Sordello of Browning seems to have little identity with the brief
and splendid Sordello of Dante, the figure that fronts us in the superb
sixth canto of the _Purgatoria_, "a guisa di leon quando si posa." The
records of the real Sordello are scant, fragmentary and contradictory.
No coherent outline of his personality remains, so that the character
which Browning has made for him is a creation as absolute as if it had
been wholly invented. The name indeed of Sordello, embalmed in Dante's
verse, is still fresh to our ears after the "ravage of six long sad
hundred years," and it is Dante, too, who in his _De Vulgari
Eloquentia_, has further signalised him by honourable record. Sordello,
he says, excelled in all kinds of composition, and by his experiments in
the dialects of Cremona, Brescia and Verona, cities near Mantua, helped
to form the Tuscan tongue. But besides the brief record of Dante, there
are certain accounts of Sordello's life, very confused and conflicting,
in the early Italian Chronicles and the Provencal lives of the
Troubadours. Tiraboschi sifts these legends, leaving very little of
them. According to him, Sordello was a Mantuan of noble family, born at
Goito at the close of the twelfth century. He was a poet and warrior,
though not, as some reports profess, captain-general or governor of
Mantua. He eloped with Cunizza, the wife of Count Richard of St.
Boniface; at some period of his life he went into Provence; and he died
a violent death, about the middle of the thirteenth century. The works
attributed to him are poems in Tuscan and Provencal, a didactic poem in
Latin named _Thesaurus Thesaurorum_ (now in the Ambrosiana in Milan), an
essay in Provencal on "The Progress and Power of the Kings of Aragon in
the Comte of Provence," a treatise on "The Defence of Walled Towns," and
some historial translations from Latin into the vulgar tongue. Of all
these works only the _Thesaurus_ and some thirty-four poems in
Provencal, _sirventes_ and _tensens_, survive: some of the finest of
them are satires.[15]

The statement that Sordello was specially famed for his philosophical
verses, though not confirmed by what remains of his poetry, is
interesting and significant in connection with Browning's conception of
his character. There is little however in the scanty tales we have of
the historic Sordello to suggest the "feverish poet" of the poem. The
fugitive personality of the half mythical fighting poet eludes the
gras