by Dante
31–33. Nicholas, whose gift-giving eventually made him the patron of Christmas, was a bishop in Asia Minor in the reign of Constantine in the fourth century. His renown for generosity is based upon his kindness in offering dowries of gold for the three daughters of an impoverished noble friend, who had been planning to sell them into prostitution in order to maintain them and himself. In the first two examples, poverty was itself seen as a sort of nobility, preferred both by Mary and by Fabricius to worldly wealth. Here things are a bit different, as Nicholas allows his friend to escape from poverty by arranging for his daughters’ dowries. [return to English / Italian]
34–39. Dante’s two questions (“Who were you? Why do you alone cry out?”) are accompanied by a promise to repay the favor of replies by procuring prayers for this penitent on earth. These three elements will structure the rest of the canto, given over almost entirely to the words of this as yet unnamed speaker.
The protagonist’s last phrase, concerning the brevity of human life, is memorably echoed near the conclusion of this cantica (Purg. XXXIII.54: “ ’l viver ch’è un correre a la morte” [the life that is a race to death]). [return to English / Italian]
40–42. Hugh Capet (we can infer that this is he from the next tercet, while he will offer a clear statement of his identity at verse 49) answers with the style of a man practiced in the ways of the political world. As a gentleman, he will respond to Dante only out of the goodness of his heart because he can see that Dante lives in grace; at the same time, like the pope who spoke before him (Purg. XIX.142–145), this father of a line of kings realizes there are few or none below who honor his memory. As he converses with Dante, we can observe that half of him lives in this new world of grace while half of him remembers the world he left behind. [return to English / Italian]
43–45. As the ancestor of a line of kings of France, Hugh had a crucial role in ruling the land that now casts its desiccating shadow over the “garden of the empire” (Purg. VI.105). We can imagine that to Dante, exiled as a result of French intervention in the affairs of Florence in collaboration with Boniface VIII in 1302, these words have a particularly bitter ring. [return to English / Italian]
46–48. For the series of events in Flanders that culminated in the uprising of the Flemish cities in 1302, see Singleton’s commentary. While the French did manage to hold on to some of the territory of Flanders, their military defeat at Courtrai in July 1302 must have seemed to Dante in some respects a punishment for what was done to Florence in the same year. Hugh’s words ring out as a prophetic hope to see his descendants justly punished, but have a particular resonance for an Italian auditor. See Santelli (Sant.2001.1), pp. 21–23, for the political atmosphere of the Italy in which Dante was composing this very political canto. [return to English / Italian]
49. The speaker at last fully identifies himself as Hugh Capet, who was in fact king of France (987–96), even if Dante did not know him as such. “The statements put by Dante into the mouth of Hugh Capet as to the origin of the Capetian dynasty are in several respects at variance with the historical facts, and can only be explained on the supposition that Dante has confused Hugh Capet with his father, Hugh the Great,…The facts are as follows: Hugh the Great died in 956; Louis V, the last of the Carlovingians, died in 987, in which year Hugh Capet became king; on his death in 996, he was succeeded by his son Robert, who had previously been crowned in 988 [to assure a Capetian continuity upon Hugh’s eventual death]. Dante makes Hugh Capet say: firstly, that he was the son of a butcher of Paris (verse 52), whereas common tradition assigned this origin not to Hugh Capet, but to his father, Hugh the Great; second, that when the Carlovingians came to an end he was so powerful that he was able to make his son king (vv. 53–60), whereas on the failure of the Carlovingian line Hugh Capet himself became king (987); and third, that with his son the Capetian line began (vv. 59–60), whereas in fact it began with himself” (T). Hugh’s control of the power over kingship is the alpha of which the rule of Philip the Fair, the French king as Dante was writing, is the omega. [return to English / Italian]
50–51. Bosco/Reggio (1979) offer a list of the ten kings who followed Hugh to the throne between 996 and 1314. Four of these indeed bore the name “Philip” and four, “Louis,” but it is the last in each of these groups who may be of greatest interest. Louis IX (1226–70) is one of the major figures of the Middle Ages, a great crusader, king, and saint. Of him Dante is—perhaps not surprisingly, given his hatred of France—resolutely silent; of Philip IV (the Fair—1285–1314), he is loquacity itself, vituperating him several times in this canto, but also in a number of other passages (Inf. XIX.85–87; Purg. VII.109–110; XXXII.155–156; Par. XIX.118–120). [return to English / Italian]
52. For Dante’s repetition of this common error concerning Hugh’s paternity see Toynbee’s remarks in the note to verse 49. [return to English / Italian]
53–54. Again Dante is misled, perhaps confusing events in the eighth century surrounding the last days of the Merovingian line, when Pippin the Short did put away his last possible political rival in a monastery. What Hugh had done was to have the last of the Carolingians, the Duke of Lorraine, imprisoned in 991. He remained in prison until his death a year later. See Bosco/Reggio’s comment on verse 54. [return to English / Italian]
55–60. Hugh’s account of himself as kingmaker is, once again, not in accord with history (see Toynbee, above in the note to verse 49): it was immediately after he himself was made king that he had his son, Robert, anointed as his successor. Thus his account of himself as father of the first of the line is an unwitting act of modesty, since he himself was the first in it. [return to English / Italian]
61–66. Hugh offers a brief and allusive recapitulation of four centuries of French expansionism, beginning with the continuing efforts to annex Provence, which avoided this fate until 1246, when a marriage between the brother of Louis IX, Charles of Anjou, was arranged with Beatrice, daughter of Raymond Berenger IV of Provence. And then, to make amends for this perfidy (per ammenda will be repeated, with increasing sarcasm, to create a triple identical rhyme, twice in the following tercet), France consolidated its territories by annexing three other territories that had been independent. [return to English / Italian]
67–81. And now the really dreadful deeds begin: a descent into the Italian peninsula where a series of members of the French royal house named Charles are given employment by being sent into Italy: Charles of Anjou, who is blamed for killing Conradin (the last hope of Italian Ghibellinism) at Tagliacozzo in 1268 (see Inf. XXVIII.17–18) and for poisoning Thomas Aquinas in 1274 (a rumor that appears to have been made out of whole cloth as part of Italian anti-French propaganda, but which Dante seems only too willing to propagate). Then Charles de Valois will take (we are once again in the realm of post-factum prophecy) Florence in 1301 on behalf of an alliance among the French, the papacy of Boniface, and the Black Guelphs of Corso Donati; it is not difficult to imagine Dante’s outrage at the intervention of this second Charles. Finally, the third of these wretched Frenchmen, Charles II, son of Charles of Anjou and king of Naples, is brought onstage to suffer Dante’s taunts, delivered by this French version of Dante’s ancestor Cacciaguida (see Par. XV–XVII), a benevolent ancestor of (in this case) an undeserving descendant. This Charles is portrayed as—after having lost a calamitous naval battle during the Sicilian Vespers in 1284 and, as a result, being held prisoner on his own ship—selling his daughter (there having been no intervention from St. Nicholas on his behalf, we may assume) into matrimony with Azzo VIII of Este in 1305. [return to English / Italian]
82–84. Hugh’s first apostrophe of Avarice parallels Dante’s at vv. 10–12. [return to English / Italian]
85–90. And now the worst of all the French arrives for his excoriation, King Philip IV (see note to Purg. VII.103–111 and to vv. 50–51, above). This king, who had been excommunicated by Boniface as a result of their dispute over the French king’s desire to tax the clergy, had his revenge. In Se
ptember 1303, the king’s representative, William of Nogaret, accompanied by an Italian ally, Sciarra Colonna, a member of the family that Boniface, aided by the advice of Guido da Montefeltro, had harmed (see Inf. XXVII.102), arrived in Anagni with a force of soldiers and, after physically assaulting the elderly pope, imprisoned him in his own palace, which they sacked. Boniface was eventually freed in a popular uprising against these intruders and made his way to Rome. But the insult to his person, both physical and spiritual, was apparently so great that he died on 12 October 1303. For a description in English of the outrage done to Boniface see Carroll’s commentary (1904).
Dante was no admirer of Boniface. The French attack upon the person of the pope, however, was an attack upon the holy office itself, and thus upon the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church. And thus Boniface is compared to Christ betrayed by Pontius Pilate and crucified, while the agents of Philip become the two thieves present at that event, but now represented as part of the torture administered to their victim.
For the possible dependence of Dante’s verses here on a poetic prayer to the Virgin composed by Boniface see Moore (Moor.1889.1), pp. 396–97; for the text of this poem see Artinian (Arti.1967.1). [return to English / Italian]
91–93. The “new Pilate” now directs his rage against the Templars. (For a more balanced view than Dante’s of Philip’s motives see Scott [Scot.1996.1), pp. 174–77.) “The Knights Templars were one of the three great military orders founded in Cent. xii for the defence of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. After having existed as a powerful and wealthy order for nearly two centuries they were in 1307 accused by Philip the Fair of heresy, sacrilege, and other hideous offences, in consequence of which he ordered their arrest, and by means of diabolical tortures wrung from them confessions (for the most part undoubtedly false) of their alleged enormities. Five years later, at Philip’s instigation, they were condemned by Clement V, and the order was suppressed by decree of the Council of Vienne (May, 1312); in the following year the Grand Master, Du Molay, was burned alive at Paris in the presence of the king. The French king’s motive in aiming at the destruction of the Templars was, it can hardly be doubted, a desire to get possession of the immense wealth of the order, as is implied by Dante, and stated in so many words by Villani (viii.92)” (T). When did Dante write this passage? Clearly sometime after 1307; and, perhaps nearly as clearly, before 1312. It is notable that none of the details of the denouement of this ugly scheme reached Dante’s page: sanza decreto (unsanctioned) the king sets out without the papal support necessary to justify such an action (it would come from that other detested Frenchman, Pope Clement V, only in 1312). [return to English / Italian]
94–96. Hugh’s second apostrophe parallels Dante’s (vv. 13–15) in hoping for divine vengeance to descend from above and smite the guilty, in this case most particularly Philip the Fair.
There are questions as to whether the poet meant the reader to think of the “vengeance” as reflecting his defeats in Flanders in 1302 (see Singleton [1973]), or Philip’s death while hunting, when his horse was overturned by a charging boar, in 1314 (the opinion of John of Serravalle [1416]), or neither of these events. As Trucchi (1936) points out, Dante clearly refers with joy to Philip’s death in November 1314 at Paradiso XIX.118–120. The notion that God’s vengeance for the events at Anagni in 1303 occurred in Flanders in 1302 hardly seems acceptable. Further, as Bosco/Reggio (1979) argue, since Dante does refer to Philip’s death in the next cantica, it only makes sense to believe that he did not yet know of it when he wrote this passage, for it would have been much too tempting a piece of information not to include. In any case, the result is as Dante probably would have wanted anyway; here he predicts only that such outrageous behavior will receive God’s eventual vengeance—it is but a matter of time. This seems the best understanding. The gleeful passage in Paradiso banks the promissory note that Dante writes us here.
At verse 35, Dante had inquired as to the speaker’s identity; it has taken Hugh sixty-two lines to answer him by including the history of France’s decline as a narrative of a family’s woe, from his virtue to Philip’s savagery, in just over three hundred years. Needless to say, for Dante, Hugh’s tale is still more important as the record of what went wrong for Italy, drawing her from her Roman-imperial destiny toward her near death (see Purg. VII.94–96), because of France’s malfeasance. [return to English / Italian]
97–102. To answer Dante’s second question, caused by his sense that only one penitent seemed to be crying out the names of the generous, Hugh is equally contorted and long-winded, only clearing up Dante’s miscomprehension at vv. 118–123. When he uttered the name of Mary (verse 19) he did what he and his companions do during the day, i.e., name the exemplars of generous lives; at night they turn from names that serve as “goads” to those that serve as “bridles,” those of the avaricious.
For Mary as “bride of the Holy Spirit,” Singleton (1973) cites Matthew 1:20: “For that which is begotten of her is of the Holy Spirit.” [return to English / Italian]
103–117. This is Dante’s most “crowded” group of exemplary figures in Purgatorio, eight of them presented in fifteen lines. Once again he divides his cast into biblical and pagan personages, here not in parallel pairings (as in Purg. XII.25–60) but chiastically:
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103–105. Virgil’s tale of Pygmalion’s avarice (Aen. I.340–364) is narrated by Venus to Aeneas. Pygmalion was king of Tyre and brother of Dido, married to wealthy Sychaeus. Pygmalion secretly murdered Sychaeus, whose shade then appeared to reveal everything in a dream to Dido, who consequently made off, with Sychaeus’s hidden stores of wealth, to her new life in Carthage, thus depriving Pygmalion of the gold he sought. [return to English / Italian]
106–108. Two back-to-back Ovidian narratives involving Midas (Metam. XI.100–193) may here be condensed into a tercet. In the first Bacchus allows Midas his famous “touch,” turning all to gold with disastrous results once he realizes he can no longer eat nor drink, and has to ask to have his gift withdrawn; in the second, Apollo metamorphoses Midas’s ears into the enormous ears of an ass because Midas, alone among the listeners, insisted on his opinion that Pan’s piping was more beautiful than Apollo’s playing of his lyre. Dante refers to this scene in his second Eclogue (Egl. II.50–53). It is not clear whether Midas is laughable only for his foolish avarice or for his ass’s ears as well. [return to English / Italian]
109–111. Achan’s theft of the treasure of the Israelites and its result (his being stoned to death by command of Joshua) is the subject of the entire seventh chapter of Joshua (7:1–26). [return to English / Italian]
112. Ananias and his wife, Sapphira, having sold some of their land to make a donation in support of the young Church, kept back part of the price for themselves. Peter, reading their hearts, tells first Ananias and then his wife that he realizes they have lied; as a result, each drops dead before him from shame (Acts 5:1–11). [return to English / Italian]
113. Heliodorus was sent by his king, Seleucus IV of Syria, whom he served as treasurer, to take possession of the treasure in the temple in Jerusalem. Entering the sacred precinct for such purpose, he is assaulted by a terrifying figure on horseback and by two young men who beat him (II Maccabees 3:7–40). [return to English / Italian]
114–115. Polymnestor murdered Polydorus for the gold of Troy that the young son of Priam was sent with, while supposedly under the protection of the Thracian king (see Inf. XIII.31–39 and note; Inf. XXX.18–19). Dante’s sources include Virgil (Aen. III.22–48) and Ovid (Metam. XIII.429–438). [return to English / Italian]
116–117. Marcus Licinius Crassus, known as “Dives” (the rich man), the name reflecting his reputation for avarice. He had a successful political career, becoming triumvir with Caesar and Pompey in 60 B.C. (all three were reconfirmed in 56). In 55 he became proconsul in Syria. Trapped in an ambush by the warring Parthians, he was killed, and his severed head and one hand were sent back to the P
arthian king, Orodes, who then had his mouth filled with molten gold. There is unresolved discussion of Dante’s likely source for this tale, with candidates being Paulus Orosius, Historiae adversus paganos; Lucius Annaeus Florus, Epitome de Tito Livio; Cicero, De officiis. The Latin phrasing most cited is “aurum sitisti, aurum bibe” (you thirsted for gold, now drink it) used to refer to the Parthian king’s treatment of Crassus’s head. For the importance of Florus as source for much of Dante’s Roman history, see Antonio Martina, “Floro,” ED II (1970), pp. 948–52. For Dante’s earlier readings in De officiis see Marchesi (Marc.2001.1). [return to English / Italian]
118–123. Hugh finally explains the reasons for his seeming to have spoken alone when Dante first observed him. What can we deduce from the fact that he, of all the penitents, is the most moved to call upon the positive examples of generosity? Perhaps we are meant to understand that he, burdened by his thoughts of the terrible avarice of his French descendants, is the one most moved at this particular moment. [return to English / Italian]
