Quasi re. Le vicende di Fortebraccio capitano di ventura

by Marco Rufini

LiBRO VINCITORE DEL PREMIO ITALIA MEDIEVALE 2014

Affascinante affresco letterario che percorre la vita, tra Medioevo e Rinascimento, del nobile Fortebraccio da Montone, “umbro doc” e capitano di ventura. Diventato signore di Perugia, coltiva “il Grande Sogno”: diventare il primo re d’Italia, cacciando le presenze straniere e limitando il potere papale alle anime. Conquista, quindi, tutta l’Italia centrale, spingendosi fino a Roma.
Il sogno sta per realizzarsi, ma il nuovo Papa Martino V (della famiglia romana Colonna, nemica dell’Umbria) simulando un negoziato, ingaggia una guerra all’ultimo sangue, che porterà alla cattura quindi alla condanna definitiva di Fortebraccio da Montone.

288 pages, Hardcover

Published May 24, 2013

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essential reading for anyone who has attended, or plans to attend, the annual "Perugia1416" celebrations of Braccio da Montone's triumphal entry into the city (festival held since 2016). If your sympathies lie with the Priori of the independent commune and its Raspanti faction (artisans, small business owners, and the merchant class), this may not be the book for you; it is rather the story of how a sole 'Perugia-born' native son, a mercenary captain hailing from a hamlet or town north of Perugia, acquires the city and its environs by military means, and succeeds in temporarily setting up a kind of lordship, in the period of the ascendancy of his aristocratic faction, the Becchanti (aka Beccherini, aka Beccarini, aka Bracceschi, aka Bracciani). However, the appropriation/expropriation of the Perugian city & territory by Andrea 'Braccio' Fortebraccio (d.1424, 600 years ago) --literally, the name means 'Strong Arm'-- and his assumption of the position of lord or prince (signore) over the city is only an episode in the longer arc of history that will eventually culminate, some decades after the story told here, with the building of the Rocca Paolina, a domineering fortress erected within the city limits to keep the rebellious, noble sons of Perugia under the thumb of the Papal States.

The ambitions of a soldier-on-the-make, aka 'soldiers of fortune', are something of a sub-genre in historical fiction, going back perhaps at least as far as Machivelli's Castruccio Castracani (1520 quasi-biography, set in 1320s), through Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus, or Hapless Hopalong (1668 picaresque novel, set from 1618 to 1648), Manzoni's Count of Carmagnola (1820, set in the 1420s), Mary Shelley's Valperga (1823 novel, set in 1320s), J.B. Pick's The Last Valley (1959, set in 1637-38), all the way to Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolò series (1986, set in the 1460s), and beyond. : In the end, Fortebraccio was 'king of nothing' ("re di niente" p.228), and his supremacy over Perugia lasted less than a decade--

[Gian Andrea · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compelling, elegantly written, biography of 'The Invincible', Braccio da Monte, Italian Condottiero of the fifteenth century, whose strategic, military and political genius saw him close to coronating his dream of becoming the first king of a unified Italy.
Widely underrated by modern history, his life and deeds are truly fascinating and worth of a novel that is as engaging as thought-provoking, for his life is a tale of human existence always lived to the limit, among countless battles and lovers, regrets and excesses, and wholly dedicated to a bigger reason.
A real page-turner.