Sordello

Sordello was a Lombard troubadour associated with several courts in northern Italy and Provence. His historical career became legendary and he later appeared in Dante’s Purgatorio. Robert Shea uses a highly fictionalised Sordello as an adventurer and political agent in The Saracen.

The historical Sordello was praised as a poet and moved among aristocratic courts in Italy and Provence, but later writers greatly enlarged his cultural significance. Dante meets him in Purgatorio and uses their shared Mantuan identity to launch a famous lament on Italy’s political divisions. Robert Browning later made Sordello the subject of a difficult long poem, ensuring that the troubadour remained a recurring figure in European literary memory.

In Robert Shea’s The Saracen Land of the Infidel, Thomas Aquinas, Louis IX, Hulagu Khan and the troubadour Sordello stand beside fictional conspirators in a story that treats Christian, Muslim and Mongol ambitions from several perspectives. Sordello is treated fictionally in Robert Shea’s The Saracen Holy War.