Dante in Love

by A. N. Wilson

So it was always going to be a difficult thing for Henry to win his crown. The all-important ceremonial aspect of becoming Holy Roman Emperor had a threefold procedure. The candidate was first crowned in Aachen, the burial-place of the Emperor Charlemagne. Then, the Iron Crown of Lombardy was placed on his head at Monza, near Milan. Finally, he was, in ideal circumstances, taken to Rome and made Emperor in a ceremony presided over by the Pope. Clement V would never actually set foot in Italy, but already, in July 1309, he would proclaim Henry to be King of the Romans.

  Meanwhile, the ‘Crown of Charlemagne’ – the crown which had certainly been worn by Conrad III – and the swords of Charlemagne and St Maurice had been sent from the various fortresses where they were kept in Germany to Aachen, where on 6 January 1309 – the Feast of the Epiphany, the day when the Church commemorated the arrival of the Kings to kneel at the foot of the Saviour – Henry had the first part of his coronation: the crowning as the King of Germany. He was invested with the priestly robes of alb, dalmatic, stole, girdle and gauntlets, with stockings, shoes, and the great cope worn by Frederick II at his coronation. This rich purple oriental stuff had been fashioned by Saracen artists at Palermo and around its border in ancient Arabic characters is embroidered the legend, ‘Woven at the royal manufactory, the seat of happiness and honour, where prosperity and perfection, merit and distinction abound; where boasts of progress, glorious good fortune, wonderful splendour and munificent endowment, which glide by in continual pleasures without end or change; which is animated by feelings of honour and attachment, in promoting happiness, maintaining prosperity, and in encouraging activity. In the capital of Sicily in the year of Hegira 528 [i.e. AD 1133].’1

  Before Henry had so much as entered Italy, the Guelfs and Ghibellines were lining up for and against him. The Ghibelline Pisans had sent him a gift of 60,000 florins while he was still in Lausanne,2 but the Pisan Guelfs, together with Florence, Lucca and Volterra, had all declared themselves against the new Emperor.

  By the time his rival John was being crowned in Prague as King of Germany, Henry, perhaps with some magic luck given him by his coronation cope, had already crossed the Alps. He reached Turin in October 1310 and there he received the homage of the Lombard cities. Verona, Mantua and Modena – all Ghibelline – were exultant. But even the Guelf cities of Pavia and Piacenza were prepared to send emissaries to greet the new Emperor. Henry declared that he favoured neither Ghibelline nor Guelf, but only sought to impose peace. On the Feast of the Epiphany, 1311, he was crowned with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, not in Monza, as it happened, but in the cathedral at Milan.

  How much Imperial regalia survived for this ceremony is less certain. Gregory di Montelungo, the papal legate in the time of Frederick II, had been a bishop untroubled by the pacifist injunctions of the Gospel. He had held Parma for the papal forces. One morning when the Emperor had gone hunting, Bishop Gregory attacked his walled camp and carried off much booty, including much of the Imperial regalia. A common fellow – nicknamed Curtus passus – was found peddling the Imperial crown in the streets of Parma. He managed to get 200 imperial pounds (libros imperiales) for the prized object, a heavy crown set with many precious stones which the gossipy friar Salimbene examined in the sacristy of Santa Maria Maggiore.3 Centuries later, the treasures looted on that day found their way into the treasury of Maria Theresa in Vienna.

  To Dante, of less importance than the jewels themselves, would have been the profound religious significance of the event. Salvation itself had come to Italy. Dante was among those who paid personal tribute to the newly crowned Emperor. He shuffled forward in the queue of those who did obeisance to the iron-crowned figure to kiss his feet. As he did so, he wrote that ‘when my hands handled thy feet and my lips paid their debt, then did my spirit exult in thee, and I spoke silently with myself, “Behold the Lamb of God. Behold him who hath taken away the sins of the world”’ [Ep. VII.2, Wicksteed].

  Scandal was caused in many human breasts, including Dante’s, by Pope Boniface VIII claiming absolute temporal power. But Dante reverses the monstrosity. Rather than supporting a Pope’s political power, he gives to the Emperor the Christ-like status of being one who does not merely bring social or economic stability but the actual absolution of sin.

  In the Purgatorio Dante makes an obscure prophecy. A Deliverer is going to come.

  I see with certainty, and therefore I tell you,

  that stars, safe from any obstacle or hindrance,

  are drawing near, in which will come

  five hundred and ten and five

  as a messenger of God to slay that thief,

  and the giant too with whom she is making mischief.

  [Purg. XXXIII.43, author]

  There have been many attempts to explain who is meant by this obscure numerological code. A recent convoluted one, by Barbara Reynolds, is that the Latin numeral DXV – 115 – should first be spelt out as Italian. So, D, or 500, is said as cinquecento (Italian for 500). When spoken, this sounds identical to cinqu’e cento – 5 and 100, or 105. Then you are left with X (10) and V (5) – which if put together in Arabic numerals also come to 105. You then have to put the Italian word for one – uno – in front of all this – ‘Un’ cinqu’e cento’ – I.105. What you have then is a line reference to Dante’s own poem. The mysterious DXV becomes ‘see Inferno I.l.105’, where there is a reference to the deliverer of Italy being born between ‘feltro e feltro’. Dr Reynolds believes that this in turn refers not, as so many have guessed, to an individual deliverer, such as Can Grande. Rather, the remedy for Italy’s ills can be found between the felt covers of a lawbook. Italy will be saved by a return to the rule of law. This explanation seems to involve so many bits of code-breaking that even Dante’s complex mind would have recoiled from it. Not least, I find unconvincing the fact that the Latin numeral D – 500 – has to be translated not merely as cinquecento, which it clearly could be – but as Un’ (i.e. Book I of the Inferno) cinqu’e cento – 105. So, ingenious as it is, the Reynolds reading is unconvincing.

  Edward Moore (editor of the Oxford Dante) in 1903 came up with as ingenious an explanation as any, and it makes good sense to suppose that the number means ARRICO or Henry. To get this interpretation you have to use the Hebrew alphabet, and then you have to give the value of 4 to the letter O. It is true that the medieval symbol for 4 very often was O. Dante would not have had to be deeply versed in Hebrew to have known that, while only a few Latin letters corresponded to numerals (C, D, I, L, V, X), the Hebrew characters all corresponded to numbers – a fact of profound significance in the Kabbala. There were plenty of Jews in Italy with whom Dante could have consulted if he had needed to confirm the matter. Of the twenty-two Hebrew letters, Aleph = 1, Resh = 200, I = Yod = 10, Kaph or coph = 100. This would give us:

  a = 1

  r = 200

  r = 200

  i = y = 10

  c or k = 100

  o = 4

  515

  As Moore says, ‘The process of thus giving a numerical value to names and words was a thoroughly familiar one in the time of Dante and long before. The chances against any given name (especially that of one whom every consideration of probability points to as being almost certainly the person indicated in the context) corresponding thus precisely with a large number like this are simply enormous.’ Moore also points out that DVX – ‘the Leader’ in Latin – is spelt by the same set of characters.

  A number of different characters have been proposed as the DVX deliverer, including Dante’s Verona patron Can Grande, but it is surely inconceivable that Dante could have spoken of any political figure in these terms other than the one before whom he knelt in Milan Cathedral and inwardly exclaimed, as John the Baptist had done when he met Christ, ‘Behold the Lamb of God!’. The DVX, the Leader, the Deliverer, the DXV (the Latin number 515) all have to be one and the same, namely Henry VII. Dante was a volatile man, and changeable in his opinions, but even he could not have looked for more than one political saviour in whom h
e was prepared to invest so much hope. And besides, apart from Henry VII, there was no other candidate for the Imperial throne whom Dante supported.

  It cannot be proved beyond any question, but it looks overwhelmingly probable that, at the end of the Purgatorio, he is looking to Henry VII for deliverance. Since Henry died in 1313, it means that the Purgatorio was written before that point. It is the most political of the three books in the Comedy. In its sixth canto, Rome is described as a widow. Widowed and lonely, day and night she weeps [Purg. VI.113]. This is one of the many moments in the Purgatorio where you feel the timescale is confusing. At the supposed date of the vision, 1300, Rome was widowed because its Emperor, Albert the German, was not there – had failed to take up the difficult mantle of Empire by fighting his way through the Guelf cities and taking possession of the Caesars’ domains. But, unsatisfactory as Boniface VIII might have been in Dante’s view, you could hardly describe the man who instituted the Jubilee, and filled the Holy City with an unprecedented number of pilgrims to the tombs of the Apostles, as having abandoned the place. Rome is widowed in the Purgatorio because the poet is momentarily thinking of it in the year before Henry VII began his march through Italy. There is a double time-scale at work here, even if you do not also believe that Dante would have gone back to the Purgatorio and revised it.

  The question must also remain of when he wrote his political tract on monarchy. Scholars are divided between those who think that this tract – calmer in tone than the letters, but broadly speaking conveying the same viewpoint – belongs, likewise, to the period of Henry VII’s lifetime, and was perhaps written as Henry made his way to be crowned in Rome; and those who believe that in tone and ethos it is calmer, more distant, and that it belongs to the very end of his life. Those who take this latter view have on their side the fact that it contains a reference to Dante’s last poem, the Paradiso. In Book I of De Monarchia, we read that the principle of freedom is ‘the greatest gift given by God to human nature as I have already said in the Paradiso of the Comedy’. I do not think this is a matter of any great moment. The phrase could easily have been interpolated by a later scribe and thereby incorporated into all later manuscripts. In this book, therefore, the narrative accepts Moore’s interpretation of the DXV prophecy, and an early dating of De Monarchia, placing both texts within the hectic three-year period of Henry VII’s descent through Italy.

  Robert of Anjou had already journeyed to Avignon, where on 30 September 1310 he had been crowned the King of Naples and Sicily by the Pope. (Under the Normans, Southern Italy and Sicily were united, their kingdom sometimes known as the Two Sicilies, or the Kingdom of Naples, or the Kingdom of Naples and Sicily.) On his return to Italy, he lost no time in rallying Guelf cities and families to his standard. The situation led to instability in almost every single Italian city. In fundamentally Ghibelline cities, emissaries from Robert would sow seeds of discord, and in Guelf cities the Imperial emissaries would do likewise. Throughout 1311, Henry’s small army was making as much havoc as it could in the supposed interests of bringing peace to the peninsula. In the summer of 1311, he besieged Brescia. ‘Remember,’ wrote their Florentine allies, ‘that the safety of all Italy and all Guelfs depends upon your resistance. The Latins must always hold the Germans in enmity, seeing that they are opposed in act and deed, in manners and soul; not only is it impossible to serve, but even to hold any intercourse with that race.’4

  No siege is pleasant. The idea of a siege is that an invading army surrounds a group of civilians and waits for them to starve. Henry’s siege of Brescia, however, was particularly unpleasant. When he took prisoners, they were hanged. Tebaldo de’Brusati, who was deemed a traitor to the Imperial cause, was trussed in a cowhide. Hand and foot were tied to a separate ox, each of whom was then driven in opposite directions until Tebaldo had been torn apart.5 ‘Lo now is the acceptable time when arise the signs of consolation and peace’, had been the words of Dante’s Epistola V, welcoming the Emperor to Italian soil.

  The siege of Brescia also led to a large number of Henry’s German mercenaries dying, either from disease or wounds. His own brother was killed. The siege gained nothing, though Brescia eventually surrendered before the Emperor’s severely diminished army limped on to Genoa.

  Dante, while the Emperor’s army made its clumsy progress, wrote his series of deranged letters – ‘O Italy, henceforth rejoice; though now to be pitied by the very Saracens, yet soon to be envied throughout the world! Because thy bridegroom, the solace of the world and the glory of thy people, the most clement Henry, Divus and Augustus and Caesar, is hastening to the bridal’ [Ep. V.10, Wicksteed]. That was written perhaps in September 1310. By the end of March 1311, Dante was staying as the guest of the Ghibelline Count Guido Novello di Battifolle, in that self-same Casentino where he fell in love four years earlier. Here he penned what was perhaps the strangest of all his letters, to the wicked inhabitants of Florence who failed to acknowledge their new Emperor. The man who only a few years before had spoken of all Italy becoming as it were a new nation through a discovery of a common language, now railed in the most unbalanced language against his own fellow-citizens for not wanting to be ruled by a German army. ‘You who transgress divine and human law, whom a dire rapaciousness hath found ready to be drawn into every crime – doth not the dread of a second death pursue you?’ He imagines Florence being destroyed if they fail to submit. ‘The fortifications which ye have not reared in prudence against necessity, but changed at random and for wantonness… these ye shall mournfully gaze upon, as they fall in ruins before the battering-ram and are burnt with fire… Ye shall look upon the grievous sight of your temples, thronged with the daily concourse of matrons, given up to the spoiler, and your wondering and unknowing little ones, destined to expiate the sins of their sires’ [Ep. VI.4, Wicksteed].

  The old women and the children of Florence must be slaughtered to appease God’s, or Dante’s, anger. (Same thing, perhaps.) By the time he wrote Epistola VII on 17 April, still at Poppi in the Casentino, very near the old battlefield of Campaldino, Dante is urging the Emperor himself to attack Florence. He does so in language which does suggest mental illness. ‘Dost thou not know, O most excellent of princes, and from the watch tower of highest exaltation, dost thou not perceive where the fox of this stench skulks in safety from the hunters? For the culprit drinketh not of the headlong Po, nor of thy Tiber, but her jaws do ever pollute the streams of the torrent of Arno; and knowest thou not, perchance, this plague is named Florence?’ [Ep. VII.7, Wicksteed].

  But Dante had once again backed the wrong horse. Florence and European nationalism were to triumph. Imperialism was, truly speaking, dead, even before the calamity of Henry VII’s death actually occurred.

  Far from bringing peace to Italy, Henry VII’s arrival greatly increased the havoc and bloodshed. The Florentines, who continued to believe the things which Dante himself had believed until a decade earlier – that their self-determined future lay in independence of Imperial interference – were not offered to the Almighty as a holocaust to revenge Dante’s personal malice.

  The Emperor reached Pisa on 6 March 1312, and remained there a little over a month, welcomed with great pomp. Here the news reached him that Robert of Naples had reached Rome with an army. With only 1,000 horsemen and a small body of infantry, Henry VII himself set out for Rome. They reached the Eternal City on 7 May. He was easily able to take possession of the Capitol, but the Guelf forces had Castel Sant’Angelo, and when Henry and his army tried to take possession of St Peter’s and to grasp the Imperial crown, they were driven back, with heavy loss of life.

  The Roman populace, however, was on his side, and it was because of popular pressure that the bishops were prepared to abandon custom and to conduct the Imperial coronation, not in St Peter’s but in St John Lateran on the Feast of the Apostles Peter and Paul, 29 June. By now, the absent Pope in Avignon had switched his allegiance and no longer supported Henry’s candidacy. Without papal blessing, Henry was proclaime
d Emperor by the people. ‘With the Popes driven out of Rome, he was raised up to the supreme Imperial power, solely by the recognition of the people, he was led in triumph to the Capitol.’6 Dante would have echoed the words quite solemnly.

  Henry, disastrously, now chose to follow Dante’s advice and to besiege Florence. Crossing the Campagna, the citizens’ army contracted fever and many died. He halted at Figline. The Florentines, who got wind of what was afoot, marched a large infantry army and 1,800 cavalry to the castle of Incisa. Neither side was ready for battle. The Emperor continued to Florence by another route and reached it on 19 September. Astoundingly, the citizens had not been warned by their army of the Emperor’s approach. Accompanied by their bishop and his clergy, brandishing swords, they came to the walls of the city. By the time the Emperor’s army had begun the siege, the Florentine troops had been joined by reinforcements from the Guelf league – Siena, Pistoia, Bologna, a huge army of footsoldiers and 4,000 cavalry, to meet the Emperor’s 800 German knights, and 1,000 Italian footsoldiers. Even then there was no battle. By November the Emperor lifted the siege and made off to Poggibonsi where he spent the winter, remaining there until 6 March 1313. With shrinking provisions, he knew that he stood no chance of defeating his enemies. He managed the short distance to Pisa in three days, arriving there by 9 March. By now, his money had run out, his army had been greatly diminished, and his health was broken.

  Henry switched tactics, and began rather grandly to issue directives as if his Imperium were universally recognized. He forbade the Florentines from coining money. They took no notice. He made matters worse by authorizing the Marquis of Monferrato to fabricate false coinage marked with the Florentine stamp. We know from the Inferno what Dante, when sane, thought of this practice. Henry went on to condemn Robert of Sicily as a traitor to the Empire, and he set to work to build up an army again, with the aim of attacking that kingdom. The Pope threatened him with excommunication. He built up a large cavalry, 2,500 foreign mercenaries and 1,500 Italians. The Genoese equipped seventy galleons for him, and the Pisans a further twenty. But on 24 August at Buonconvento, Henry VII suddenly died. He was not yet forty years old.