Albracca is a major city of Cathay

Cathay

Cathay is the Anglicized version of "Catai" and an alternative name for China in English. It originates from the word Khitan, the name of a nomadic people who founded the Liao Dynasty which ruled much of Northern China from 907 to 1125, and who had a state of their own centered around today's...

 in the Italian romantic epic

Epic poetry

An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation. Oral poetry may qualify as an epic, and Albert Lord and Milman Parry have argued that classical epics were fundamentally an oral poetic form...

s Orlando innamorato

Orlando Innamorato

Orlando Innamorato is an epic poem written by the Italian Renaissance author Matteo Maria Boiardo. The poem is a romance concerning the heroic knight Orlando .-Composition and publication:...

by Matteo Maria Boiardo

Matteo Maria Boiardo

Matteo Maria Boiardo was an Italian Renaissance poet.Boiardo was born at, or near, Scandiano ; the son of Giovanni di Feltrino and Lucia Strozzi, he was of noble lineage, ranking as Count of Scandiano, with seignorial power over Arceto, Casalgrande, Gesso, and Torricella...

 and Orlando furioso

Orlando Furioso

Orlando Furioso is an Italian epic poem by Ludovico Ariosto which has exerted a wide influence on later culture. The earliest version appeared in 1516, although the poem was not published in its complete form until 1532...

by Ludovico Ariosto

Ludovico Ariosto

Ludovico Ariosto was an Italian poet. He is best known as the author of the romance epic Orlando Furioso . The poem, a continuation of Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato, describes the adventures of Charlemagne, Orlando, and the Franks as they battle against the Saracens with diversions...

. In the story it is the walled city and fortress where Angelica

Angelica (character)

Angelica is a princess in the epic poem Orlando innamorato by Matteo Maria Boiardo. She reappears in the saga's continuation, Orlando furioso by Ludovico Ariosto, and in various later works based on the two original Orlando pieces...

 and the knights she has befriended make their stand when attacked by Agrican, emperor of Tartary

Tartary

Tartary or Great Tartary was a name used by Europeans from the Middle Ages until the twentieth century to designate the Great Steppe, that is the great tract of northern and central Asia stretching from the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean inhabited mostly by Turkic, Mongol...

.

Scholars have identified Albracca with Bukhara

Bukhara

Bukhara , from the Soghdian βuxārak , is the capital of the Bukhara Province of Uzbekistan. The nation's fifth-largest city, it has a population of 263,400 . The region around Bukhara has been inhabited for at least five millennia, and the city has existed for half that time...

 in modern Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan

Uzbekistan , officially the Republic of Uzbekistan is a doubly landlocked country in Central Asia and one of the six independent Turkic states. It shares borders with Kazakhstan to the west and to the north, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan to the east, and Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the south....

, in part because the siege of Albracca by Agrican described in the Orlando innamorato resembles the historic siege of Bukhara by Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan

Genghis Khan , born Temujin and occasionally known by his temple name Taizu , was the founder and Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, which became the largest contiguous empire in history after his death....

 in 1220.

Sources

• Boiardo: Orlando innamorato ed. Giuseppe Anceschi (Garzanti,1978)
• Boiardo: Orlando innamorato, verse translation by Charles Stanley Ross (Oxford University Press, 1995), Book I, Cantos 10-19 and Explanatory Notes, pp. 401-402. ISBN 0-19-282438-4
• Ariosto:Orlando Furioso, verse translation by Barbara Reynolds
  Barbara Reynolds
  Barbara Reynolds is an English scholar, lexicographer and translator, wife of the philologist and translator Lewis Thorpe.-Early life:The daughter of Alfred Charles Reynolds, and the god-daughter of Dorothy L...
  
  in two volumes (Penguin Classics, 1975). Part one, ISBN 0-14-044311-8; part two, ISBN 0-14-044310-X
• Ariosto: Orlando Furioso ed. Marcello Turchi (Garzanti, 1974)