by A. N. Wilson
Hath goodness infinite, that it receives
All who turn to it…’
[Purg. III.110–120, Cary]
In this passage, the reader is not only reminded of the everlasting mercy of Providence, but of Dante’s double claim to fame – as a great poet, and as a political fixer. Dante the Florentine wishes Manfred to realize that by the time he has reached the midway of our life’s journey, he had risen from slightly unpromising beginnings to being, not merely the city’s most famous poet, but also a political and diplomatic bigwig of the city, sent upon missions to meet Popes and heads of state. He would be an appropriate person for Manfred to send on a mission from Purgatory to assure the Queen of Aragon that all was well with her father. It is one of the many moments in the poem when Dante reminds us of his elevated status. It was after the Battle of Benevento that the Guelf magnates resumed their power in Florence and the new constitution was drafted which would eventually allow Dante to rise in the political world.
A more immediate privilege which the Guelf victory afforded the infant Dante was that it enabled him to be baptized. The Pope (a Frenchman named Guy Foulques who reigned from 5 February 1265 to November 1268 as Clement IV) installed Charles of Anjou as the King of Sicily in Manfred’s place. Clement IV trod gingerly in Florence. The hostility of so powerful a city to the Papacy was not in his interest, but he was anxious not to upset all the old Ghibelline magnates whose interests had been overthrown at Benevento. Clement wanted to have a united Florence which would accept his authority. As a gesture of leniency, he lifted the interdict which had been in place in the city ever since the Arbia had been stained with blood in 1260. For all that time, the Pope’s interdict had meant that the citizens of Florence were excommunicated. They could not receive the Catholic sacraments: a heavy penalty, if you consider the consequences for a Catholic of dying in a state of mortal sin – the very punishments of Hell which Dante was to describe so graphically. No Masses said, no Holy Communion distributed to the faithful, no last rites for the dying, no absolution if they wished to confess their sins, and no baptism. There had been plenty of time in that interval for Florentines to wonder what would happen to them when they died. Many of the more sophisticated (such as Farinata) had decided that the soul had no immortality. Freethinking and other forms of anti-Catholic heresy were rife in this independent republic. Others, Catholics, who had watched friends and relations die unabsolved, and who followed their coffins to maimed funeral rites, must have shuddered at the possibility that the Pope, as well as exercising political influence, had it in his power to consign them to the everlasting punishment which could be the fate of those dying ‘unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d’. The dying Manfred found mercy without a priest or a sacrament, merely by calling on God in his extremity, and that must have been the hope of many Florentines during the interdict. Any believer who finds such hope, naturally treads a delicate line between reinforcing their faith in God, and wondering – if such mercy can be offered merely by a believer calling upon God – why the elaborate machinery of the Catholic religion, with its sevenfold sacraments and its orders of bishops, priests and deacons, was necessary for salvation. Such profound thoughts, undermining the very nature of Catholicism, paradoxically lie buried at the heart of Dante’s ultra-Catholic poem.
Dante tells us that he was baptized in the Baptistery at Florence, which can still be visited to this day: ‘In your old baptistery, I was made Christian’ [Par. XV.134, Cary]. At another point in his Comedy he calls the Baptistery ‘our temple’ [Inf. X.87]. The building we now see as the cathedral at Florence (the church of Santa Maria del Fiore) was not begun until 1296. The octagonal building known as the Baptistery was the cathedral in Dante’s day. The famous doors of the Baptistery designed by Lorenzo Ghiberti were not in place until a century after Dante’s death.17 But inside, the mosaics are the same as Dante’s eyes would have looked upon. In those days, when the Roman Catholics still followed the custom of the universal Church, as had obtained before the great schism with Eastern orthodoxy, baptisms took place only on Easter Eve and the eve of Whit Sunday. Dante would therefore either have been baptized as a very young baby in May 1265 or he would have had to wait until the following spring.
The building is very different today, however, from what it was when that rite took place. When Dante went to Hell and saw the purchasers of ecclesiastical office being forced head downwards into holes in the flaming rock, he was reminded of the cylindrical wells in which the priests stood in the Baptistery in order to perform baptisms. Baptism would have been by immersion, and these little cylinders, dug in the floor, allowed the priests to stand without getting too wet as they lowered their catechumens into the larger waters. Dante tells us [Inf. XIX.16–21] that he once had to break one of these cylinders because a little boy had fallen in, and was in danger of drowning. Benvenuto da Imola (born 1331–4, died c.1380) tells us that a boy jumped impetuously and got his limbs twisted in one of these wells. No one could get him out. Dante, who at the time was one of the Priors of the city, called for an axe and smashed the marble side of the well to fish the boy out.18 The great font, surrounded by holes for the priests to stand in, was destroyed in 1576.
Dante’s father, Alighiero di Bellincione (born about 1220), was probably a notary who belonged to the class of minor aristocracy. They certainly were not grandi and did not exercise power. Their security depended upon keeping on the right side of those who did so – families such as the Donati. The Alighieri probably had some land outside Florence which they let out to tenants. He made money, as had the grandfather, as a moneylender – a fact which twentieth-century academic research established but which Dante does not mention, especially not in the passages of the Comedy when he denounces the sin of lending money upon interest – that is, of usury. Nearly all Dante’s work is in some sense autobiography. Yet his reworking of his own story is pregnant with dogs in the night-time who do not bark. One such curiously silent animal is his father. Dante’s works reverberate with denunciations of usury, complaints that Florence has declined from its old aristocratic ways by its avarice and worship of gold. Yet his own father was clearly very much involved with the mercantile, banking world of modern Florence; he was part of what was changing Florence. He was a usurer and, in so far as Dante had money and substance, it was from usury that this wealth would have been derived.
Dante’s father married twice, Dante being the son of his first wife, Bella, possibly of the Abati family. Bella also had a girl, but we do not know her name. When Bella died, Dante was probably about five years old. His father married again, to Lapa Cialuffi, and from this union there was a son and a daughter – so Dante had two half-siblings, named Francesco and Gaetana.
Dante was born into a Florence, then, which had just experienced one of the many lurches or switches of power between the rival factions. It was now in the hands of the Guelf magnates, the party supported by Dante’s father. But the price they had paid for getting rid of their Ghibelline rivals and seeing the end, for the time being, of the German hopes for a Hohen staufen Emperor, was that they must be subject, in deed if not in their constitution, to the French monarchy. Charles of Anjou very much dictated the terms of the new Florentine constitution.
The old podestà or elected leader would be assisted by a council of twelve good men, buoni uomini, and by a council of a hundred good men of the populace – buoni uomini del popolo – a mixture of nobility and merchants. While this political structure remained relatively conservative and unchanged from the Ghibelline days, the Florentines had developed a commercial structure which was to be the model for all subsequent successful medieval and early-modern commercial city states – including the City of London. The seven great trades or arti maggiori were organized into guilds, and became in effect a state within a state, with their own council, statutes, assemblies and magistrates. It was from this base that the great Florentine families of the Renaissance, above all the Medici, were to spring.19
What was Dan
te’s Florence like? There were 110 churches, thirty-nine religious houses, the shops of the arte della lana numbered over 200, producing cloth worth 1.2 million florins. By the end of Dante’s life, there were Florentine bankers and merchants in all the great cities of Europe. The revenue of the city deriving from customs duties each year amounted to well over 300,000 florins, and the expenses (exclusive of military costs and public building) were barely 40,000 florins.20 So, by the standards of a modern economy which depends upon credit and loans, this was a preternaturally strong growth economy. Florence was growing, and growing richer, all the time. Far from being pleased by this fact, Dante repeatedly laments it in his poetry, supposing that the increased wealth brought corruption.
IV
GEMMA DONATI AND BEATRICE PORTINARI
BEFORE WE GO ANY FURTHER, WE NEED TO TAKE NOTE OF TWO little girls who had a momentous importance in Dante’s life. And before we meet them, we need to be aware of the continuing political story in which Dante and his father were swept up, following the Guelf victory at Benevento, and the arrival of Charles of Anjou on Italian soil to take the place previously occupied by the Hohenstaufens – that is, to become King of Naples and Sicily and the prime political power in the peninsula.
Pope Clement IV, although a Frenchman, realized that he had bought an ally against the Hohenstaufens at a high price. After the death of Manfred at Benevento, Conradin – strictly speaking the legitimate heir to the Imperial throne – left Germany and entered Italy. The son of Frederick II’s dead son Conrad, he was sixteen years old, blond, beautiful, naïvely ignorant of Italy and its politics, and the Ghibelline cities went wild in their enthusiasm for him. But as he made his triumphal progress south-wards, cheered by the Pisans and followed by the Sienese, the youth had no idea of what he was marching into. The Pope, from his fortress at Viterbo, watched the armies ride past. ‘He will vanish like that golden dust,’ said the hard old man, ‘they are leading him like a lamb to the slaughter.’1
So, indeed, proved to be the case. Charles of Anjou’s army eventually outmanoeuvred Conradin. They captured him as he tried to escape the battlefield not far from Tagliacozzo, south of Rome. In a piece of sadistic theatre which shocked even his contemporaries, Charles had the beautiful boy brought to the public square in Naples and beheaded. By now, the Pope was beginning to wonder what monster he had enlisted to help him in his political balancing tricks.
He did not have long to wonder since he died soon after the boy’s execution. When the College of Cardinals met at Viterbo to elect a successor, the process of decision descended into a blatant wrangle between French and Italian cardinals. Three years passed before they could reach any kind of agreement. Eventually, public outrage at the absence of either Pope or Emperor forced them to a decision. For three years, Italy had been divided between supporters of the Emperor and supporters of the Pope, even though neither Emperor nor Pope existed. The College handed over to a mere six cardinals the responsibility of finding a new Pope, and they made the bold choice of a Crusader in minor orders, the Archdeacon of Liège. He was an Italian aristocrat named Tebaldo Visconti, who, at the time of his election, was in the Holy Land fighting the Saracen, alongside King Edward I of England. He hastened back to Italy, determined to make the object of his Papacy the recapturing of the Holy Places in Palestine, and reunion with the Christian Churches of the East.
Unlike his two predecessors, he was determined to be consecrated in Rome, and to reassert the primacy of that city and that see in the affairs of the Church. To Rome he went, on landing in Italy. In Rome he was ordained priest, and then consecrated as Bishop of Rome and Pope. He took the title of Gregory X.
Of all the Popes of Dante’s childhood and youth, Gregory X was the most sympathetic towards the Hohenstaufen claims to the Empire. He supported the election of an obscure South German count, Rudolph of Habsburg, as King of Germany (the first stage on the path to being elected as Emperor). Gregory was a politician. He wanted to reconcile the warring factions of Guelf and Ghibelline, above all in that source of wealth and power, the city of Florence. When Dante was eight years old, Gregory X came to the city in a grand ceremony, with the Emperor of Constantinople, Baldwin, and with Charles of Anjou. ‘And so it came about, on the 2nd of July 1273, that the Pope with his cardinals, and with King Charles, and with the said Emperor Baldwin, and with all the barons and gentlemen of the court (the people of Florence being assembled on the sands of the Arno hard by the head of the Rubaconte bridge, great scaffolds of wood having been erected in that place whereon stood the said lords) gave sentence, under pain of excommunication if it were disobeyed, upon the differences between the Guelf and Ghibelline parties, causing the representatives of either party to kiss one another on the mouth, and to make peace, and to give sureties and hostages; and all the castles which the Ghibellines held they gave back into the hands of King Charles, and the Ghibelline hostages went into Maremma under charge of Count Rosso. The which peace endured but a short time.’2 It is scarcely conceivable that the boy Dante did not witness this political spectacular. He had set eyes on his first Pope.
As an enthusiastic supporter of the Guelf cause, Dante’s father would have been there. And we have evidence of the father’s desire to strengthen his family’s position by his arrangement of Dante’s marriage into the most powerful Guelf faction in the city – the Donati. There survives the legal instrument (instrumentum dotis) dated 9 January 1277, whereby Dante Alighieri, aged eleven, was betrothed to Gemma Donati. Medieval Florentine marriage customs were not like those of modern Europe or America. For modern people in the West, a family is a little nuclear group, consisting of one or two children and a couple, living together in a flat or house, isolated from the rest of the world. The greater family – the wider circle of brothers, sisters, cousins, mothers-in-law – might be important, or they might not, but the unit of the family, as discussed by sociologists or governments, is the so-called nuclear family. It is doubtful whether a medieval person would have recognized a nuclear family as detached from the wider clan. The attitude of thirteenth-century Florentines would have been much closer to the family and marriage arrangements which in the twenty-first century still obtain in the Muslim and Hindu worlds, where the betrothal of two young people signifies the desire of two clans to come together in a wider alliance. Mahatma Gandhi, who was married aged thirteen, would be less surprised than we are by the fact that Dante was engaged to be married aged eleven.
Though we shall never know how the poet and Gemma Donati got along, whether they enjoyed a satisfactory sexual life or a shared sense of humour, we shall never be able to forget that Dante, by his marriage, was absorbed into the great clan of the Donati. And his ambivalent attitude to this experience was celebrated in the Comedy by the fact that one great Donati is sent to Hell, another is met in Purgatory, and a third is in Heaven.
Dante’s father had thereby secured an alliance with a family-faction of enormous power. Go to Florence, and you will see reminders of their great power. Fiorenzino, ‘the Baron’, showed how important they were in 1065, when he set up a hospital and other charitable institutions in the city. Donati owned land and mills all around the city and made money from rents within Florence itself. Very likely, they were the landlords of the Alighieri house. They owned a tower and a house in via San Martino, quite near the Dante house, and they owned the Corte dei Donati, a group of houses set around a square just outside the city walls. Their trophies of war were to be hung up in the enormous Franciscan church of Santa Croce, adorned by the brush of Giotto; there are Donati buried splendidly in Santa Margherita, Santa Croce and Santa Reparata, the church which became Santa Maria del Fiore – the cathedral of Florence.
The Donati used their wealth to hold office in other cities, as podestà and capitani. They did not need to follow any profession. Their task, apart from the accumulation of money and the manipulation of other people, was fighting. They were a family of professional mercenaries, condottieri, who could raise fighting men from
among their circles of dependents. They also had a reputation as thieves – cattle thieves, extortioners and embezzlers.
When Dante went to Heaven and met his grand old crusading ancestor Cacciaguida, they were soon united in a catalogue of regrets for the aristocratic old days, and in lofty, not to say snobbish, reflections on the mercantile and commercial occupations of so many of the powerful Florentine families. In the simple, golden times of Cacciaguida’s manhood, Florence was peaceable, sober and unostentatious.
No daughter’s birth brought fear unto her father,
for age and dowry did not then imbalance –
to this side and to that – the proper measure.
[Par. XV.103–5, Allen Mandelbaum’s translation]
The dread of not being able to afford the daughter’s dowry is the common feature of clan-based societies.
Gemma, his espoused wife from late childhood onwards – if only we knew more about her! – was a kinswoman of three Donati whom Dante the child knew well – Corso, Forese and Piccarda.
Corso, described by the chronicler Dino Compagni as ‘Catiline the Roman but more cruel’, was a man of great brilliance; very handsome all his life, a fluent public speaker, a wit and a brave, unscrupulous knight. ‘He was the enemy of the popolo and of popolani, and was loved by his soldiers; he was full of malicious thoughts, cruel and astute.’3 Corso was destined to be the poet’s downfall. You get the flavour of the man in Compagni’s description – ‘when armed and mounted on his charger, Corso rode through the streets, he was greeted on all hands with a spontaneous Viva il Barone!’4 To have made an enemy of Corso (as Dante evidently did in later life) was to be dead meat. Fate had its own plans for Corso himself, which are glancingly alluded to in one of the more grotesque passages of horror in the Inferno.
