The Lost Poem by the Forgotten Poet of Charles V's 'Conquest of Tunis' Tapestries

The famous sixteenth-century tapestry series the “Conquest of Tunis’, detailing the 1535 campaign of Charles V to recapture Tunis from the Ottomans under Barbarossa , has been much studied for the artistry of its images by Vermeyen.Less attention has been devoted to the Latin text at the base of each panel, often described as mere ‘captions’ to the events depicted and of uncertain authorship. This chapter identifies both the author of the poem, and examines the engagementof the poem with wider contemporary patterns of representing CharlesV.It is argued that, much more than just ‘captions’, these texts are a Latin hexameter poem, the Periocha expeditionis Africanae Thunetensis by the hitherto largely forgotten sixteenth-century poet Francois de BourgognedeFallais. This poem engages intertextually with classical Roman epic poets, in particular Vergil and Lucan, to cast Charles as a successor to Aeneas, Caesar, Augustus and his campaign to reconquer Tunisas a continuation of Rome’s warsagainst Carthage.In so doing, the poem engagesin a wider pattern ofutilising the powerful symbolic resonance of the Roman empire to portray Charles V positively as a successorto that imperial tradition.