A compact but memorable little piece called Fortuna desperata became an international hit song in the 1480s, eventually spawning over forty other pieces of music. Heinrich Isaac and Ludwig Senfl contributed six and eight adaptations of Fortuna, respectively; five complete masses, including a linked pair by Jacob Obrecht and Josquin Desprez, were based on it. Numerous lesser-known and anonymous composers wrote versions with new or recast voices. Instrumentalists arranged it for keyboard, probably for consort ensemble. Sadly, the source of this musical Nile remains somewhat shrouded in the historical mists. Neither the composer, nor even the original version of this piece can be clearly identified. A late Spanish manuscript attributes Fortuna desperata to the famous (but faraway and, by then, deceased) Burgundian composer, Antoine Busnois. Intense biographical research, however, has failed to find any traces of Busnois' hypothetical presence in Italy. Musically and textually, Fortuna would be unique among his works.

Only two pieces with Italian texts are attributed to Busnois: Fortuna and an Italian contrafactum upon a older French chanson. It should be noted that Fortuna desperata's text fits the form of its music well. The best version of the text survives in a poetic anthology, currently in the British Museum; it shows three well-formed stanzas of four rhymed lines, and a textual refrain in each. The text laments the ravages of fortune, which has apparently "denied" or "denigrated" the reputation of a certain lady, and caused her bitter death. The musical setting remains fairly simple, in keeping with Italian styles of popular music at the time; a third voice is added to a mostly homophonic duo of superuis and tenor. The lines are robust and singable, which obviously facilitated the job, faced by subsequent composers, of using the music as a basis of new compositions. Remarkably, the textual refrain Fortuna desperata does not seem to call for a musical recapitulation, but fits instead the final phrase of the melody. The counterpoint yields some brief harmonic clashes and parallellisms, which would shock a composition teacher; these infelicities may be a further argument against Busnois' authorship.

However, the central paradox remains: while Fortuna desperata was most certainly composed in Italy, there is no record of Busnois' presence in Italy. The London poetic source was owned by a Medici, and contains only works by famous Florentines—Dante, Poliziano, and Lorenzo di' Medici himself. The earliest known arrangement of the music was written before 1478 by Ser Felice di Giovanni Martini, a Florentine singer. Musicologist Honey Meconi has even suggested a Florentine inspiration for the text: 1476 saw the death in Florence of the ravishing beauty Simonetta Cattaneo, model for Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus and mistress, according to some sources, of Guiliano di' Medici. The possible Florentine background of Fortuna Desperata suggests the authorship of Ser Felice. Such a reattribution would not, of course, diminish the beauty of the piece itself, nor the richness of its transmission.

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