Gherbino Attacks the Tunisian King’s Ship to Rescue the Princess

Gerbino Attacks the Tunisian King’s Ship to Rescue the Princess is a rescue attempt that turns love into a collision between private desire and a public pledge. Gerbino goes to sea for the daughter of the King of Tunis, but the King’s men kill her before he can save her. His furious retaliation cannot undo that loss, and his grandfather, King Guglielmo II of Sicily, ultimately orders Gerbino’s execution to uphold the assurance he had given Tunis. The episode makes fidelity itself tragic: the promise is kept, but only after the lovers and their hopes have been destroyed.

A marriage and a promise

The princess and Gerbino have fallen in love, though the account does not describe their meeting. When the King of Tunis arranges her marriage to the King of Granada, she grieves at the prospect of separation and would gladly flee her father for Gerbino if she could. Gerbino, hearing of the marriage, is likewise distressed and considers seizing her if she travels by sea. Their love is already shaped by distance and danger: her marriage is a political arrangement, while his proposed rescue depends on intercepting a guarded ship.

The King of Tunis has learned something of Gerbino’s passion and purpose. Fearing Gerbino’s courage and strength, he seeks a guarantee from King Guglielmo II of Sicily that neither Gerbino nor anyone else will interfere with the princess’s passage. King Guglielmo, an old man who knows nothing of his grandson’s love, does not understand the reason for the request. He freely gives the assurance and sends his glove as its token. The glove later becomes the compact’s visible proof, turning a private romantic undertaking into a public breach of faith.

The princess knows that her departure is being prepared. She secretly sends a servant to Palermo to tell Gerbino that she will sail for Granada within days and to challenge him to show whether his vaunted courage and professed love are real. The messenger returns to Tunis after delivering this appeal. Gerbino knows that his grandfather has guaranteed the princess’s safe passage, and the knowledge leaves him uncertain; nevertheless, love and the fear of seeming cowardly impel him to act.

The attack at sea

Gerbino goes to Messina, quickly arms two light galleys, and chooses men known for their courage. He sails to the coast of Sardinia to wait for the princess’s ship. After only a few days, it appears nearby, moving with a light wind. Gerbino tells his companions that the woman he loves is aboard and that the vessel also carries great riches. He promises them the riches as the reward for fighting, reserving the princess alone for himself. The speech presents the venture as both an act of love and an assault attractive to men eager for plunder.

The Tunisian ship cannot escape, and its crew prepares to defend it. Gerbino offers the masters a choice: come aboard his galleys or fight. They refuse to surrender, declaring that the attack violates the pledge made by King Guglielmo. To prove it, they display the king’s glove. Gerbino answers that no falcons are there to require gloves—a dismissive wordplay that refuses to treat the token as binding. He insists that they must give up the princess or face battle.

The two sides exchange stones and missiles, and the fighting continues for a long time with losses on both sides. Seeing that the assault is achieving little, Gerbino takes a small vessel he has brought from Sardinia, sets it alight, and drives it against the ship together with his two galleys. The defenders understand that they must surrender or die. Instead of handing over the princess, they bring her, weeping, from below deck to the prow. Before Gerbino’s eyes, they kill her and cast her into the sea, declaring that this is all they can give him, and that his faithlessness has earned it.

A victory without rescue

Gerbino responds as if he cares nothing for the missiles still striking around him. He boards the ship despite the danger and attacks the defenders with his sword. The narrator compares his violence to a hungry lion among oxen: he kills one person after another, satisfying fury rather than hunger. The image makes clear that the battle has passed beyond any possibility of rescue. Gerbino can punish his opponents, but he cannot reverse what they have done.

As the fire spreads through the ship, Gerbino has his sailors take whatever they can recover as payment for their efforts. He leaves with what the story calls a poor victory over his adversaries. His men have gained booty, but the woman for whom he fought is dead. Gerbino orders her body raised from the sea, mourns her for a long time, and has her buried honorably on Ustica, a small island opposite Trapani. He then returns to Sicily as the most sorrowful man alive. The funeral gives the failed rescue a final, deliberate act of care, in sharp contrast to the violence at sea.

The king’s judgment and the story’s irony

The King of Tunis sends ambassadors dressed in black to King Guglielmo. They complain that the assurance has not been observed and recount the attack. King Guglielmo is enraged, but he sees no way to deny the justice they demand. Although his barons plead with him to change course, he has Gerbino seized and condemns him to death. He chooses to live without descendants rather than be considered a king who breaks his word.

The ending binds together two kinds of fidelity that cannot coexist in this episode. Gerbino follows his love despite knowing of the guarantee; King Guglielmo honors the guarantee despite the cost to his own family. The princess’s appeal sets the rescue in motion, yet she is given no chance to escape the political marriage by any means other than Gerbino’s dangerous intervention. His attack makes him an enemy of the pledge, and the crew’s killing of her transforms that breach into irreparable tragedy. The final execution does not restore the king’s promise in any practical sense: the princess and Gerbino are both dead. It shows instead that the assurance, once given, governs King Guglielmo even when keeping it demands the life of his grandson. The lovers die without having enjoyed the fruit of their love, while the kingdom’s honor survives only as a costly, grimly enforced principle.