,” in La menzogna, ed. Franco Cardini (Florence: Ponte alle Grazie, 1989), 120–136.