The robber chief Rinaldo Rinaldini, whose adventurous story was first recorded by Johann Wolfgang Goethe's brother-in-law Christian August Vulpius, is a kinsman of Robin Hood and Schinderhannes. In Italy at the dawn of the Empire, a politically fractured country still divided into many small states, he waged gang warfare on his own initiative: to avenge injustice done to his family, to help the poor and oppressed, to drive out the oppressors.
