by A. N. Wilson
Certainly, Brunetto himself was a very famous writer in his day. He wrote an encyclopaedic work in French called Li Livres dou Trésor, and in Italian he wrote an allegorical journey with the similar title of Tesoretto. It is in this book that he describes what was the crisis of his own life, highly comparable to Dante’s fate. He was sent as an ambassador to the court of Alfonso X of Castile and, on his return through the pass of Roncesvalles, he met a scholar from Bologna and asked him the news of Tuscany. This scholar told him about the Battle of Montaperti, informed him that the Guelfs ‘through evil providence and force of war’ had been driven from Florence. Brunetto was destined to spend the next five years abroad.
Many commentators have been puzzled by the fact that Brunetto Latini, a wholly benign figure of whom Dante appears to have been fond, was placed not in Paradise but in Hell. And there exist all manner of elaborate explanations, especially among the more prudish Victorian commentators, which try to say that although Brunetto is in the circle of Hell reserved for sodomites, this was not, in fact, his reason for being there. ‘It is not known,’ wrote Paget Toynbee somewhat loftily in his invaluable Dante Dictionary, ‘on what grounds Dante condemned Brunetto to this particular division of Hell; possibly, as in the case of Priscian [writer of a Latin grammar, AD 500], he is introduced merely as a representative of a class [literati grandi] which was undoubtedly especially addicted in those times to the vice in question. Benvenuto testifies that it was especially prevalent in Bologna while he was lecturing on the Divina Commedia there in 1375, to such a degree, indeed, that he felt himself bound, in spite of the odium and personal risk which he incurred by so doing, to bring the matter to the notice of the papal legate.’5
One of the things which become clear about the Comedy, after several readings and rereadings, is that it is an allegory of Dante’s own life, a reworking of his own experiences, a rehearsal of his own vices. This is far from being all that it is, but it is in a sense an allegorized autobiography. This is especially noticeable in the Inferno and the Purgatory, in which Dante confronts faces from his past. In an unfinished preface to the third part of the Comedy, Dante6 himself tells us that his book is ‘polysemous, that is to say, “of more senses than one”’ [Epistulae (hereafter Ep.) X.7, Philip Wicksteed’s translation]. What could be called a template of the work is the framework given by Dante’s actual life, what little he teasingly lets us know of it.
When he confronts Brunetto, there is much tenderness, and much sorrow. It is surely not fanciful to suppose that in his encounter with Brunetto, he is, among other things, facing his own adolescent homosexuality?
He and Virgil cross by ferry to the seventh circle, with great sea walls rearing up beside them, reminiscent of the embankments erected by the Flemings between Wissant and Bruges, or by the Paduans along the Brenta. There they meet a company of men running along scaldingly hot sand. The tormented ones look up at the two travellers, peering with the close scrutiny of tailors who squint at a needle while they are threading it. One of them stretches out his arm in greeting and exclaims, ‘This is marvellous!’ Dante is astounded.
‘Are you here, Ser Brunetto?’
And he: ‘My son, do not mind if Ser Brunetto
Latino lingers for a while with you
and lets the file he’s with pass on ahead’
[Inf. XV.29–33, Mandelbaum]
Brunetto remains, in the searing plains of Hell, the same benign, sweetly encouraging mentor he had evidently been to Dante in life:
And he to me: ‘If you pursue your star,
you cannot fail to reach a splendid harbour,
If in fair life, I judged you properly;
and if I had not died too soon for this,
on seeing Heaven was so kind to you,
I should have helped sustain you in your work.
[Inf. XV.55–60, Mandelbaum]
Brunetto has sharp things to say about the factions which have excluded him (and Dante) from Florence. He attributes the decline of the city to the arrival in Florence of the hill people from the neighbouring town of Fiesole (‘the beasts of Fiesole’ [Inf. XV.73]). And he hopes – as any author departed this life might do – that people are still reading his book:
‘Let my Tesoro, in which still I live,
Be precious to you, and I ask no more’
[Inf. XV.119–20, Mandelbaum]
As I write these words in the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Roman Catholic Church still officially condemns homosexual practices as sinful. (The Catechism stigmatizes sodomy as one of the ‘four sins crying to Heaven for vengeance’.) The more liberal Anglican Communion of 40 million Christians is bitterly divided between liberals, especially in Britain and America, advocating a rethink on the matter, and diehards persisting in the belief that to be gay condemns you either to a life of total celibacy or a life of deadly sin. If millions of human beings on this planet are still having this debate today, we should perhaps not be surprised that Dante, writing in the early fourteenth century, should have confined his old friend and mentor to Hell for the sin of Sodom. And yet, and yet… The encounter is one of several in the Inferno which makes us wonder whether Dante is not deliberately undermining the Catholicism which the poem seemingly supports. All the rhetoric of the scene in which Brunetto appears, all its shape and narrative, contrives with ultimate sophistication and brilliance to make us think that he is an admirable person. He runs off, and Dante watches him go. The conclusion to the canto shimmers with ambiguity:
Of those runners, he
Appeared to be the winner, not the loser.
[Inf. XV.123–4, Mandelbaum]
So, the grown-up Dante contemplates the companion, and perhaps more than companion, of his teens.
VI
A NEW CONSTITUTION FOR FLORENCE AND THE SICILIAN VESPERS
SO, THE YOUNG DANTE GREW THROUGH ADOLESCENCE, IN THE sesto of San Piero. Did he pass Beatrice sometimes in the street? Did he sometimes get asked to visit his betrothed, Gemma? History is totally silent on the question, and we wait nine years after his supposed ‘first sight’ of Beatrice at the party in her father’s house, when he was aged nine, and an encounter with her which was to be even more charged with significance in his inner, imaginative life.
As far as his actual career was concerned, his prospects in life, the political structures of Florence, its civic life, were of equal importance.
After the death of the Crusader Pope Gregory X in January 1276, there had followed a year in which three Popes – Innocent V, Hadrian V and John XXI – were elected and died. John XXI, a scientist, author of a textbook on logic and one who had taken a particular interest in medicine, died in May 1277 when the ceiling of his study collapsed on top of him. There followed six months in which the College of Cardinals (now only seven in number) deliberated. They chose a Roman aristocrat, Cardinal Giovanni Gaetano, a member of the great clan of Orsini. His prime object as Pope was to rid Italy of the overbearing influence of the House of Anjou, and this meant attempting to reconcile the warring Guelfs and Ghibellines and trying to persuade families of moderate disposition not to be partisans in the conflict. Accordingly, when Dante was fourteen, in October 1279, there occurred a great public event which would have a profound effect on his own personal destiny.
Pope Nicholas III, as Cardinal Gaetano became, sent to Florence one of his own hand-picked cardinals – his nephew Latino Malabranca, a Dominican friar. (He was once thought to have been the author of the ‘Dies Irae’, the famous hymn which used to be recited at every Catholic Requiem Mass, and is still a part of the liturgy for All Souls’: ‘Qui Mariam absolvisti/Et latronem exaudisti/Mihi quoque spem dedisti’ – ‘Thou hast given me hope, who didst also absolve Mary Magdalene and the penitent thief’. Though Malabranca was probably not the author,1 Dante’s was the first generation to hear this hymn, now familiar to Christendom.)
Cardinal Latino, as befitted the nephew of a great Pope, was received into Florence in an elaborate ceremony on 18
January 1280. Representatives of Guelf and Ghibelline magnates publicly embraced. But as well as peace between the warring factions, not just in Florence, but also throughout Tuscany, the Dominican cardinal brought to Florence a whole series of restrictive laws for women which would seem familiar in modern Pakistan, Afghanistan or Iran but which the Christian West no longer associates with its own religion. All women, both wives and widows as well as maidens, were commanded to wear a veil. Salimbene, the gossiping old Franciscan chronicler, tells us that they hated this at first but soon found ways to procure veils of fine silk and interweave them with gold so as to make their faces even more fascinating and beautiful to the eye. From 1294, the commune forbade such veils to be interwoven with gold. A little later similar legislation in Bologna forbade veils worth more than ten lire. Cardinal Latino also banned plunging necklines and sweeping dresses ‘so long they sweep the dirt’.2 And in medieval streets, dirt would have been dirty. Given the condition of a medieval street, you can imagine that they swept rather more than dust.3
The injunctions remind us of the tremendous value set upon cloth in the Middle Ages. The cloth trade throughout Europe was highly developed. The ladies of Faenza and Bologna rivalled one another with their magnificent gowns of a single material, gathered at the waist. By the beginning of the thirteenth century, however, Italian women were beginning to be influenced by French fashions in which two or more colours were introduced into the gowns. Cotton was a twelfth- to thirteenth-century innovation in Italy, increasingly popular in the hot summers. But native Italian cotton, in so far as it was grown at all, was of poor quality. More and more was imported, especially through Genoa.
The cardinal’s peace visit did not merely enforce simpler clothes on women and handshakes between Guelf and Ghibelline men. It reformed the city’s constitution, bringing administrative changes which would eventually allow Dante to enter public life. A month after the ceremony in which Latino enacted the reconciliation of Guelf and Ghibelline factions, a new constitution was published. The Guelfs and the Ghibellines would share the government on an alternating basis. Cardinal Latino took up residence in the Mozzi palace, on the Oltrarno side of the Rubaconte bridge.4 The Papacy was determined to make the new constitution of Florence stick. The new magistracy would consist of ‘The Fourteen’ – eight Guelfs and six Ghibellines. Many of the great Ghibelline families, including those of proud old Farinata degli Uberti – whose looks appeared to scorn even Hell as he stared at it with contempt – were allowed to return and take up residence in their old fortresses. The new detail in Latino’s reform was that the arbitrators of the peace in disputes between the two parties were to be not the grandi, the old families, but the guilds. The eight guilds themselves appointed representatives (‘syndics and procurators’) who appeared before the cardinal to represent the views and interests of their members. Without this reform of Latino’s, Dante would not have been eligible for public life in Florence. He would have never have been in a position to confront the Pope, or to fall foul of the Donati, or to be thrown into bitter exile. The searing experiences which created his poem would not have happened. Moreover, he would have remained forever the poet of the inner life, of the emotions, of the ‘philosophy’ of Love, rather than being the man with the grand overview of what was going on in Florence, in Italy, in Europe.
Latino Malabranca’s Henry Kissinger-style mission to Florence in 1280 was undoubtedly one of the factors which helped form the Comedy. Naturally, like any attempt at political compromise, it was only partially successful. There were plenty of unreconciled Ghibelline families who remained in exile from Florence. They were the fioriusciti, the exiles, determined not to accept a compromise, but to hold out for a full-scale return of power. They set their unrealistic hopes on the claims of Rudolph, the newly elected German King, to the Imperial sceptre.
In 1280, and 1281, the power of the French crown in Italy looked so unshakeable that the hopes of a German rival seemed laughable. When Pope Nicholas III died of a heart attack on 22 August 1280, the tiny College of Cardinals elected as his successor Simon of Brie, Cardinal of St Cecilia, a mild-mannered Frenchman who was completely under the sway of the French royal house. In his early days he had been a courtier of St Louis. He was a French patriot through and through, and within a short while he was weighing the College of Cardinals with Frenchmen. He elected seven within a month of his enthronement. Four were French, one was English and only two were Italian. Pope Martin IV (as Brie was called now) had a clear, large and seemingly achievable agenda. He would extend the power of the French in Italy. Charles of Anjou would, with his Guelf allies, be not merely King of Sicily and of Naples, but also the effectual power in all the great Guelf republics such as Florence. Angevin power would stretch not merely from Paris to Palermo. They had bigger ambitions than that. If it were possible to persuade the stubborn Christians of the East to accept the Catholic version of the Creed and the authority of the Pope, then Christendom could be united. Constantinople itself would fall to French control, while the Bishop of Rome ruled the Christian world as spiritual leader in a universal ecumenical Papacy.
The last moments of any such dream being realistic were shattered during the early Easter of 1282 in Sicily. About half a mile south-east of the old city walls of Palermo, as the crowd awaited the beginning of Vespers on Easter Monday, 30 March, a group of French soldiers mingled among the people. They were drunk. One of them, a sergeant called Drouet, dragged a young married woman from the throng and pestered her with his attentions. Her husband drew a knife and stabbed Drouet to death. At that moment the bells of the Church of the Holy Spirit began to toll out for Vespers.
Soon the cry in the crowd was ‘Death to the Frenchmen!’ Not one Frenchman was left alive. Though the immediate cause of the outrage – Drouet’s drunken manhandling of the woman – could not have been stage-managed, there was no doubt afterwards that this rebellion against French rule had been carefully prepared by the secret service of the Byzantine Emperor – Michael Palaeologus – and by those European heads of state who believed that French Empire-building had gone too far. By the Tuesday morning, 2,000 French men and women lay dead in Palermo and other parts of Sicily. ‘And they dashed the children against stones and ripped open pregnant women.’5 By the time Charles of Anjou had withdrawn from the island, and the Sicilians had offered their crown to Pedro III of Aragon, far more had happened than that one tiny island had established its semi-independence from the French. ‘It fundamentally altered the history of Christendom.’6 Popes, and Roman Catholics, could go on dreaming of a universal Church in which all Christians recognized the Bishop of Rome as its Supreme Governor. But such a dream was, after Easter 1282, hopelessly unrealistic. Likewise, the lynch-pin of Guelf hopes in Italy, Charles of Anjou, had suffered a devastating blow.
The Angevin rule in Sicily and other parts of Southern Italy felt to the occupied like a series of violations. Yet, such is the admixture of piety and brutality, high spiritual aspiration and gross avarice in this period that there was probably truth in Charles of Anjou’s dying prayer (in 1285) – ‘Lord God, as I believe truly that Thou art my saviour, I pray Thee to have mercy on my soul. Thou knowest that I took the Kingdom of Sicily for the sake of the Holy Church and not for my own profit or gain. So Thou wilt pardon my sins.’7 These events would all be noted, and absorbed imaginatively into the tapestry of Dante’s Comedy. In Heaven, Dante the poet was to meet Charles of Anjou’s grandson, Charles Martel, King of Hungary.
Upon my brow a crown already shone
The crown of that land where the Danube flows
When it has left behind its German shores.
And fair Trinacria [Sicily], whom ashes (these
result from surging sulphur, not Typhoeus)
cover between Pachynus and Pelorus,
along the gulf that Eurus vexes most,
would still await its rulers born – through me –
from Charles and Rudolph if ill sovereignty,
which alway
s hurts the heart of subject peoples,
had not provoked Palermo to cry out:
‘Die! Die!’
[Par. VIII.64–75, Mandelbaum]
They were provoked. They had had enough. The quest, not merely for political stability but for justice, was to be part of Dante’s overriding political concern as a grown man. In youth, however, while these events went on around him, he was dominated by the instability not just of the state but of family fortune. Before his teens were over, the most disrupting family tragedy of all – no less devastating for being as common as Hamlet’s mother said it was – befell him.
VII
LATE TEENS – THE DREAM
DANTE WAS ONLY IN HIS TEENS WHEN HIS FATHER DIED. IT happened some time between 1281 and 1283. In accordance with the laws of Florence, he needed a guardian until the age of twenty-five. Is it possible that, had Signor Alighieri Senior lived, Dante would have been forced to follow in his father’s footsteps and develop his talents as a notary and money lender? If so, it would not necessarily have diminished his poetic life. T. S. Eliot worked in a bank. Wallace Stevens was an insurance lawyer. Dante was to involve himself in the world of politics and probably took his turn in the military, as we shall see. He had a life outside literature, and one of the reasons that the Comedy is not simply a good poem but The Good Poem, the all-encompassing portrait of its age, is precisely that Dante was so profoundly involved with the current affairs of his time, with the rivalries of great families and political factions, with the religious crises and philosophical problems, as well as with the loves and lives, of his contemporaries. Nevertheless, it is hard not to feel that as a fatherless teenager of restless and, as yet, unacademic brilliance, he was in a better position to begin his poetic apprenticeship than would a boy living beneath the task-master’s eye of a living father – like Frank Osbaldistone, the boy-narrator who would like to be a poet but is forced to work in the counting house in Rob Roy.