Letter to Enrico VII for the death of Guidubaldo
Guidubaldo di Montefeltro, second Duke of Urbino, died in the night between 11th and 12th April 1508, at the age of thirty six, prostrated by the illnesses that had plagued most of his brief but intense existence. In the following months Castiglione, to exorcise his pain and to perpetuate the memory of his dead friend, wrote a lengthy eulogy that, in the form of an official letter was dedicated and sent to Henry VII King of England. The work, far from being a generic and occasional eulogy, was part of a refined strategy, both literary and political. The story and the emotional evocation of the biographical parable of the unfortunate Guidubaldo, in fact, served the purpose of extracting form his case a portrait of the ideal prince, according to the ethical values of humanism, that a few years later would be discussed by Machiavelli.
The letter saw the light as an accredited and official document, possibly due to a specific desire of the widowed Duchess (Elisabetta Gonzaga), in the difficult and delicate moment of the succession, when the passage of power from the dead master to his young heir, Francesco Maria Della Rovere, exposed the state to the recklessness of the great foreign powers, as well as to the risk of internal unrest. With his text Baldassarre spoke for the entire court, and publicly recalled the alliance between Urbino and London, that he himself, with his journey to England in 1506, had helped to consolidate. Furthermore, to neutralise any further ideas of future, illegitimate conquest, the letter described and censured the infamous betrayal of Guidubaldo perpetrated by Cesare Borgia in 1502, to expropriate his state. In this manner, the earthly life of the Duke of Urbino was elevated to that of prototype of the figure of a virtuous and wise prince, who resisted magnanimously and with lucid detachment the injuries of fate.
Both historical reasons and the separation form a friend concurred in the genesis of the epistle and the determination of its multiple contents: making it at one and the same time a bitter and grieving testimony, a declaration of love and fidelity to the court of Urbino, a political message defending the legitimacy of the succession. The text, that followed the same influences that later were present in the genesis of The Cortegiano, was printed and published for the first time in 1513.
