Canossa

From 1501 to 1503 Ludovico, driven by the family’s financial problems following his father’s death, took up his first post for the House of Este as commander of the fortress at Canossa. The fortress at Canossa, destroyed in 1412, had been bought by Lionello d’Este, who had the walls restored and coverings put on the towers, the palace and the monastery. In 1494 Ercole I ordered the once more partly ruined walls to be rebuilt. When Ludovico was there, this fortress had a small garrison of soldiers under a commander, who was also in charge of the local borgo and surrounding villages. Ludovico certainly lived at the fortress from 6 April 1502 till 31 January 1503, although he probably actually lived there longer, from January 1502 to June 1503. It was in the years in which he was commander of Canossa, between the end of 1502 and the beginning of 1503, that Ludovico’s first illegitimate son, Giovanbattista Ariosto, was born, due to an ancillary love-affair with a certain Maria, almost certainly the Ariosto family maidservant and to whom Niccolò left something in his testaments of 1492 and 1500. The poet, when he had moved to Canossa, had indeed taken this no longer young woman with him, as his personal servant. The post of commander, in no way an honorific post, was hard daily toil, away from the world, that Ludovico accepted without complaint because it provided him with a regular monthly wage.  In all probability, the following verses from the Latin elegy De diversis amoribus date back to the period of his military experience at Canossa: "Iuratusque pio celebri sub principe miles / excepto horrisonae Martia signa tubae". During the period in which he was commander of Canossa Ludovico left the place only for brief visits to Ferrara in 1502 and in 1503, and to go and stay in the summer of 1503 with his Malaguzzi cousins.