Cariteo's Endimione (1509), a lyric sequence published in Naples shortly after the Spanish takeover of the Aragonese kingdom, advertises a prominent debt to Petrarch's Rime sparse. Commentaries in the earliest printed editions of the latter suggest politically charged models for this sequence. They represent Petrarch, like Cariteo, as a skilled rhetorician, a foreigner in the service of lords and aristocracy outside his ancestral domain, and an ardent proponent of monarchism with a pan-Italian sensibility. These qualities befitted Cariteo at a time when he was articulating his loyalty to the newly installed Spanish viceregal government as a defense against French invasion.
