Collected Works of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  Petrarch himself gives us an account of their first meeting.408

  “In days gone by,” he says in a letter to Boccaccio,409 “I was hurrying across Central Italy in midwinter; you hastened to greet me, not only with affection, the message of soul to soul, but in person, impelled by a wonderful desire to see one you had never yet beheld, but whom nevertheless you were minded to love. You had sent before you a piece of beautiful verse, thus showing me first the aspect of your genius and then of your person. It was evening and the light was fading, when, returning from my long exile, I found myself at last within my native walls. You welcomed me with a courtesy and respect greater than I merited, recalling the poetic meeting of Anchises with the king of Arcadia, who, “in the ardour of youth,” longed to speak with the hero and to press his hand.410 Although I did not, like him, stand “above all others,” but rather beneath, your zeal was none the less ardent. You introduced me, not within the walls of Pheneus, but into the sacred penetralia of your friendship. Nor did I present you with a “superb quiver and arrows of Lycia,” but rather with my sincere and unchangeable affection. While acknowledging my inferiority in many respects, I will never willingly concede it in this either to Nisus or to Pythias or to Lælius. — Farewell.”

  Thus began a friendship that lasted nearly twenty-five years. They were, says Filippo Villani, “one soul in two bodies.”

  But Petrarch did not remain long in Florence; after a few days he hurried on to Rome, whence he wrote to Boccaccio on his arrival: —

  “... After leaving you I betook myself, as you know, to Rome, where the year of Jubilee has called — sinners that we are — almost all Christendom. In order not to be condemned to the burden of travelling alone I chose some companions for the way; of whom one, the oldest, by the prestige of his age and his religious profession, another by his knowledge and talk, others by their experience of affairs and their kind affection, seemed likely to sweeten the journey that nevertheless was very tiring. I took these precautions, which were rather wise than happy as the event proved, and I went with a fervent heart, ready to make an end at last of my iniquities. For, as Horace says, ‘I am not ashamed of past follies, but I should be, if now I did not end them.’411 Fortune, I hope, has not and will not be able to alter my resolution in anything....”412

  But as he himself seems to have feared, he was unlucky that day, for as he passed with his companions up the hillside out of Bolsena he was kicked badly on the leg by his companion’s horse and came to Rome with difficulty, suffering great pain all the time he was there. He seems to have reached the City on November 1, and to have left it again early in December for Arezzo, his birthplace, where he was received with extraordinary honour. Thence he returned to Florence, where he again saw Boccaccio with his friends Lapo da Castiglionchio and Francescho Nelli, whose father had been Gonfalonier of Justice and who himself became Secretary to Niccolò Acciaiuoli when he was Grand Seneschal of Naples. Nelli was in Holy Orders and Prior of SS. Apostoli. Lapo was a man of great learning; he now presented Petrarch with a copy of the newly discovered Institutions of Quintillian.

  In the New Year Petrarch left Florence, and three months later we find Boccaccio visiting him in Padua as ambassador for the republic, which, no doubt to his delight and very probably at his suggestion, wished to offer the great poet a chair in her new university. For partly in rivalry with Pisa, partly to attract foreigners and even new citizens after the plague,413 the republic had founded a new university in Florence at the end of 1348, to which, in May, 1349, Pope Clement VI had conceded all the privileges and liberties of the universities of Paris and Bologna. For some reason or another, however, the new university had not brought to Florence either the fame or the population she desired. It was therefore a brilliant and characteristic policy which prompted her to invite the most famous man of learning of the day to accept a chair in it; for if Petrarch could have been persuaded to accept the offer, the university of Florence would have easily outshone any other then in existence: all Italy and half Europe might well have flocked thither.

  The offer thus made, and if at Boccaccio’s suggestion, then so far as he was concerned in all good faith, was characteristic in its impudence or astonishing in its generosity according to the point of view, for it will be remembered that Florence had banished Petrarch’s father and confiscated his goods and all such property as it could lay its hands on two years before the birth of his son in 1302. With him into exile went his young wife. They found a refuge in the Ghibelline city of Arezzo, where for this cause Petrarch was born. Even in 1350, the year in which the poet entered Florence for the first time, the decree of banishment was in force against him; had he been less famous, less well protected, he would have been in peril of his life. As it was, Florence dared not attack him; nor, seeing the glory he had won, did she wish to do anything but claim a share in it.

  It was doubtless this consideration and some remembrance of her humiliation before the contempt of that other exile who had died in Ravenna, that prompted Florence, always so business-like, to try to repair the wrong she had done to Petrarch. So she decided to return him in money the value of the property confiscated from his father, and to send Boccaccio on the delicate mission of persuading him to accept the offer she now made him of a chair in her university.414 With a letter then from the Republic, Boccaccio set out for Padua in the spring of 1351, meeting Petrarch there, as De Sade tells us, on April 6, the anniversary of the day of Petrarch’s first meeting with Laura and of her death.

  The letter which Boccaccio took with him was from the Prior of the Arti: Reverendo Viro D. Francisco Petrarcha, Canonico Padoano, Laureato Poetæ, concivi nostro carissimo, Prior Artium Vexillifer Justitiæ Populi et Communis Florentiæ. It was very flattering, laudatory, and moving. It greeted Petrarch as a citizen of Florence, spoke of his “admirable profession,” his “excellent merit in studies,” his “utter worthiness of the laurel crown,” his “most rare genius which shall be an example to latest posterity,” etc. etc. etc. Then it spoke of the offer. “No long time since,” it said, “seeing our city deprived of learning and study, we wisely decided that henceforth the arts must flourish and ought to be cultivated among us, and that it would be necessary to introduce studies of every sort into our city so that by their help our Republic, like Rome of old, should be glorious above the other cities of Italy and grow always more happy and more illustrious. Now our fatherland believes that you are the one and only man by whom this result can be attained. The Republic prays you, then, as warmly as it may, to give yourself to these studies and to make them flourish....” So on and so forth, quoting Virgil, Sallust, and Cicero, with allusions to that “immortal work the Africa which....” Boccaccio was to do the rest. “Other things,” the letter ends, “many and of infinitely greater consideration, you will hear from Giovanni Boccaccio, our citizen, who is sent to you by special commission....”415

  With this letter in his pocket Boccaccio made his way to Padua, where, as we know, he was delighted to come, nor was Petrarch less happy to see him. And when he returned he bore Petrarch’s answer to the Republic: “Boccaccio, the bearer of your letter and of your commands, will tell you how I desire to obey you and what are my projects.” No doubt while Boccaccio was with him, seeing his sincerity, Petrarch felt half inclined to accept; but he was at all times infirm of purpose. “If I break my word that I have given to my friends,” he writes,416 “it is because of the variation of the human spirit, from which none is exempt except the perfect man. Uniformity is the mother of boredom, that one can only avoid by changing one’s place.” However that may be, when later in the year he left Padua, it was to return not to Florence, but to France.

  If we know nothing else of this embassy, we know, at least, that this sojourn in Padua passed pleasantly for Boccaccio. In a letter written to Petrarch from Ravenna, in July, 1353,417 he reminds his “best master” of his visit. “I think,” he writes, “that you have not forgotten how, when less than three years ago I came to you in
Padua the ambassador of our Senate, my commission fulfilled, I remained with you for some days, and how that those days were all passed in the same way: you gave yourself to sacred studies, and I, desiring your compositions, copied them. When the day waned to sunset we left work and went into your garden, already filled by spring with flowers and leaves.... Now sitting, now talking, we passed what remained of the day in placid and delightful idleness, even till night.”

  Some of that talk was doubtless given to Letters, but some too fell, as it could not but do, on politics. For that letter, so charming in the scene it brings before us of that garden at nightfall, goes on to speak in a transparent allegory of the affairs of Italy and of Petrarch’s sudden change of plans, for whereas in 1351 he had promised to enter the service of Florence and had cursed the Visconti, when he returned to Italy in 1353, it was with these very Visconti he had taken shameful service — with the enemies of “his own country” Florence, whom he had spurned, and who in return had repealed the repeal of his banishment and refrained from returning to him the money value of his father’s possessions. Is it in revenge for this, Boccaccio asks, that he has taken service with the enemy? He reproaches him in the subtlest and gentlest way, yet with an eager patriotism that does him the greatest honour, representing him to himself even as a third person, one Sylvanus, who “had been of their company” in Padua. Yet Boccaccio does not spare him, and though he loved and revered him beyond any other living man, he bravely tells him his mind and points out his treachery, when his country is at stake.

  That Sylvanus, it seems — Petrarch himself really — had lamented bitterly enough the unhappy state of Italy, neglected by the Emperors and the Popes, and exposed to the brutality and tyranny of the Archbishop Giovanni Visconti of Milan. More and more he cursed the tyrants, and especially the Visconti, and “how eagerly you agreed with him!... But now,” the letter continues,418 “I have heard that this Sylvanus is about to enter the service of those very Visconti, who even now menace his country. I would not have believed it had not I had a letter from him in which he tells me it is so himself. Who would ever have suspected him of so much mobility of character, or as likely to forswear his own faith out of greediness? But he has done so perhaps to avenge himself on his fellow-citizens who have retaken the property of his father, which they had once returned to him. But what man of honour, even when he has received a wrong from his country, would unite himself with her enemies? How much has Sylvanus mystified and compromised, by these acts, all his admirers and friends....”

  Just here we come upon something noble and firm in the character of Boccaccio, something of the “nationalism” too which was to be the great force of the future, to which Petrarch was less clairvoyant and which Dante had never perceived at all. The Empire was dead; in less than a hundred years men were to protest they did not understand what it meant. The Papacy then too seemed almost as helpless as it is to-day. Internationalism — the latest cry of the modern decadent or dreamer — was already a mere ghost frightened and gibbering in the dawn, and the future lay in the growth of nationalities, in the variety and freedom of the world, perhaps in the federation of Italy. Were these the thoughts that occupied the two pioneers of the modern world on those spring nights in that garden at Padua?

  CHAPTER XI

  1351-1352

  TWO EMBASSIES

  Boccaccio did well to be anxious. The greed of the Visconti, the venality and indifference of the Pope, threatened the very liberty of Tuscany, and though Boccaccio had till now held no permanent public office in Florence, we have seen him as a witness to the donation of Prato, as ambassador for the Republic in Romagna, and as its representative offering Petrarch a chair in the new university. He was now to be entrusted with a more delicate and serious mission. But first, on his return from Padua in January-February, 1351, he became one of the Camarlinghi del Comune.419 During the remainder of that year we seem to see him quietly at work in Florence,420 most probably on the Decameron, and then suddenly in December he was called upon to go on a mission to Ludwig of Brandenburg, Count of Tyrol.421

  Florence was tired of appealing to the Pope always in vain and had at last looked for another champion against the Visconti. Deserted by the Church, at war with the Visconti, Florence had either to submit or to find a way out for herself, and with her usual astuteness she hoped to achieve the latter by calling to her aid the excommunicated Ludwig. The moment was well chosen. Ludwig was just reconciled with Charles IV, King of the Romans, the greatest enemy of his house. He was poor and in need of money, little loved in his own country, and not indisposed to try any adventure that offered. So Boccaccio set out. The letters given to him December 12, 1351, were directed to Conrad, Duke of Teck, who had already visited Florence in 1341, and to Ludwig himself.422 We know, however, nothing personal to Boccaccio with regard to this mission. In fact save that it was so far successful that Ludwig sent Diapoldo Katzensteiner to Florence to continue the overtures we know little about it at all. Katzensteiner’s pretensions, however, proved to be such that the Florentines would not accept them, and communications were broken off.423 That was in March, 1352. On May 1 a new project was on foot. Florence decided to call the prospective Emperor Charles IV, the grandson of her old enemy Henry VII, into Italy to her assistance.424

  That a Guelf republic should turn for assistance to the head of the Ghibelline cause seems perhaps more strange than in fact it was. Guelf and Ghibelline had become mere names beneath which local jealousies hid and flourished, caring nothing for the greater but less real quarrel between Empire and Papacy. Charles, however, was to fail Florence; for at the last moment he withdrew from the treaty, fearing to leave Germany; when he did descend later, things had so far improved for her that she was anything but glad to see him especially when she was forced to remember that it was she who had called him there. After these two failures Florence was compelled to make terms with the Visconti at Sarzana in April, 1353, promising not to interfere in Lombardy or Bologna, while Visconti for his part undertook not to molest Tuscany.425 But by this treaty the Visconti gained a recognition of their hold in Bologna from the only power that wished to dispute it. They profited too by the peace, extending their dominion in Northern Italy. In this, though fortune favoured them, they began to threaten others who had looked on with composure when they were busy with Tuscany. Among these were the Venetians, who made an alliance with Mantua, Verona, Ferrara, and Padua, and were soon trying to persuade Florence, Siena, and Perugia to join them.426 Nor did they stop there, for in December, 1353, they too tried to interest Charles IV in Italian affairs. When it was seen that Charles was likely to listen to the Venetians the Visconti too sent ambassadors to him, nor was the Papacy slow to make friends.

  In 1352 Clement VI had died, and in his stead Innocent VI reigned in Avignon. He was determined to assert his claims in Italy, and especially in the Romagna, and to this end despatched Cardinal Albornoz, the redoubtable Spaniard, to bring the unruly barons of that region to order. The whole situation was delicate and complicated. Florence was in a particularly difficult position. She had called Charles into Italy without the Pope’s leave — she, the head of the Guelf cause. He had not come. Now when she no longer wanted him he seemed to be coming in spite of her and with the Pope’s goodwill. She seems to have doubted the reality of that, as well she might. Moreover, though she and her allies would have been glad enough to join the Venetians, the situation was too complicated for hurried action, especially as a treaty only two years old bound them not to interfere in Lombardy and Bologna so long as they were left alone.

  Charles’s own position can have been not less difficult. Now that he seemed really eager to enter Italy, both sides seemed eager for him to do so. Should he enter Italy as the “Imperatore de’ Preti,” and so make sure of a coronation, or descend as the avenger of the imperial claims? He hesitated. In these circumstances it seemed to the Florentines that there was but one thing to do — to inform themselves of the real intentions of the Pope, and when t
hese were known, to decide on a course of action. In these very delicate missions his countrymen again had recourse to Boccaccio. He set out on April 28, 1354.427 His instructions were to find out whether the Emperor was coming into Italy with consent of His Holiness, to speak of the loyalty of Florence to the Holy See, and to protest her willingness to do whatever the Pope desired. At the same time he had to obtain at least this, that the Pope should exert himself to save the honour and independence of the republic. Again, if the Pope pretended that heknew nothing of the advent of Charles, but asked the intentions of Florence in case he should enter Italy, Boccaccio was instructed to say that he was only sent to ask the intentions of His Holiness. In any case he was to return as quickly as possible.