A Carolingian Poem

From the outset, Orlando Furioso presents itself as a Carolingian poem, since the author announces that he will be singing of individual adventures and chiv¬alrous deeds that occurred at a precise historical time, the eighth century AD:

According to one of the first interpreters of the poem, the sixteenth-century critic Simone Fornari from Reggio Calabria, the war between Agramante and Charle¬magne's armies frames the unity of the poem with a moral aim, that of demonstrat¬ing that reckless actions deserve punishment and prudence is the ultimate lesson Ariosto is aiming at:

Fornari's allegorical focus might not be the most insightful way of looking at the historical and political background of the poem, and yet it highlights the relevance of Charlemagne to establish a frame to the poem in terms of both literary genre and a shared cultural context amongst Ariosto's first readers.

By beginning with the religious war between the Muslims of Agramante and the Christians of Charlemagne, Ariosto is reminding his readers of the background context to his own story: that of the Carolingian epic, going from the foundational Chanson de Roland to Ariosto's most recent predecessor, Matteo Maria Boiardo's Inamoramento de Orlando. Notably, as Jane Everson has aptly pointed out, ‘Ariosto privileges the campaign of Agramante, the most firmly Carolingian of Boiardo's three war themes, making the invasions of Gradasso and Mandricardo subordinate to that, indeed incorporating these latter two into the forces of Agramante’.