THE SERVANT WHO SLAPPED CHRIST
TYRE, William, Archbishop of, and Giuseppe OROLOGGI (translator).
Historia della guerra sacra di Gierusalemme, della Terra di Promissione, e quasi di tutta la Soria ricuperata da’ Christiani: raccolta in XXIII libri, da Guglielmo Arcivescovo di Tiro, & gran Cancelieri del Regno di Gierusalemme. La quale continua ottantaquattro anni per ordine, fin’al Regno di Baldoino IIII …
Venice, Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1562.
4to, pp. [xxvii], [1 (blank)], 702, [2 (colophon, register)], Valgrisi serpent device to title-page and verso of last leaf, historiated woodcut initials to the start of each book; marginal damp-staining to last few quires, light foxing and toning throughout, marginal repairs to first and final leaves; a good copy in seventeenth-century vellum over pasteboard, title and calligraphic flourish lettered directly to spine; some staining to upper board, edges gnawed, spine chipped at foot; near-contemporary ownership inscription of Nicandro Petrella to title-page, p. 44, p. 244, and p. 355.
[bound after:]
[RANZO, Carlo.] JANNACONE, Domenico Antonio (compiler). Narrazione di quel servo, che diede lo schiaffo a N.S. Giesu Cristo, che penitenza facci. Et altra Narrazione di un Giudeo errante, il quale si trovò presente alla Passione, e morte di esso. E di qual Padria fu Pilato, e come morì. In Torino per il Guigonio Stamp. del S. Officio. Italy, c. 1700.
Manuscript on paper, 4to, ff. [6], [1 (blank)], [1]; very neatly written in a seventeenth-century Italian hand in dark brown ink in a single column, 28–29 lines to a page; a large dampstain to the first page but nonetheless very well preserved; ownership inscription ‘Ex libris Dominici Antonii Jannacone, Terrae Torellae, Philosophiae, Medicinaeque Doctoris’ in the same hand to first page.
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Historia della guerra sacra di Gierusalemme, della Terra di Promissione, e quasi di tutta la Soria ricuperata da’ Christiani: raccolta in XXIII libri, da Guglielmo Arcivescovo di Tiro, & gran Cancelieri del Regno di Gierusalemme. La quale continua ottantaquattro anni per ordine, fin’al Regno di Baldoino IIII …
First Italian edition of William of Tyre’s (1130–1186) important account of the first two crusades and of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, with the addition of a seventeenth-century manuscript detailing a uniquely Italian rendition of the tale of the Wandering Jew.
The Latin editio princeps of William of Tyre’s account was first printed in 1549 in Basel and was instrumental in shaping the perception of the Crusades in the Western imagination, serving as the primary historical source of Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (1581).
Preceding the work is a manuscript copy of a curious work by Carlo Ranzo, who had fought at Lepanto in his youth and travelled through the Balkans to Constantinople with Jacopo Soranzo, the Venetian ambassador to Constantinople from 1576–1581. He kept a journal of his travels, printed in Turin in 1616 as the very rare Relatione di Carlo Ranzo gentil’huomo di Vercelli, d’un viaggio fatto da Venetia in Constantinopoli. In his account (which also appears as an appendix to the the equally scarce La vita di S. Orsola scritta da Sigisberto Monaco gemblacense of the same year), Ranzo describes an account related to him at a meeting of Venetian noblemen by one Penaglio Branza, newly returned from the Holy Land after an interval of ten years, in which a Turk in Jerusalem leads him into a secret chamber containing a servant who had struck Christ during the Passion and was therefore condemned to wander in circles until the Second Coming. This iteration of the tale of the Wandering Jew circulated widely throughout Italy until the nineteenth century and is here followed by histories of the Wandering Jew in Germany and Italy, and a note on Pontius Pilate, as compiled by Giovanni Francesco Alcarotti in 1596. Our manuscript copy of these works, compiled by one Domenico Antonio Iannacone (of Terra Torella, i.e. Torella dei Lombardi in Campania?), is a witness to a seemingly unrecorded edition of these works (Turin, Guigoni, n.d.).
Adams W 179; BM STC Italian, p. 322; EDIT16 22407; USTC 835556.
See D’Ancona, ‘La leggenda dell’ebreo errante’ in Saggi di letteratura popolare (1913), pp. 141–190; Gallotta ed., Carlo Ranzo: Relatione d’un viaggio fatto da Venezia in Constantinopoli (2017).
