Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  Founded by Augustus as a military camp, Florence was set amid countryside filled with meadows and flowers. That’s one possible explanation for its name – the Italian version, Firenze, derives from its older Latin name Florentia, the place of flowers. The outline of the Roman walls is still evident in the plan of Florence today. They coincide with the modern Via dei Tornabuoni to the west, Via dei Cerritani to the north, then, making a corner at the Piazza del Duomo, they ran along the line of the Via del Proconsolo to the east. To the south the walls stood back from the then-marshy shore of the river and ran along the line of the Borgo Santi Apostoli; an outpost commanded the head of the Ponte Vecchio.

  The great space that is the Piazza della Republica at the centre of the city was the Mercato Vecchio, the old medieval market that occupied the forum of Roman times. The crossroads of the ancient city was here, the intersection of the cardo maximus that ran north–south along the line of the present-day Via Roma, and the east–west decumanus maximus along the line of the Via del Corso. Walk east along the Via del Corso, a narrow street today, and you come to the Palazzo Portinari Salviati at number 6, where Beatrice Portinari was born. Dante was born very close by, though the exact location of his house is unknown. Here among the pattern of the ancient Roman streets was the Florence that Dante loved, the city that was Dante’s world.

  Hardly anything now remains of Florence’s Roman past. The shape of the Roman amphitheatre can still be discerned in the curve of the Via Torta and the Via dei Bentaccordi. The oldest standing structure in Florence is Byzantine, the Pagliazzi Tower, which now forms part of the Hotel Brunelleschi, much loved by Robert Langdon, and where he stays while recuperating at the end of his adventures in Inferno.

  These remains were similarly slight in Dante’s day. What counted for the Florentines, however, was the superimposition of their lives on the outline and street plan of the ancient past, a sufficient sensation for Dante and other Florentines to claim themselves as the heirs of Rome – and also to project a sense of greatness into a future that was yet to be born.

  FLORENCE REBORN

  Situated in the valley of the Arno, the richest farmland in Tuscany, and standing astride the trade and pilgrimage routes between East and West, Florence had become a prosperous mercantile city by Dante’s time.

  Much of its wealth came from the wool industry, which imported fine English wool, the best in the world. After being washed in the Arno, combed, spun into yarn and woven on wooden looms, the wool was dyed intense and beautiful colours, ranging from the sparkling yellow obtained from crocuses growing in the high Tuscan meadows to brilliant vermilion derived from cinnabar gathered near the Pyramids of Giza. The manufacture and trade in wool required financing, so Florence soon developed a sophisticated banking and financial system that found opportunities in numerous spheres well beyond Florence itself.

  This newfound prosperity had come upon Florence very suddenly, almost like a gold rush. The wool industry was introduced to the city by Humiliati monks only in 1239, just twenty-six years before Dante’s birth in 1265. Until then, and for several decades thereafter, the Florentines were still a very simple people, as described by Giovanni Villani, the historian of the city, writing during the first half of the fourteenth century.

  The citizens of Florence lived soberly and on simple food, spending little, and their manners were often coarse and plain. They dressed themselves and their wives in coarse garments. Many wore skins without linings and caps on their heads. All wore leather boots on their feet. Florentine women wore boots without ornament, and the greatest of them settled for a single tight-fitting gown of coarse scarlet cloth fastened with a leather belt in the ancient fashion, and a hooded cloak lined with squirrel, the hood being worn on their heads. The common women wore coarse green cloth of Cambrai cut in the same style, and one hundred lire was a common dowry for wives, two or three hundred being considered excessive in those days. Most young women were twenty or more before they were married. Such were the plain manners of the Florentines, but they were faithful and true to their commune and with their simple life and poverty they did greater and more virtuous things than are done in our time of increased delicacy and luxury.

  One consequence of this rapid accumulation of wealth was a great building boom during Dante’s lifetime. The Badia Fiorentina, which dated from the tenth century, was rebuilt between 1282 and 1335, and its bell tower, from which Zobrist leaps to his death in Inferno, was constructed in about 1285. Across the road from the Badia, the Bargello was built from 1256 to 1327. Work on the basilica and convent of Santa Croce, burial place of Michelangelo, Galileo and other illustrious makers of the Renaissance, began in 1294; the Duomo was started two years later, followed by the Palazzo Vecchio where building began in 1299 and continued in its first phase until 1314.

  This boom continued after Dante’s death in 1321. Between 1334 and 1357 Dante’s friend Giotto, painter and architect, built the bell tower that rises beside the Duomo. The Orsanmichele, sometime church, market and grain store, was rebuilt between 1337 and 1404. The Ponte Vecchio, swept away by a flood in 1333, was rebuilt in 1345 in the form we see it today.

  In other words, within half a century, and before the city was struck by the Black Death in 1348, Florence had put in place many of the landmarks by which we know it today. It had gone from being home to a people dressed in ‘coarse garments’ to the birthplace of the Renaissance.

  A TUMULTUOUS CITY

  Yet this familiar Florence, the Florence that we know as a treasure store of art and architecture, a pleasurable indoor and outdoor museum, was for Dante a city of danger, violence and extremes, and it remained so right through the age of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Sandro Botticelli.

  Politically, northern Italy was different from the rest of Europe. Elsewhere there were emperors and kings, but apart from Naples and the Papal States, self-governing city-states were the rule in Italy. Power was shared in various degrees among their inhabitants, making political life in a city-state like Florence, for example, far more complicated than in the feudal world of oaths and obligations elsewhere in Europe. The rising merchant class was challenging the old aristocracy, and both were vying for control of Florence, all the more bitterly in the light of its ever-growing prosperity. Outside forces also took an interest, both the Holy Roman emperor – based in Germany – and the pope in Rome competing to impose their influence on the north Italian states. And while both the nobility and the merchant class of Florence were jealous of their city’s independence, in their rivalry with one another they were happy to align themselves with these outside powers – the nobility generally with the emperor, the merchants usually siding with the pope. The former were known as Ghibellines, the latter as Guelfs, in names that belonged to old legend; any other name, like blues and greens, would have served just as well.

  In fact precisely that simplicity of identification by colour tags came into play when the Guelfs finally established their dominance in Florence during Dante’s youth. They were even helped by Dante himself, when he rode in the cavalry at the battle of Campaldino in 1289, after the all-powerful Guelfs, no longer having Ghibellines to oppose, divided against themselves into Blacks and Whites. Both factions still sympathised with the pope over the emperor, but the Blacks more so than the Whites – so violently so, in fact, that Dante, who was a White, was condemned to be burned alive at the stake for his politics. He spent the rest of his life, from 1301, in exile from his bellissima city – a city that for some time to come would be beset by sectarian strife, scored by invisible but well-understood demarcation lines, and bloodied and abused by family vendettas, gang and militia fighting, kidnappings, tortures and assassinations, as well as extremes of democratic, despotic and theocratic rule.

  EYEWITNESS TO THE BLACK DEATH

  In Bertrand’s letter to me, he sounded quite proud, saying he considered Inferno to be a very elegant and humane resolution of the problem. … Compared to the virulence of the Black Death, I admit there
is some compassion in this approach. There will be no hospitals overflowing with the sick and dying, no bodies rotting in the streets, and no anguished survivors enduring the death of loved ones.

  Sienna Brooks, Inferno, chapter 99

  Giovanni Boccaccio, the earliest biographer of Dante, was an eyewitness to the Black Death when it struck Florence in 1348. Two years later he began writing the Decameron, those hundred diverting and often erotic tales told to one another by seven young women and three young men who retreated to a deserted villa in Fiesole to escape the plague down below. Boccaccio preceded his tales with his own vivid description of what he saw during those terrible months, from March to July, when ‘upwards of a hundred thousand human beings lost their lives within the walls of the city of Florence, which before the deadly visitation would not have been supposed to contain so many people!’

  Venice lost three-quarters of its population, Pisa seven-tenths, and some cities lost almost all their inhabitants. Estimates varied widely, the lowest for Florence being sixty thousand dead, but whatever the exact number, the devastation it wrought upon the city became proverbial throughout Italy, where it became known as the Plague of Florence.

  John William Waterhouse’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of the tale-telling youths of the Decameron.

  In Dan Brown’s Inferno, when Bertrand Zobrist leaves a trail of clues that draw Robert Langdon from Florence to Venice and then to Istanbul, he’s tracing in reverse the direction that was taken by the Black Death in 1348. His aim is to place his Inferno depopulation device at the plague’s historical hub.

  The actual origin of the plague, however, lay much further to the east, in China. It eventually reached the Black Sea in 1347. Constantinople, as Istanbul was in those days, was still capital of the Byzantine Empire, and a major port for trade between East and West.

  Whether the plague touched Constantinople first and then travelled north into the Crimea, or vice versa, is not clear, but what is known is that Genoese merchant ships calling in at the Crimean port of Kaffa unwittingly picked up the plague, then sailed through the Bosphorus and to Venice, Sicily and Genoa, quickly infecting the whole of Italy. In March 1348, the plague reached Florence.

  Boccaccio understood well enough that the plague had originated in the East, but like others of the age he had no idea of its cause nor how it was transmitted. He speculated whether it was ‘disseminated by the influence of the celestial bodies, or sent upon us mortals by God in His just wrath by way of retribution for our iniquities’.

  SYMPTOMS AND ESCAPES

  Preventative steps were taken, ‘cleansing the city from many impurities’; public prayers and processions called on divine intercession, the gates were closed to anyone who was sick, and juniper and sulphur were burned in fireplaces until the scent and smoke were so thick in the streets that birds dropped dead off the rooftops. What no one knew was that their enemies were rats and fleas. And so ‘the pestilence began to be horribly apparent by symptoms that showed as if miraculous’.

  In men and women alike it first betrayed itself by the emergence of certain tumours in the groin or the armpits, some of which grew as large as a common apple, others as an egg, some more, some less, which the common folk called gavoccioli [swellings]. From the two said parts of the body this deadly gavocciolo soon began to propagate and spread itself in all directions indifferently; after which the form of the malady began to change, black spots or livid making their appearance in many cases on the arm or the thigh or elsewhere, now few and large, now minute and numerous. And as the gavocciolo had been and still was an infallible token of approaching death, such also were these spots on whomsoever they showed themselves… Almost all within three days from the appearance of the said symptoms, sooner or later, died, and in most cases without any fever or other attendant malady.

  Some people reacted by choosing to ‘shun and abhor all contact with the sick and all that belonged to them, thinking thereby to make each his own health secure’, while ‘avoiding every kind of luxury’, and only ‘eating and drinking very moderately of the most delicate viands and the finest wines’. Others took the opposite direction, maintaining that ‘to drink freely, frequent places of public resort, and take their pleasure with song and revel, sparing to satisfy no appetite, and to laugh and mock at no event, was the sovereign remedy for so great an evil’.

  Then there were others who:

  kept a middle course between them, neither laying the same restraint upon their diet as the former, nor allowing themselves the same license in drinking and other dissipations as the latter, but living with a degree of freedom sufficient to satisfy their appetites, and not as recluses. They therefore walked abroad, carrying in their hands flowers or fragrant herbs or divers sorts of spices, which they frequently raised to their noses, deeming it an excellent thing thus to comfort the brain with such perfumes, because the air seemed to be everywhere laden and reeking with the stench emitted by the dead and the dying, and the odours of drugs.

  But the soundest of all, thought Boccaccio, were those who ‘deserted their city, their houses, their estates, their kinsfolk, their goods, and went into voluntary exile, or migrated to the country parts’ – which was what the ten young people in his Decameron did, and survived.

  FROM BREAKFAST TO MASS GRAVE

  Whatever course one took, the inexorable toll of death had its terrible effect on human behaviour:

  Tedious were it to recount, how citizen avoided citizen, how among neighbours was scarce found any that showed fellow-feeling for another, how kinsfolk held aloof, and never met, or but rarely; enough that this sore affliction entered so deep into the minds of men and women, that in the horror thereof brother was forsaken by brother, nephew by uncle, brother by sister, and oftentimes husband by wife; nay, what is more, and scarcely to be believed, fathers and mothers were found to abandon their own children, untended, unvisited, to their fate, as if they had been strangers.

  Many people died daily or at night in the streets, but for those who died at home their deaths often went unnoticed ‘until the stench of their putrefying bodies carried the tidings; and what with their corpses and the corpses of others who died on every hand the whole place was a sepulchre’. The graveyards were soon full, and with corpses arriving at the churches hundreds at a time, huge trenches were dug in which the dead were piled up ‘as merchandise is stowed in the hold of a ship, tier upon tier, each covered with a little earth, until the trench would hold no more’.

  The most shocking thing for Boccaccio was the suddenness with which a person could be overcome, could end up in that ditch within hours of waking fresh upon the day:

  How many brave men, how many fair ladies, how many gallant youths, whom any physician, were he Galen, Hippocrates, or Asculapius himself, would have pronounced in the soundest of health, broke fast with their kinsfolk, comrades and friends in the morning, and when evening came, supped with their forefathers in the other world!

  FROM THE BLACK DEATH TO THE RENAISSANCE

  When Sienna Brooks, repeating the views of Bertrand Zobrist, says ‘the Black Plague thinned the herd and paved the way for the Renaissance’, the reference is to a view held in some quarters that Europe in the early fourteenth century was ‘overpopulated’, and that the massive cull by the Black Death was, though shocking, good news socially and economically. By that reckoning, the deaths of around a third of the population of Europe and as much as half of Italy’s population, had the beneficial effect of creating conditions favourable to stimulating a cultural and intellectual renaissance.

  The beaked figure of the plague doctor is a recurrent image in Dan Brown’s Inferno .

  Simply put, the argument is that the death of so many artisans, labourers and peasants gave the survivors a scarcity value that allowed them to drive up their wages so that they had a higher standard of living and greater expectations. ‘Every vile craftsman of the city now aspired to reach the priorate and the great offices of the commune’, as the Florentine historian Matteo V
illani put it right after the plague. But not only workers were affected. Land, money, buildings and furnishings that had belonged to the dead were redistributed among the survivors, whatever their class. The remaining population was richer per capita than it had been before, and therefore had higher disposable incomes that could be spent on cultural pursuits.

  Yet there is no evidence whatsoever that Florence, or northern Italy in general, had been suffering from overpopulation or in anyway strapped for cash or retarded from pursuing cultural excellence. Indeed, the opposite is the case, as the building programme in Florence before the Black Death demonstrates. Florence had especially flourished since the introduction of its wool industry in 1239, and was still flourishing right up to the Black Death in 1348.

  That said, the plague did affect the economy of Florence in one particularly critical way; it transferred spending from families to the state. As Boccaccio wrote, ‘How many families of historic fame, of vast ancestral domains, and wealth proverbial, found now no scion to continue the succession!’ The great families, as a basis for economic and political organisation, were shattered by the Black Death. Their functions thereafter were largely taken over by the Florentine state.

  The Black Death created a new outlook of communal solidarity as opposed to older narrow concerns with family and lineage. Families could perish, but the state was immortal, and from now on the wealthy invested their money in the state. With the aim of promoting social harmony and stability in business, Florence became a corporate economy. Wealthy Florentines were guaranteed a fixed return on their investments in state-sponsored projects, including buildings and the decorative arts, as part of a broader welfare programme that provided aid to orphans, undowered daughters, the poor, the infirm, the sick and the elderly. For workers and the wealthy alike, the state created a more stable environment, but also the means to direct investment towards learning and the creation of beauty. As Giovanni de Medici, the founder of the banker-despot dynasty that would rule over Florence for much of the Renaissance, told his sons, it was not enough to be rich, one also had a duty to embellish the city.