Faggio is the neighboring duchy at the center of the political history dramatized in The Courier’s Tragedy. Its rightful heir, Niccolò, survives an attempt on his life and later appears under an assumed identity, while the fate of Faggio’s lost knights eventually exposes the crimes behind the duchy’s struggle for power.

Political history

The play’s conflict begins with the murder of Faggio’s good duke, which enables his illegitimate son Pasquale to rule as regent for Niccolò, the young rightful heir. Duke Angelo of neighboring Squamuglia arranged the murder, and the succession crisis serves his ambitions: he seeks to join the duchies by marrying his sister Francesca to Pasquale, not acknowledging that Francesca is Pasquale’s mother. The proposed union and the earlier murder make Faggio’s succession a point where family secrets and territorial policy converge.

Niccolò and the postal rivalry

Niccolò survives Pasquale’s plan to kill him in a cannon: Ercole, who is secretly aligned with dissidents at the Faggio court, substitutes a goat and smuggles the child out disguised as an elderly procuress. As an adult, Niccolò returns to Angelo’s court posing as a special courier for the Thurn and Taxis family, whose postal system holds a monopoly across much of the Holy Roman Empire. His ostensible purpose is to win a market for its faster, cheaper service, since Angelo insists on using his own messengers to communicate with Pasquale in Faggio. Beneath that commercial pretext, Niccolò is waiting for an opportunity to confront Angelo.

The Lost Guard

Faggio’s military history is marked by the disappearance of roughly fifty chosen knights, the Lost Guard, who had served as protection for the good duke. They vanished during manoeuvres near the Squamuglia frontier; the duke was poisoned soon afterward. When Niccolò hears the story, he warns that if the disappearance and the murder are connected to Angelo, the duke should beware. His remark draws suspicion from Vittorio, one of Angelo’s couriers, who threatens to report it as treasonous talk.

Confession and significance

The mystery of the Lost Guard is resolved when a soldier reports that a body identified as Niccolò’s has been found by the lake. The identification rests on the amulet placed around his neck when he was a child. With the body is a bloodstained letter bearing Angelo’s seal—the same letter Niccolò had been carrying, but now transformed from the deceptive document previously presented into Angelo’s confession. It reveals that Angelo massacred the Lost Guard and threw them into the lake; their bones were later recovered, made into charcoal, and turned into ink that Angelo used in subsequent messages to Faggio, including the confession itself.

Faggio’s story therefore turns on the conversion of concealed violence into political evidence. The lost knights first survive only as an unexplained absence; the confession makes that absence legible and connects it to the duke’s murder and the usurper’s rule. The duchy’s succession struggle is also bound to the play’s postal plot: couriers and letters carry both the competition for influence and the eventual disclosure of what Angelo has done.