BORSO D’ESTE, Duke of Modena, Duke of Ferrara.
Letter in his name in Italian, addressed to Feltrino Boiardo.
Modena, 3 July 1453.
Letter (100 x 205 mm), in Italian (greeting, date and address in Latin), on paper, eleven lines including greeting and date, written in a cursive semi-humanist chancery hand in brown ink, address in three lines on verso; creased where once folded, two holes (one resulting in loss of most of one word), some chipping and creasing at edges.
A letter from early in Borso d’Este’s rule as first Duke of Modena. It is addressed to the condottiero Feltrino Boiardo, instructing him to raise taxes from the territories of Casalgrande, Dinazzano and Montebabbio for the support of a brigade of men-at-arms.
Feltrino Boiardo (d. 1456), who in 1452 had been invested by Borso d’Este with the three territories named here, seems to have been a man of some culture. He knew Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Leonardo Bruni and the Decembrio brothers, and is said to have translated or paraphrased Apuleius’s Golden Ass. However, almost nothing survives of his correspondence: there remains a single letter in his hand (Bergamo, Biblioteca Civica MS Lambda II 32, ff. 22–23v). His literary connections are documented in two indirect letters by Pier Candido Decembrio (one at Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, MS 2387, f. 20r, and at Milan, Biblioteca Braidense, MS A. H. 12, f. 15v; the other at Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana MS 827, f. 17r), a letter from Guarino (Reggio Emilia, Archivio di Stato MS M. b. 4, ff. 4–5), and a letter from Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, regarding the death of Braccio da Montone (Siena, Biblioteca Comunale MS H. VII. 6).
Provenance: from the collection of Professor Cecil H. Clough (1930–2017), historian of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
