by A. N. Wilson
The violent feud which existed between the Donati and the Cerchi families was central to all the new political reforms. It was precisely to devise a way of solving political differences without being sucked into the Mafia-culture imposed on city life by the magnate families that Giano della Bella had introduced the Ordinances of Justice. Dante made a powerful effort not to take sides in the Donati–Cerchi matter, but ultimately it was impossible not to be involved. Both were Guelfs – they were the chief supporters of the Guelf idea. But the Donati – Dante’s in-laws – were Black Guelfs, that is to say they were close to the ascendant family of Anjou.
After Charles Martel’s visit in spring 1294, he with his father Charles, King of Naples, had themselves clambered up the rocks to persuade the Abbot of Santa Maria di Faifula – old Father Pietro del Morrone – to become Pope Celestine V. After the debacle of the holy hermit’s Papacy, ending with abdication in December 1294, the Black Guelfs of Florence, the Donati prominent among them, had welcomed the arrival of the smooth politician and brilliant canon lawyer Boniface VIII as Pope. The White Guelfs, ardently supported by Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti, were headed by the Cerchi. They advocated keeping their distance from Boniface while broadly supporting papal claims against the Ghibellines. By 1300, it was with this faction that Dante had perhaps inevitably come to be identified.
And now we are coming full circle to the mid-way of this our life, where we began. Dante is coming to his moment of crisis. Dante was a victim of events, rather than their instigator. With figures such as the unscrupulous Big Baron, Corso Donati, at work to seize power back for his family and faction in Florence, he did not stand a chance of surviving politically, especially since Boniface VIII and the French monarchy supported Donati and the Black Guelfs.
The year 1300, in which the Comedy was set, was a momentous and tragic one for Dante. The year of the Jubilee in Rome was also the year of the terrible ‘Calendimaggio’ in Florence, the fateful 1st of May which brought to a head the feuding between Black and White Guelfs. It was exactly twenty-six years since, during the May celebrations in 1274, the child Dante had fallen in love with the child Beatrice. Now she was dead. A new generation of girls and young women danced through the streets in floral costume; new youths in fine silks ensconced themselves in gaily coloured booths and tents erected at various points of the city. There were processions of the Madonna, there were games, merry-makings and parties. ‘The Devil,’ says Dino Compagni, ‘finding the young more adapted to his deceptions than their elders’, made use of a gang of youths, who invaded one of the suppers given by the Cerchi family. In the street brawl which followed, Ricoverino de’ Cerchi lost his nose.
The city was in a state of tension for the next few weeks. On the Vigil of St John the Baptist on 23 June, the city’s patron saint, there was another occasion for crowds to gather, and for alcohol to flow freely. The Consuls of the Arts led the civic procession to the Baptistery. A party of Donati’s aristocratic toughs fell on them, shouting out, ‘We are they who beat the Ghibellines at Campaldino and yet you have deprived us of all the offices and dignities of our city.’
Inevitably, there were clashes on both sides. Dino Compagni the chronicler was among those who deliberated with the ‘Consiglio de’ Savi’ who thought that the only way of bringing peace to the city was for rioters of both sides to be punished with exile. Dante was on the council and was forced to agree.
Each man kills the thing he loves. Quite how much, by 1300, Dante still loved Guido Cavalcanti is open to question. Dante, by now perhaps the most famous poet in Tuscany, with his fame spreading all over Italy, was directly responsible for the death of the man he once called best friend – the man who was not merely his friend, but his poetic mentor, the man who taught him to be a poet.
If we are to see the significance of Cavalcanti, we must start with his end, rather than his beginning. We must start in the Jubilee Year of 1300. Then, we must go back and see how important his friendship and patronage were to the early Dante and meet the group of Florentine poets among whom Dante learnt his craft.
In the sixth circle of Hell there are found those heretical souls who are being punished for not believing in immortality. They are entombed in flame. The loose term to describe their heresy is Epicureanism. Here Dante meets Farinata degli Uberti, who died in 1264, one of the leading Ghibellines in Tuscany. He had been banished from Florence in 1258 and, with the help of Manfred, son of the heretical Emperor Frederick II, Uberti had settled in Siena until their great victory at the Battle of Montaperti in 1260. After his death, Farinata degli Uberti and his wife were formally condemned for heresy. Farinata’s proud soul, when encountered in Hell, reminds Dante Alighieri that he had twice routed the Guelfs, the opposing party to which his family had adhered. Dante, as full of vindictive party spirit in the world beyond as he was in Italy, snarls back that ‘you people’, the Uberti, had not learnt the art of return. That is, when they suffered exile, they were never allowed back to Florence.
Dante the author of the poem knows that he will himself suffer this terrible punishment – exile from Florence. But at this point in the poem, at what is supposed to be Good Friday in 1300, Dante the character in his own poem is in ignorance of his fate. And this is the first moment in the poem when someone is going to break to him the horrible news. Another heretic emerges from his fiery tomb to confront Dante. He is kneeling. His name is Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti. Whereas Uberti was a character in the recent history of Florence who had been banished from Florence before Dante was even born, the Cavalcanti were his close contemporaries. And Guido Cavalcanti, the son of the abject figure met in Hell, the kneeling Cavalcante in his burning tomb, was described in another place11 by Dante as his ‘primo’ – first, best, foremost friend: and Dante, in this very year of the vision, 1300, was destined to be responsible for Guido’s death.
The scene in Hell, therefore, with Dante the character in 1300 (described by Dante the poet some years afterwards) is one which is full of dramatic irony. To one reader at least, ‘In the famous Canto X of Inferno the confrontation with Guido’s father is marked by spiteful equivocations, bad faith and cunning malevolence on Dante’s part. It is in no way an Exorcism.’12 As we shall come to see, Dante’s whole artistic and spiritual journey – dramatized in the Comedy – is based precisely on acts of rejection, of disloyalty, of iconoclasms towards authority-figures – towards the Pope, his own teachers and early influences. Dante knows, and we the readers are supposed to know, that Guido Cavalcanti, the cleverest and one of the greatest love poets in the Italian language, had fallen foul of the factional politics which was the bane of his city. It was Dante himself who, as Prior in the summer of 1300, just a few months after the fictional encounter with old Cavalcanti in Hell, sent Guido to what would be his death. In 1297, Guido had been involved in a violent incident; he had incited the Cerchi family on one of their periodic assaults on the Donati. His part in the affray cost him a hefty fine. Then, on May Day 1300, as we have seen, an armed fight broke out between the two families. It was decided to punish both sides equally, and to send the ringleaders into exile. Guido was sent to Sarzana, where he fell ill of malaria. He was allowed to come back to Florence to die. Villani tells us he was ‘buried among the tears of the good citizens’.
As the symptoms of malaria gripped him in Sarzana, and as he lost hope of his ever coming home alive, Guido wrote the lyric ‘Because I do not hope to turn again’. He had often used the trope, in his love poetry, of sending the verses, the Ballade, to his beloved. ‘Dear song, go lightly to Toulouse for me,/And steal into the church of La Daurade,/And humbly pray that by the courtesy/Of some fair lady there you may be led…’13 had been one of the wittiest of these lyrics, since, even as he sends this Ballade to the girl in Toulouse (Mandetta), he is falling under the spell of a country girl who was singing a love song. The next Ballade, with some of the confusing signals of a letter in an epistolary novel – is it meant to make Mandetta jealous? Or is it simply a playful acc
ount of the fickleness of his own heart? – actually tells the ‘noble’ mistress about the allures of the peasanty one.
Now do you know, my ballad, when you stand
Before my noble lady, what to say
About my sorrowful and anguished mind?
Tell her, ‘My sender groans the time away
Because he cannot hope to see the day
When he finds Pity of such courtesy
That she would keep his lady company14
Now, in the grip of malaria, dying, he sends his Ballade, not to the South of France – the nursery of European poetry – but to his own home, Tuscany.
You know, my little song, how firmly bound
Death holds me, and how fast life ebbs away15
It is a fascinating fact that, even in the face of death, Guido continues to be the philosopher of love. These lines are as ‘modern’ as the thoughts which grip young Hans Castorp up Thomas Mann’s snowbound Magic Mountain when, dying from tuberculosis, he exerts himself on the ski slopes and has a mysterious sense of pity for his actual heart, the heart muscles struggling for life, which he had witnessed through the X-ray machinery in the clinic. The dying Cavalcanti looks, likewise, at his heart, not as a figure of speech, but as the organ of life itself. In the medieval world the heart was also the source of thought.
To you, my little song, for friendship’s sake,
This timid trembling soul I now commend:
In pity for its wretched state, O take
It with you to my lady, for I send
You both to her. There in her presence stand,
Ah, little song and sigh.16
In death, Cavalcanti wishes to present heart, soul and mind, not to God but to the ideal of sexual and human love which he finds in the donna piacente. The Ballade ripples with ironies. One of them is that Guido, far from being the conventional worshipper in the temple of Courtly Love, spends much of his writing life dissecting the convention and in effect destroying it, complaining that, far from bringing joy, love produces chaos, and distracts the rational soul from its contemplation of virtue. In conventional Courtly Love poetry, the lady is cast as having ‘killed’ her victim by a haughty or indifferent glance. She is his enemy. Here, in perhaps the final poem which this great lyric genius was to write, he tells the Ballade itself to bear the glance of the enemy who will read the poem when it reaches Tuscany.
you’ll carry news of sighs
filled with pain and fear
but beware the glance
from an enemy of gentle nature
because of my mishap
you will be hindered
as well as rebuked by her
who would anguish me
after death
crying and new pain.17
It is a complicated thought. The Ballade, which is going to the lady like a messenger, has to avoid meeting her gaze; he is afraid that by bringing news of illness, the Ballade will banish thoughts of love. That is to say, Cavalcanti is, of course, setting the absurd conventions of Courtly Love poetry in perspective, by the elaborate courtesy. There is also, surely, buried in this dense strophe, another message – one which concerns Dante. Yes, the ‘enemy’ whose glance the Ballade must avoid is female: ‘Don’t look up when you return to Florence – you will find yourself staring at an enemy of gentle nature’. But what can be more ‘contrary to Nature’ than a friend, one who calls himself your best friend, sending you to your death in a malaria-infested swamp?
When, in the Inferno, Dante the character meets the shade of Guido’s father, however, these extraordinary events lie a few months in the future. Dante the poet knows they happened. They are among the most dramatic events of that pivotal crisis year of 1300. But they cannot be mentioned in the poem, which is supposed to be happening at Easter. Old Cavalcante, when he recognizes Dante, and realizes that this is a visitant from the material world, wonders why he is not accompanied by his best friend, his own son. This alone is a pregnant inquiry, since it implies that the two men, Guido and Dante, had at some stage been inseparable. Where one appeared – even on a short visit to Hell – Guido’s father would have expected to see the other. Dante replies ambiguously and, grief-stricken, the father sinks back into the tomb. Dante had not meant to deceive old Cavalcante – and it is at this moment that Farinata, still stung by Dante’s gibe about his family not having mastered the ‘arte’ of returning from exile, breaks the horrible news to the Dante-Character that he himself is destined to become an exile.
So, there is a lot going on in this remarkable exchange. Dante, the ‘primo’ friend of Cavalcanti, is unable to speak to his dead father. And perhaps he is partly silenced because Dante the narrator, Dante the poet, knows how soon Dante the politician is to be the instrument of his best friend’s death.
But there is more oddity, more irony, to come, later in the Comedy when Dante makes his visit to Purgatory. In Canto XI of that book, he meets the noted master of manuscript illumination, Oderisi da Gubbio. The illuminator is being purged for the sin of pride. He speaks of professional rivalry. While on earth, he was so proud of his beautiful manuscripts that he held fast to the belief that he surpassed the work of his great rival Franco Bolognese. Professional rivalry is, says Oderisi, endemic to the artistic process. The sin of pride is inexorably entangled with the desire to excel as an artist or a writer. ‘Fame is the spur which the clear spirit doth raise/The last infirmity of noble days,’ Milton says in Lycidas. And yet this cannot be achieved without the meretricious business of the artist being judged by his ‘public’. Once upon a time, he says, Cimabue was the foremost painter. Then he was overtaken by Giotto. Then again – in poetry… And here, once again, we encounter one of those knots of heartless irony which delighted Dante. We are in the circle where pride is supposedly purged. But Dante’s own journey of purgation and sanctification is not complete. Oderisi tells the traveller that in the field of poetry the palm was once held by Guido Guinizelli of Bologna, but that he was outshone by Guido Cavalcanti of Florence. Perhaps, muses Oderisi, there is one already born who will ‘chase both of them from the nest’. There are no prizes for guessing who this will be. Even in the sacred Mountain of Purgatory, there fore, in the very spot where pride needs to be redeemed, Dante reveals his own pride in all its ruthlessness. Guido was not only to be driven from the nest in a metaphorical sense: he was sent away to the unhealthy swamps of Sarzana, where the mosquitoes killed him. And it was his best friend, his disciple and fellow-poet Dante Alighieri who performed the act of supplanting. Harold Bloom believed that Romantic poets were beset by the Anxiety of Influence, above all the Influence of Milton, whom they both absorbed into their systems and then needed to transform or to kill. They did so as an act of imaginative self-liberation; Dante, it would seem, did so, in those murderous times, as a literal and judicial act. He got Guido Cavalcanti out of his path. Granted, not everyone who visited the mosquito-infested swamps of Sarzana died of malaria; but it is extraordinary, by the time Dante reaches Purgatory, that he presents Guido purely as a rival to be supplanted, not as a friend to be mourned.
There is a further irony in these Cavalcanti references which we must absorb into our systems before we understand the strange nature of Dante the Catholic mystic’s journey to his vision of Almighty God. What were the views of Cavalcante Cavalcanti, the old father, about life after death and the immortality of the soul? We do not know, but we see him in Hell being punished alongside those who were definitely and publicly accused of materialism.
At the date of the supposed vision, Easter 1300, Dante’s supposed best friend is still alive, but his father – with apparently the same Averroist ideas as Guido about the perishability of the soul – is not in Purgatory, but in Hell. It is as if, not content to send Guido into exile and an early death in his own time, Dante effectually needed to all but damn him for eternity.
It was clear by now that no one in public life in Florence was safe from the reversals of fortune. We have already chronicled how, in 1301, Dan
te was one of the ambassadors summoned to Rome to discuss with the Pope the implications of Charles, Count of Valois, being introduced into the situation. It is confusing that so many French players in this story have the name of Charles. This is a cousin of Charles II of Anjou (the Lame) and of Charles Martel. His brother was Philip IV, Philip the Fair of France. Pope Boniface VIII had offered him the Imperial throne if he came to fight for the papal cause in Italy. He had promised to hang Corso Donati and favour the White Guelfs in Florence, but it was a hollow promise. Events now lurched out of the control even of the chief protagonists, many of whom met terrible ends.
Dante had been ‘stitched up’. The Pope wanted him, as a persuasive anti-Charles of Valois man, to be out of Florence while the dirty deed was done. Therefore Dante was kept at inordinate length by the Sovereign Pontiff in Rome. ‘Why are you so stubborn?’ was his cynical refrain. Corso Donati, meanwhile, entered Florence on 1 November. Charles of Valois had promised the podestà to have him hanged, but he did nothing to prevent Donati from letting loose a week-long orgy of violence on the city. The prisons were opened. Supporters of the Whites had their houses looted and burned. Rapes and murders were common. The Priors were forced to resign, and the new Black Priors instituted the exile and fine upon the poet. Marooned in Rome, he could make his way back to Tuscany, but never to Florence, never again. We do not know whether in the initial stages of his exile Dante went alone or whether he took his wife and children. In June 1302, the banishment order against him was extended to all male descendants once they had reached the age of fourteen – but we do not know the birth dates of his sons. Later in exile we do know he was reunited with the children – and perhaps, presumably! – with the wife.
