Renaissance Studies Vol. 19 No. 2 © 2005 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Blackwell Publishing, Ltd. Oxford, UK REST Renaissance Studies 0269-1213 © 200X The Society for Renaissance Studies, Blackwell Publishing Ltd if known Original Article A universal chronicle from Renaissance Rimini Daniel Bornstein History and culture in a provincial centre: a universal chronicle from Renaissance Rimini Daniel Bornstein The Cronaca universale of Gaspare Broglio is well known to local historians, and oddly familiar as well to students of modern poetry, since Ezra Pound used it as a source for certain of his Cantos. 1 From Cesare Clementini in the early seventeenth century to Philip Jones in the late twentieth, historians of Rimini have mined Broglio’s chronicle for information about the town and its Malatesta rulers. 2 To judge by their ample citations and references, and by the brief fragment published by Aldo Francesco Massèra in 1922, 3 one would have to conclude – as Eric Cochrane did in his magisterial Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance – that Broglio’s chronicle, like all the other Riminese chronicles, was purely local in scope, and that it shared with the rest of them ‘a common purpose: that of glorifying the ruling family’. 4 Such an impression would only be reinforced by Antonio Luciani’s subse- quent publication of a far more substantial portion of the text, amounting to roughly half of the manuscript. By printing all the passages, and only those passages, that treat events from Broglio’s lifetime and bear on Broglio’s 1 Biblioteca Civica Gambalunga, Rimini, SC-MS. 1161: Broglio di Tartaglia da Lavello, Cronaca universale. Pound’s use of Broglio is discussed briefly by Daniel Bornstein, ‘The Poet as Historian: Researching the Malatesta Cantos’, Paideuma , 10 (1981), 283 – 291, and treated with greater precision and expertise by Lawrence S. Rainey, Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture: Text, History, and the Malatesta Cantos (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), and Rainey, ‘“All I Want You to Do Is to Follow the Orders”: History, Faith, and Fascism in the Early Cantos’, in A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in The Cantos , ed. Lawrence S. Rainey (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), pp. 63 –114. 2 Cesare Clementini, Raccolto istorico della fondazione di Rimino e dell’origine e vite de’ Malatesti, 2 vols. (Rimini, 1617 and 1627; reprint Bologna: Forni, 1969), Francesco Gaetano Battaglini, Della vita e de’ fatti di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, Signor di Rimino , and Angelo Battaglini, Della corte letteraria di Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta , both in Basini Parmensis poetae opera praestantiora nunc prima edita et opportunis commentariis inlustrata (Rimini, ex typographia Albertiniana, 1794), Charles Yriarte, Un condottiere au XVe siècle. Rimini: Études sur les lettres et les arts à la cour des Malatesta (Paris: J. Rothschild, 1882), Luigi Tonini, Storia civile e sacra riminese (Rimini, 1848 – 1882), vol. 5: Rimini nella signoria de’ Malatesti (Rimini: Albertini, 1880; reprint Rimini: Bruno Ghigi, 1971), Carlo Tonini, La coltura letteraria e scientifica in Rimini dal secolo XIV ai primordi del XIX (Rimini: Albertini, 1884), P. J. Jones, The Malatesta of Rimini and the Papal State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 3 Cronaca universale di Broglia di Tartaglia da Lavello, ed. A. F. Massèra, in Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new edition, vol. 15, part 2 (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1922), 183 –192. Massèra obviously intended to publish more of the chronicle; the passage he did publish breaks off in mid-sentence. 4 Eric Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 98.