Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
8 - Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
from ARTICLES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ARTICLES
- 1 A Lying Legacy? A Preliminary Discussion of Images of Antiquity and Altered Reality in Medieval Military History
- 2 War and Sanctity: Saints' Lives as Sources for Early Medieval Warfare
- 3 The 791 Equine Epidemic and its Impact on Charlemagne's Army
- 4 The Role of the Cavalry in Medieval Warfare
- 5 Sichelgaita of Salerno: Amazon or Trophy Wife?
- 6 Castilian Military Reform under the Reign of Alfonso XI (1312–50)
- 7 Sir Thomas Dagworth in Brittany, 1346–7: Restellou and La Roche Derrien
- 8 Ferrante d'Este's Letters as a Source for Military History
- Appendix: Selected Letters of Ferrante d'Este (Punctuation and accents added)
- NOTE: Provisions for the Ostend Militia on the Defense, August 1436
Summary
Historians have devoted very little attention to Ferrante d'Este, Duke Ercole I's second son. If he went down in history, it was because of his participation in Giulio d'Este's plot against his half-brother Alfonso, which ended up with Ferrante dying in prison in 1540 and Giulio being freed 19 years later. Besides this, only poor and fragmentary information can be found about Ferrante. But he deserves more.
Born in Naples in 1477, while his mother Eleonora d'Aragona was paying a visit to her father King Ferrante, Ercole's son spent most of his youth there, coming back to Ferrara at the age of 11. In 1493 he was sent to France to live at Charles VIII's court, from which he returned in 1497, after having accompanied the king's descent into Italy in 1494. Some months later, Ferrante managed to enter the service of Venice as a condottiero and the following year went to Tuscany with his company in order to defend Pisa against Florence. The campaign turned out to be a failure and d'Este with the rest of the Venetian army left Pisa in April 1499. After this inglorious experience, Ferrante's military career came to a stop and, until the already-mentioned plot against Alfonso, he led a courtly life with few events of any importance.
Only Lewis Lockwood has devoted some attention to Ferrante, studying his role as a musical amateur, yet d'Este also had some role as a patron of literature, for the poet Antonio Tebaldeo dedicated two of his rhymes to him.
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- Information
- Journal of Medieval Military History , pp. 155 - 165Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2005