The Sword of Roland in La Serenissima: Materiality and the Occult in Late Medieval Venice

Abstract

Among the many recipes contained within a fifteenth-century book of secrets housed in Venice’s Biblioteca Marciana, there is a singularly unique one that offers to create the ‘Sword of Roland the Paladin’. The recipe, supposedly learned from a necromancer from Bologna, would create a solution from a mélange of herbs and alchemical salts and would purportedly invest the blade with occult powers. This recipe for creating the ‘Sword of Roland’ promises the potential of an object, rather than an actual physical thing. Nonetheless, this specific recipe offers an exceptional lens through which to investigate the intersection of material objects and magic in the late medieval Mediterranean Basin. It does so in four ways: in the physical space of the Biblioteca Marciana, in the physical codex in which the recipe is found, in the actual objects required to make the solution and in the very urban space of Venice itself.