Boiardo has been so eclipsed by Ariosto that he is not known as well as he ought to be, when we consider his services to Italian literature. To him belongs the credit of having invented the romantic epic, and Ariosto, who followed in the same lines, added but little to the general groundwork of his predecessor. Matteo Maria Boiardo was born of a noble family at Reggio in 1434, and having early gone to Ferrara, remained there till his death in 1494. A scholar, poet, administrator, and courtier, his position at the court of the duke of Este reminds us involuntarily of that of Goethe, three hundred years later, at Weimar. His first essays in literature were in Latin, but when he was about forty years old he began his poem of Orlando Innamorato (Roland in Love). He was led naturally thereto. Ferrara had early favored chivalrous poetry, and the library of the duke contained a large number of romances, belonging especially to the Arthurian cycle, which pleased the elegant society of the court more than the Carlovingian stories so popular with the common people. These romances of King Arthur and the Round Table, however, were in French. Boiardo's great merit consists in the fact that he united in one the various characteristics of both the Carlovingian and the Arthurian romances, and thus combined the popular and the courtly element. He chose the characters of his poem from the former, but changed them to true knights of chivalry, and added all the paraphernalia of the Arthurian tales. Of especial importance was the introduction of romantic love as the motive of all action. The general theme of Orlando Innamorato is the war between Charlemagne and the Saracens, yet there is no one definite action, as in the case of the regular epic. Rather the poem consists of a series of independent, or at least very loosely connected, episodes, in which the adventures of the various knights errant are recounted with great skill and interest. Chief among these episodes is that of Orlando and his love for Angelica, the daughter of the king of Cathay, who comes to the court of Charlemagne in Paris, and by means of her beauty and coquetry succeeds in drawing away a number of the best Christian warriors. Other important characters are Astolfo, Rodomonte, Rinaldo, and the latter's sister, Brandiamente, who falls in love with the pagan Roger, who, according to Boiardo, was the founder of the house of Este. Vast as the poem is in its present state, Boiardo left it only half finished when he died in 1494.