Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

by Giovanni Boccaccio

  The Epistola consolatoria a Pino de’ Rossi, written in the winter of 1361–2 following the banishment from Florence of the addressee, is not only an attempt to offer encouragement to a close friend at a time of profound personal misfortune, but also an elegant and eloquent exercise in a literary genre with strong classical antecedents, a document that bears witness to the author’s continuing and ever more intensive commitment to humanistic culture. The exile of Rossi had coincided with the execution of that same Niccolò di Bartolo del Buono to whom Boccaccio had dedicated his Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine, and in fact several of the author’s close acquaintances fell victim to the purge carried out by the Florentine Signory after the abortive coup d’état of 1361, with the aims of which he had not, presumably, been entirely out of sympathy. It is perhaps significant that very soon afterwards, in that same year in fact, he handed over the family house in the San Felicita quarter to his stepbrother Iacopo, who was now of age, and retired to Certaldo, the town of his paternal forebears.

  His withdrawal to Certaldo signalled a pause in his involvement in Florentine diplomatic affairs, which had lasted for more than a decade and had taken him at least three times to the Romagna (in 1350, 1353 and 1357), once to the court of Ludwig of Brandenburg in the South Tyrol to explore the reasons for his intervention in Milanese affairs (in December 1351/January 1352), and once as leading spokesman of an apparently very successful legation to Pope Innocent VI at Avignon (in May–June 1354). There was also his diplomatically abortive mission to Petrarch in Padua during the spring of 1351. Other journeys he undertook during the decade preceding his move to Certaldo included a visit in September 1355 to Naples, during which he worked briefly in the great library at Monte Cassino, and a further visit in March 1359 to Petrarch, who was now established in Milan. Boccaccio had long admired Petrarch’s clerical garb, which by this time he had probably himself adopted, for there is a decree of Innocent VI dated 2 November 1360 granting certain dispensations and privileges to Boccaccio, which would suggest that he had taken holy orders some little time before it was issued. The decade was notable also, from Boccaccio’s point of view, for the fleeting visit to Florence in 1355 of Niccola Acciaiuoli, by now universally known as the Grand Seneschal. It seems that during his visit, Acciaiuoli referred disparagingly to Boccaccio as Iohannes tranquillitatum, a label implying that he was a fair-weather friend whose support was not to be counted upon in times of political adversity such as Acciaiuoli had experienced during his exile from Naples to Avignon some years before.

  Far from being discouraged by this outward token of Acciaiuoli’s lack of esteem for the friend of his youth, Boccaccio continued to court his patronage almost up to the time of Acciaiuoli’s death on 8 November 1365, though his attitude to the Grand Seneschal was by no means always one of fawning subservience. In the eighth of the sixteen Latin eclogues that comprise, under the title of Buccolicum carmen, Boccaccio’s own contribution to that arcane and allusive genre of Latin poetry which both Dante and Petrarch had sought without success to revive, he complains of the indifference of Acciaiuoli during his Neapolitan journey of 1355. But it was only after yet another fruitless expedition to Naples that began in October 1362 and ended five months later that the full force of his invective was released, in a letter to Francesco Nelli. Having been expressly invited by Acciaiuoli to make his home in Naples, he had set off with his stepbrother Iacopo from Tuscany, in high hopes and with all of his books, only to discover upon his arrival that the lodging to which he had been allocated was quite unfit for human habitation. The shortcomings of the place are described in minute detail in the letter to Nelli, a fellow Florentine who occupied a prominent position at the Angevin court. The letter was probably never sent, however, for there is no record of any response in the correspondence of either Nelli or Acciaiuoli.

  Meanwhile, in 1359–60, Boccaccio had given a significant new impetus to humanistic studies by persuading the Florentine Studium to establish the first chair of Greek in non-Byzantine Europe, and to invite Leontius Pilatus to occupy it. Leontius had been a pupil of the celebrated Greek scholar Barlaam of Calabria, whom Boccaccio had known in Naples, once describing him as ‘tiny of body but very great in knowledge’, and who had attempted in vain to teach the rudiments of Greek to Petrarch in Avignon. During his brief tenure of the Florentine chair, Leontius, whose unkempt appearance and barbaric manners are described in a passage of the Genealogia deorum gentilium, was a guest in Boccaccio’s house, and it was Boccaccio who prodded him into completing the first, rudimentary translations into Latin of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as some of the works of Euripides and Aristotle. As for his lectures at the Studium, they aroused much adverse comment, not only because of the man’s extraordinary boorishness, but because the instruction he provided was not sufficiently practical for those young Florentines preparing for a mercantile or diplomatic career in the eastern Mediterranean. All the same, Boccaccio prided himself with good reason on the role he had played in ensuring that the study of ancient Greek literature should take its place alongside the almost exclusively Latin-based researches of the fourteenth-century Italian humanists.

  Shortly after his conversations with Petrarch in Padua in 1351, Boccaccio had begun to compile a notebook in which he copied out various texts to form a kind of anthology. This work, known nowadays as the Zibaldone Magliabechiano, belongs, probably, to the period 1351–6, and it in turn gave rise to two Latin works which were widely disseminated and translated in Europe during the succeeding two centuries: De casibus virorum illustrium, begun by Boccaccio around 1355, and De mulieribus claris, probably begun in the summer of 1361. The first draft of De casibus was completed around 1360, but the definitive enlarged version belongs to 1373–4, and is dedicated to Mainardo de’ Cavalcanti, chancellor of the Duchy of Amalfi, who, during Boccaccio’s Neapolitan journey of 1362–3, had entertained and lodged the author in a fashion more appropriate to a man of his standing than the miserly manner in which he had been received by Acciaiuoli. De casibus consists of a series of cautionary biographies, distributed over nine books, of famous men selected from biblical, Roman and contemporary history, from Adam to the tyrannical ruler of mid-fourteenth-century Florence, the Duke of Athens. With few exceptions, what the subjects of these biographical tales have in common is that they all rose to a position of eminence from which they were toppled by divine Providence through an excess of pride or folly, or a combination of both. The didacticism of the work is what chiefly distinguishes these tales, based upon biblical or historical figures, from several such tales in the pages of the Decameron, especially the stories of the Second Day, which are for the most part based on fictional figures. The theme of Fortune was one to which Boccaccio, like many other writers before and since, was strongly attracted. But whereas in the Decameron Fortune is seen on the whole as a benevolent force, in De casibus she is perceived from a moralistic viewpoint as a chastiser of men for their iniquities. De casibus thus reflects the new moral perspective that assumes increasing importance in the author’s later, humanistic writings. Much the same could be said of De mulieribus claris, probably begun in the summer of 1361 and revised no fewer than nine times, the last revision belonging to 1375. De mulieribus is dedicated to Andrea Acciaiuoli, sister of the Grand Seneschal and later to become the wife of Mainardo de’ Cavalcanti, and it contains 104 biographies of famous women, from Eve to Queen Joanna of Naples. Petrarch had written a similar volume about famous men, De viris illustribus, and it is possible that Boccaccio’s work was intended as a companion volume, at the same time forming the tribute of a discipulus to his magister.

  Whilst it is proper to emphasize Boccaccio’s new sense of didactic purpose after the immensely important encounter with Petrarch in 1351, it would be misleading to convey the impression, as several of his biographers have done, that his involvement in humanistic studies led him to reject his earlier writings in the vernacular, in particular the Decameron. In this connection there is a story, better described
as threadbare than well-worn, concerning a vision he is said to have experienced in 1362, when a mysterious messenger, originally nameless but referred to in later versions of the episode as Gioacchino Ciani, a Carthusian monk of Siena, warned him on behalf of one Pietro Petroni, recently deceased in the odour of sanctity, that his life was approaching its end and that the time had come for him to repent the foolishness of his ways. In consequence of this vision, Boccaccio is said to have resolved to destroy all of his writings that could be construed as profane, including of course his masterpiece. But the truth of the matter is that Boccaccio, even if he experienced any such vision, never took such a resolution. The sole source for the legend of the mysterious messenger is a letter of Petrarch’s (Seniles, I, 5) dated 28 May 1362, in which the older poet refers to a letter he claims to have received from Boccaccio describing the strange visitation and expressing concern over the prospect of imminent death. Petrarch takes great pains to reassure his friend, and adduces numerous examples from classical and biblical times to dispose of the argument that both of them (not just Boccaccio alone) were devoting too much of their time to the study and practice of literature and poetry. The question is discussed within the context of the debate about the relative merits of literary studies on the one hand and devotional practices on the other, a debate which had been going on at least since the age of Dante, and which in its simplest form could be expressed as Poetry vs Theology. It is at the end of this same letter, incidentally, that Petrarch suggests that they should pool their respective libraries (Boccaccio had apparently suggested that he should sell his own library to his magister), and live together under one roof.

  Whether or not he took seriously Petrarch’s suggestion that he should come and live with him, one cannot be certain. It is possible that he felt that such close propinquity to the magister would in some way damage what had up to that time been a fruitful relationship. But it is also possible that it was with precisely this invitation in mind that he abruptly departed from Naples in March 1363 after the crumbling of his hopes for a permanent lodging in the Angevin kingdom, for he proceeded directly to Padua and thence to Venice, where Petrarch received him in the splendid house he had been given on the Riva degli Schiavoni in return for a promise to bequeath his library, after his death, to the Venetian republic. Five months later, in August 1363, Boccaccio was back once more in Certaldo, where he continued with the task of correcting and revising his Latin writings, including perhaps his dictionary of geographical allusions in both classical and more recent literature, a work he had begun at some time between 1355 and 1357, and to which he gave the all-embracing title De montibus, silvis, fontibus, lacubus, fluminibus, stagnis seu paludibus et de nominibus maris liber.6 It was Petrarch who had suggested that Boccaccio should compile such a work, and who directed his pupil to the main sources, in Pliny and various ancient geographers, for much of the material it contains. With the exception of De mulieribus, it was the last of Boccaccio’s encyclopaedic Latin works, and it received its final revision in 1374, the year before he died.

  Meanwhile, by August 1365, by which time the failed coup d’état of four years before had faded in the public memory, Boccaccio had returned to favour with the Florentine government, to the extent of being dispatched on an important mission to the papal court at Avignon. The purpose of his mission was to assure Urban V of Florence’s support and goodwill in the event of the papacy’s return to Italy, which in fact took place some two years later, on 9 June 1367. The Florentines had a reputation in papal circles for combining a surfeit of fine words with a disinclination to translate them into action, and it was part of Boccaccio’s mission to dispel the Pope’s understandable mistrust by offering a binding undertaking to provide five armed galleys and 500 helmeted soldiers as an escort for his journey from Avignon to Rome. So successfully did he accomplish his mission that when Urban V did return to Rome on 16 October 1367, after a temporary stay of four months in Viterbo, it was Boccaccio himself who, in November, was sent to convey Florence’s congratulations on his safe deliverance from what historians would thenceforth refer to as the papacy’s ‘Babylonian Captivity’, the term originally used to describe the seventy years that the Jews were captives in Babylon. Urban in fact returned in September 1370 to Avignon, where shortly afterwards he died, and it was left to his successor, Gregory XI, to effect the definitive end to the ‘Babylonian Captivity’ with his transfer of the papal court to Rome in January 1377. In addition to his two official missions to Urban V, Boccaccio undertook several other journeys in the last decade or so of his life. In the winter of 1361–2 he had returned for the last time to Ravenna under the shadow of some kind of personal misfortune, the nature of which is unknown. In March 1367 he set out from Florence for Venice in the hope of a further encounter with Petrarch, but the two men never met, as Petrarch was detained by illness in Pavia. Although Boccaccio was warmly received by the poet’s daughter, Francesca, who invited him to stay in her father’s house on the Riva degli Schiavoni, he lodged in fact with a Florentine acquaintance, Francesco Allegri, returning to Tuscany towards the end of June 1367. During the following winter he supervised preparations in Florence for the defence of the city against a threatened invasion by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV, which never materialized. In July 1368 he met Petrarch for what was to be the last time, in Padua, whence he paid a further visit to Venice before returning to Tuscany in the early part of November of that year. In the winter of 1370–71 Boccaccio was once again, and for the last time, in the Kingdom of Naples, where he was more warmly received and entertained than at any time since his youthful sojourn there had come to an end in 1341. Of the numerous invitations he received to make his permanent home in Naples, none can have given him greater cause for satisfaction than the one he received from Queen Joanna herself. But he refused them all, on the grounds that he had already declined Petrarch’s pressing invitation to settle in Venice. Petrarch had now retired to the restful solitude of the Euganean hills, and it was with his example in mind that Boccaccio returned to Certaldo in the spring of 1371. There he carried out his final revisions of several of his Latin works, having already completed his sixteen Latin eclogues, Buccolicum carmen, between 1367 and 1369. And at some time during the years 1370–71 he had carefully revised and re-copied the text of the Decameron itself. The resulting manuscript, tampered with by other hands over the intervening centuries, has come down to us in the so-called Hamilton autograph 90, which is lodged in the Staats-bibliothek of Berlin.

  On 13 August 1373 Boccaccio was invited by the Florentine Signory to give a series of public lectures on Dante in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia. The first of these lecturae Dantis was given on Sunday 23 October 1373, and their substance is contained in what was to be Boccaccio’s last major literary labour, the Esposizioni sopra la Comedía di Dante, an erudite commentary on the first seventeen cantos of the Inferno containing a mass of anecdotal detail, much of it superfluous.

  On the night of 18–19 July 1374, Petrarch died in Arquà, and when, three months later, the news of his death reached Certaldo, Boccaccio wrote a commemorative sonnet, thus rounding off his own comparatively undistinguished collection of shorter poems, the Rime, with a final tribute to one whom he rightly acknowledged as his master in vernacular lyric poetry. The earlier poems constituting Boccaccio’s Rime had been strongly derivative from the dolce stil novo and the rime petrose of Dante; the later ones took their cue from Petrarch. In the sixteenth century, the great Florentine linguist Lionardo Salviati was to assert that Boccaccio ‘non fece mai verso che avesse verso nel verso’, by which he implied that his lyrical poetry was neither lyrical nor poetic. And whilst that is much too severe an assessment of Boccaccio’s skills as a lyric poet, it is certainly true that in the Rime he fell far short of the heights he scaled in the art of narrative, whether in verse or in prose. Generally speaking, the Rime form the least original part of the output of a writer whose work, whatever its shortcomings, was seldom lacking in originality.


  During the last few years of his life, Boccaccio was troubled by a succession of physical disorders, and suffered from severe obesity. This was probably the chief contributory factor to his final illness, leading to his death in Certaldo on 21 December 1375.

  II. THE WORLD OF THE NARRATORS

  The idea of assembling a substantial number of tales within a single work was doubtless one that Boccaccio had been contemplating for many years before he brought it to fruition. The questioni episode in the Filocolo and the nymphs’ accounts of their amorous exploits in the Comedía delle ninfe fiorentine are the two most obvious tokens in his earlier writings of the path he was eventually to follow. Those two extended episodes may be regarded as trial runs for a project of far more ambitious proportions, for which he must already have begun to gather the formidable amount of narrative raw material he would require, some of it being pressed into service in two of the questioni, as well as in another episode of the Filocolo.