Orlando was a Medieval literary character. Also known as Roland, he was a paladin (knight) in Europe around 700 to 800 CE. That was the time that Charlemagne was founding his empire and battling the Saracens. The term “saracen” comes from Greek and Roman writing, where it referred to people who lived in the Arabian peninsula. Later Medieval writings used “Saracen” to mean “Muslim,” a term that might not even have existed in the time of Charlemagne — Muhammed himself lived from 570 to 632, and even though his followers spread quite rapidly after his death, the word “Muslim” took longer to come into use.
But back to Orlando/Roland. In the 1400s Matteo Maria Boiardo worked on “Orlando Innomarato” (Orlando in Love), a chivalric romance that he never finished, but was published posthumously. Then Ludovico Ariosto wrote a sequel, “Orlando Furioso” (Orlando gets really mad; seriously, stay out of his way until he cools off) in the early 1500s.
Both Boiardo’s and Ariosto’s stories about Orlando are very, very long, and contain loads of characters besides Orlando himself. One of the major characters is “Rodomonte,” the king of “Sarza” (probably a fictional place) and Algiers, and the leader of a Saracen army. Rodomonte is a pretty skillful warrior (up to a point, at least; he’s killed by another character, Ruggiero, in a duel), but more than that he’s a loudmouth, always boasting about himself and various exploits from his past and/or his imagination.
Rodomonte was such a successful character that he’s been incorporated into more than one language. Boiardo, who invented him, was supposedly so pleased with his invention that he paid to have the church bells rung in either Reggio or Ferrara (he probably lived in one town or the other when he was working on his epic).
Rodomonte’s addition to languages matches the character’s two main characteristics; prowess as a warrior and being a braggart. In Spanish, “rodomonte” came to mean strength and courage. In the 1700s, the King of Spain used “rodomonte” to praise Luigi Gonzaga — although exactly which “Luigi Gonzaga” he was referring to isn’t entirely clear. In French and English, though, it was Rodomonte’s bragging that seemed to stick in everybody’s mind. “Rodomontade” became a French word in the mid 1500s, meaning either a ridiculously extravagant boast or the boaster personally. “Rodomontata” had a similar meaning in the Italian of the time.
By the late 1500s “rodomontade” was in use in English too. A 1591 book called “Answeare Supplication” includes “The ennemy who with a great Rhodomontade or brag had wonne a suburbe.” Rodomontade is a pretty good word; rolling off your tongue smoothly. Starting in the 1600s, various writers from John Donne to Anne Brontë to William Thackeray used it. The Oxford English Dictionary says it’s obsolete, but you can find it in books written in the past few years, including “Mind Games” by William Deverell and “Imagining King’s Death” by J. Barrell. In some cases it’s spelled with an “h:” rhodomontade.” The “h” started showing up a couple of centuries ago and is still around, although the version without the “h” seems to be a bit more common. Maybe the “h” just wants to appear devotedly attached, like Anne Brontë described in the 1848 “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall:” “She knows what she’s about; but he, poor fool, deludes himself with the notion that she’ll make him a good wife, and because she has amused him with some rodomontade about despising rank and wealth in matters of love and marriage, he flatters himself that she’s devotedly attached to him.”
