The Bulgarian-Byzantine Conflict in Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso

From the time of Pio Rajna, the first scholar to explore the sources of the Renaissance masterpiece Orlando furioso, to the current decade of the 21st century, literary historians from many countries have been trying to answer the question: from where did Ludovico Ariosto draw inspiration for the motif of the Bulgarian-Byzantine clash included in the last three cantos of the poem in its 1532 edition. Fantastic motifs and a number of historical errors impede a satisfactory answer to this question. According to Danova, the way to solving the problem is to answer the question why the poet added this motif in the last redaction of the poem, since it is the precisely the events in the European Southeast in the third decade of the 16th century that are partly the key to solving the mystery.