| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

H. Eric R. Olsen. The Calabrian Charlatan, 1598–1603: Messianic Nationalism in Early Modern Europe. (Early Modern History: Society and Culture.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2003. Pp. x, 186. $60.00.

In this slim volume, H. Eric R. Olsen makes an important contribution to early modern European history. In just 128 narrative pages, he relates five years in the intriguing life of a late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century character, Marco Tullio Catizone. He was a man apparently enticed by Portuguese exiles living in Venice during 1598 to claim that he was the disappeared King Sebastian of Portugal. According to some stories, Sebastian, last seen charging into the fray at the battle of Alcazar twenty years before, had survived the conflict and headed off toward Venice where he would, sometime in the future, launch an effort to reclaim his kingdom. Exiles there had locked onto the possible return of the king in hope that the people of Portugal could, with his reappearance and under his leadership, finally throw off the Spanish overlords who had annexed their land in 1580. The death of Philip II of Spain in 1598 revived the hope, and apparently the exiles believed that, with a little help from them, the time had come. The pretender Catizone, who would surely have been more convincing if he had resembled portraits of the vanished king—not to mention if he had actually been able to speak a little Portuguese—was troublesome to Spanish authorities for the next five years. Soon after he was turned over to them by the grand duchy of Tuscany, he was tried in Naples and executed in grisly fashion, in 1603.

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