Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

  But five years after Montaperti, Manfred’s forces had confronted those of Charles of Anjou at Benevento on 26 February 1266. This was the battle in which Manfred was killed and Florence once more fell under Guelf control. After Benevento, the Guelfs held power in Florence for a generation, but it was never a power which they could take for granted. Dante grew up in an atmosphere of simmering tensions and uncertainties. At any moment, the rivalries between one of the big Florentine magnates could explode into civil fights. At any moment, as the result of an alliance formed, or a quarrel picked, with some capo in another town, or another part of Tuscany, the whole delicate balance of rivalries and feuds would tumble into violence. Sometimes this would erupt merely into localized affrays. At any one time, the Guelf factions in, say, Arezzo (primarily Ghibelline) would be looking to Florence to help them overthrow their enemies, or the Florentine Ghibellines would be looking to allies in Arezzo or Siena to do likewise. So, familial vendettas and local feuds would broaden and take on the colourings of the Italy-wide (ultimately Europe-wide) conflict between Pope and Emperor. During Dante’s boyhood, the Guelfs were the dominant party. As he grew into his twenties, the balance was beginning to shift once more and Guelf supremacy came under acute threat throughout Tuscany, when Dante was in his early twenties. In 1287 (Dante was twenty-two), the old Bishop of Arezzo2 – Guglielmo degli Ubertini – switched his Guelf allegiance and allied himself with the Ghibelline nobility. He staged a coup one night in June, opening the city’s defences to his nephew – who bore the same name but was known as Guglielmo Pazzo, William the Crazy – and to the great Pisan Ghibelline Buonconte da Montefeltro. Also among the raiding party was Guido Novello, Count of Poppi, who was to become the Ghibelline podestà of Arezzo.

  This altered the whole balance of power throughout the Tuscan region, with Guelfs and Ghibellines carrying out minor raids on one another’s properties, burning crops, destroying vines and olive groves, and plundering villages. William the Crazy and Buonconte da Montefeltro rode through the Casentino, laying waste small towns. Pontassieve was in flames. San Donato in Collina was utterly destroyed – the flames and smoke were visible from Florence. Guelf raiding parties carried out revenge attacks throughout the Valdarno where the Pazzi and the Ubertini had their castles.

  In 1288, in the Valdarno, the Ghibelline lords, the Guidi, Pazzi, Montefeltro and Tarlati, drew up a battle array. The Florentines matched their forces. It must have been a splendid sight – with the aristocratic cavalry displaying their heraldic shields, and the huge, as well as hugely expensive, reserves of infantry drawn up behind them. But on this occasion, the unwelcome consequences of war were obvious to both sides, and after the display of arms, both sides dispersed. In Florence, money counted more than glory, and it was indicative of the commercial common sense of the republic (so much deplored by Dante’s old great-grandsire when the poet came to meet him in Paradise) that they should have sent one of their most distinguished merchant-millionaires to Arezzo to negotiate a settlement. The cost, in life and destruction of property, of full-scale war in Tuscany made war seem madness. The Guelfs had seen the size of the Ghibelline army and there was always the danger that the Ghibelline magnates would once more seize control of Florence – with all that this implied for the popolo who had held political sway there for a generation. So, under the covering of strict secrecy, Vieri de’ Cerchi went to Arezzo to offer the old bishop some gold florins. In exchange for the villages in his diocese, he was prepared to receive a life annuity of 5,000 golden florins, guaranteed by the Cerchi. (Their everlasting rivalry in Florence with fellow-Guelfs the Donati would, after Campaldino, flare into the split between White and Black Guelf factions.) Espionage scuppered the plan by blowing the bishop’s cover. When it became known that he had been prepared to accept a negotiated peace, old Guglielmo’s life was in danger. The only way to appease the wrath of the Aretine mob, which was calling for Guglielmo’s blood, was for him to issue a declaration of war against Florence.

  Guelf power depended upon the French. The Florentine commune rode out beneath the banners of Anjou. Charles II of Anjou (Charles the Lame) gave the Florentines a French commander, Aymeric de Narbonne. On both sides, huge (by medieval standards) mercenary armies were amassed. Bishop Ubertini, for the Aretines, had some 8,000 troops from Arezzo, and those Tuscan valleys where he had been unable to sell his patrimony – in the Valdarno and the Casentino. The Guelf army was substantially bigger, 12,000 men mustered from the Tuscan communes and towns of Florence, Siena, Lucca, Pistoia, Colle Val d’Elsa, Prato, San Gimignano, as well as Aretine Guelfs, and reinforcements from Bologna. The tactical question which faced them was whether to march across the plains of Valdarno, or whether to surprise the Ghibellines by taking the much more difficult route through the Consuma mountain path. They took this gamble, and it paid off. They crossed the river Arno and climbed up through heavily wooded country towards Consuma, where they caught the armies of Arezzo off guard. Above, in the distance, they could see the Monte della Verna, the hillside where, some decades before, St Francis of Assisi had received the stigmata. It was the eve of the feast of St Barnabas, 10 June, when the two armies found themselves face to face in the plain at the foot of Poppi, in a place called Campaldino.

  The saint’s feast-day, 11 June, was a muggy Saturday. Nearly 20,000 men were awake at dawn on the plain, making their confessions and hearing Mass. It is to be supposed that old Bishop Ubertini was not feeling at his best. In deference to the commandments of Our Lord to St Peter – ‘Put the sword in its sheath’ – the clergy carried hammers or batons with which to cudgel their enemies. Thus armed, and breastplated, the old bishop peered myopically across the plain and asked his aide de camp, ‘To which city do those walls belong?’ The answer was, ‘Sono gli scudi dei nemici’ (‘They are the shields of the enemy’).

  The Guelfs had divided their infantry into two enormous flanks of pavesari, infantrymen carrying shields (pavese) measuring 1.5 metres high. These shield walls concealed the warriors, including the cavalry. Behind the cavalry were reinforcements of infantry and thousands of mules – pack animals on the march, but on the battlefield, an animal shield against the cavalry charges of the enemy.

  The division of the shield walls was the cruelly ingenious scheme which gave the victory to the Guelfs. Following the advice of their captain, the Barone dei Mangiadori, the Guelfs waited for the first Ghibelline charge. At the cry of ‘San Donato cavaliere’, 600 knights with long lances, swords and maces charged on the Guelfs. Aymeric of Narbonne was wounded in the face. His companion, Guillaume de Durfort, was struck down by an arbalester. It seemed as if the charge had been devastating. But at this point the pincer-flanks of the shield walls moved round to cut off the Ghibelline retreat. The Ghibelline leader, Count Guido Novello, had consulted the astrologer Guido Bonatti and been told that defeat was inevitable. Once the shield pincers had closed on the Ghibelline cavalry, Novello alone had the forces at his disposal to break the line. He did not do so – perhaps believing that his defeat was in the stars.

  From Pistoia came the podestà, the kinsman of Dante’s wife – Corso Donati, a terrifying thug – who exclaimed, ‘If we lose, I will die in battle with my fellow-citizens, and if we conquer, let him that will come to us at Pistoia to exact the penalty!’ The victory would secure Corso Donati as one of the most powerful of Florentine magnates, rivalled only by Vieri de’ Cerchi, who in the course of the battle would witness the Bishop of Arezzo, with whom he had struck the contentious bargain for lordship of his diocesan fiefdom, hacked down and killed.

  The bishop is buried in the little church of Certomondo, still open for worship; across the battlefield today roars the Strada Statale 71. In the centre of the plain, erected in 1921, is a pillar, the ‘Colonna di Dante’ – for, of all the grandees and warriors arrayed for battle that day at Campaldino, it is one twenty-three-year-old cavalryman who is remembered by the rest of the world.

  It hath been heretofore my chance to see

  Ho
rsemen with martial order shifting camp,

  To onset sallying, or in muster ranged,

  Or in retreat sometimes outstretched for flight:

  Light armed squadrons and fleet foragers

  Scouring thy plains, Arezzo! Have I seen,

  And clashing tournaments, and tilting jousts,

  Now with the sound of trumpets, now of bells,

  Tabors, or signals made from castled heights,

  And with inventions multiform, our own,

  Or introduced from foreign land…

  [Inf. XXII.1–11, Cary]

  When he reaches Purgatory, Dante encounters Buonconte da Montefeltro, one of the great cavalry leaders of the Ghibellines of Arezzo. Buonconte had been a key figure in the origin of the war with Arezzo, since it was he who had helped to expel the Guelfs from the city in 1287, thereby precipitating the crisis. His body was never found on the battlefield, where some 1,700 Ghibellines died. When Dante meets his departed spirit among the souls of the late repentant, Buonconte laments the fact that neither his wife nor his daughters ever remembered him in their prayers. His description of his lonely end is a brilliant evocation of a death. Wounded on the plain of Campaldino, he had staggered up the hill, just above Bibbiena, where the river Archiano flows into the Arno. There, with the name of the Virgin Mary on his lips, he died. The Devil furiously shouted, ‘O thou of Heaven, why rob me?’ as an angel swooped to save his soul. So much for the fate of his spirit. But it is in the description of what happens to his mortal remains that Dante wrote lines which any reader of the Purgatorio will remember. A storm bursts. After that hot Saturday, Dante remembers the cloudburst and imagines the corpse of the slain being drenched by the rain. After the piety of the death, and the request for prayers, comes the blank Homeric description of the corpse washed by the rain. This warrior in his life was famous. In death, even his family have forgotten to honour him, and his corpse is lost. To that extent, he speaks, like an Unknown Warrior, for all the slain in war.

  ‘The rain fell and the overflow that earth

  could not absorb rushed to the gullies

  ‘and gathering in surging torrents, poured

  headlong down the seaward stream with so much rage

  nothing could hold it back.

  ‘At its mouth the swollen Archiano found

  my frozen corpse and swept it down the Arno,

  undoing at my chest the cross

  ‘my arms had made when I was overcome by pain.

  It spun me past its banks and to the bottom,

  Then covered and enclosed me with its spoils.’

  [Purg. V.119–29, Robert and Jean Hollander’s translation]

  X

  DEATH OF BEATRICE

  ALMOST EXACTLY A YEAR AFTER THE BATTLE OF CAMPALDINO, ON 9 June 1290, Beatrice died. The direct experience of a battle, at which so many lost their lives, can only have quickened Dante’s sense of the obvious fact that we are all mortal. During an illness, he tells us that he was overcome with fits of weeping, and he said to himself, ‘One day, even your most gracious Beatrice must die’ [VN XXIII, Barbara Reynolds’s translation]. In the delirium of fever he saw what might have been an inward vision or a dream in sleep.

  First, as my mind began to wander, I saw faces of dishevelled women, who said: ‘You too will die’. And then, after these women, other faces appeared, strange and horrible to look at, saying: ‘You are dead’. Then, my imagination still wandering, I came to some place I did not know, where I saw women going about the street, weeping and in disarray, in terrible distress. I seemed to see the sun grow dark and stars turn to such a colour that I thought they were weeping; birds flying in the air fell dead, and the earth trembled with great violence. As I marvelled in my fantasy, growing very much afraid, I thought that a friend came to me and said: ‘Do you not know? Your wonderful lady has departed from this world.’ Then I began to weep most piteously, and I wept not only in my dreams but with my eyes, which were wet with real tears. I thought I was looking up into the heavens, where I seemed to see a multitude of angels returning to their realm, and before them floated a little cloud of purest white. The angels were singing to the glory of God and the words I seemed to hear were: Osanna in excelsis, and that was all I could make out. Then my heart, which was so full of love, said to me: ‘It is true that our lady is lying dead.’ And when I heard this, I seemed to go to see the body in which that most noble and blessed soul had been; and the illusion was so powerful that I saw my lady lying dead, and women seemed to be covering her, that is, her head, with a white veil. On her face was such an expression of serenity that she seemed to say: ‘I now behold the fountainhead of peace.’

  [VN XXIII, Reynolds]

  But she was not yet dead. Later, he saw her with her friend Giovanna, a beautiful young woman whose nickname was the Spring (Primavera). It means she who will come first, and he thought that it was appropriate that Beatrice should be preceded by one whose name is the female version of John. For John the Baptist came as the herald of Christ. In the sonnet which the thought inspired, he said, ‘one marvel followed the next’. Even in this very early poem, and before he has developed the idea of Beatrice which animates the Comedy, she had become a Christ-figure. He tells us that although she was full of humility, many who met her said, ‘This is no woman; this is one of the fairest angels of Heaven’ [VN XXVI, Reynolds].

  But then – she died. At the age of twenty-four. We do not know why. The most likely cause is that she died in childbirth. The death of Beatrice was one of the great pivotal imaginative moments in Dante’s life. Only his exile from Florence can compare with it in significance to his personal mythology. How he loved her, and upon what inner journeys this love was now to lead him, will take up much of the rest of this book.

  The death of Beatrice called forth nothing less than the words of the prophet Jeremiah which were traditionally applied in the liturgy of the Church to the desolation of the Holy City after the death of the Saviour. Beatrice had left not merely her banker husband, but the whole city widowed – ‘How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become a widow, she that was great among the nations.’ [VN XXVIII, Musa]

  Beatrice is not a symbol any more than Christ is a symbol, or the Eucharistic Host is a symbol. Beatrice, however, is a figure, and in the fullness of time, Dante will work out that she has been for him the means by which he understood the very meaning of love itself. But though neither she, nor Christ, nor the Eucharistic Host are symbols, they manifest themselves to us, to our minds, in clusters of meaning which include symbolism.

  Number symbolism is of everlasting significance to Dante. Beatrice is not merely associated with the number Nine: more than that – this number was her very self. ‘Questo numero fu ella medesima’ [VN XXIX].

  Dante met Beatrice when she was (almost) nine and he was nine, and he formed what we can assume to be that deep love of which only children are capable. It is important that he loved her then, partly because the love antedated the arrival of explicitly sexual desire. In his discovery of the mysteries of love, sex has its part, but it is present neither at the beginning nor at the end.

  It came after another nine years had passed, with the erotic encounter and the erotic dream of Beatrice aged eighteen.

  The ninth was the date on which she was to die. And though to us she died on 6 June, if you reckon her death by the Arabic calendar, she died on the ninth day of their ninth month (Tisrin). She died within an hour after sunset. The first hour of the Arab ninth day would be the first after the sunset on the Roman eighth.1

  Three is the number of the Holy Trinity. As three-squared, Nine, Beatrice has already become a figure who carries God-bearing significance. Nine is the number of the sacred planets. It is through the nine planetary circles that Dante will travel, accompanied by Beatrice, towards his heavenly vision in Paradise. Earth, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn and the Primum Mobile. St Bonaventure writes of the Hebrews, who besought Pharaoh in the Book o
f Exodus to go for three days into the wilderness to sacrifice to the Lord their God. This was an emblem of the threefold illumination of the soul which occurs at evening, morning and noon. We are threefold beings, made up of matter, intelligence and our eternal souls.2

  Beatrice is three times three, and dying in the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month, this child first known aged nine is the Figure of Love Itself, a square of the Trinity, if one short of the perfect number ten. She is, in other words, all that we can ever know of love until we gaze upon the face of God Himself.

  Beatrice from now onwards will carry all these significances, and many more, in Dante’s head. At the end of the book which her death inspired, the Vita Nuova, Dante quotes a passage from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. It is where the philosopher says that the greatest and the most comprehensive truths are difficult to grasp because they are so simple. ‘In as much as difficulty is of two kinds, its cause may lie not in the things, but in us; for as the eyes of bats are to the light of day, so is perception of our soul towards things which in the order of nature, are the clearest of all’ [Conv., T. Okey and P. H. Wicksteed’s translation].

  The death of Beatrice, as well as being a reality, was a figure of this bewilderment, this loss of a childhood simplicity of faith and vision. The Eternal Nine, who is the burning ardent love he felt in childhood, who is the purity of Christian faith, who is the simplicity which is too great for complicated minds to grasp, this Nine was to be lost. Dante now prepared, in his adult complexity, to lose her; to lose her and to betray her – for a while. But his pilgrimage will lead eventually to a recovery of her, the vision of her, what Charles Williams in his exceptional book The Figure of Beatrice calls the ‘Beatrician quality’.

  She dies. Innumerable young lovers have mourned such a death. Innumerably more have regretted the disappearance if not of Beatrice yet of that quality in Beatrice, the particular glorious Beatrician quality. Innumerably more have not regretted it, have almost not noticed it, or have noticed it and easily reconciled themselves to it. It is from that too-easy reconciliation that all aged imbecilities arise, and even the not so aged. ‘Young love’, ‘calf love’, ‘it won’t last’, ‘you mustn’t expect’, ‘a quiet affection’, and all the rest of the silly phrases – silly not in themselves but in their sound, borrowing silliness from the voices that sound them.3