by John Gardner
In the heyday of the Lady of the Sun, Geoffrey Chaucer thrived. It was probably during this period that he began his significant travels for the crown. He’d traveled briefly to Spain in 1366, but he was apparently at that time a minor attendant. It seems barely possible that in 1368 he may have traveled to Italy to visit Prince Lionel. Speght, writing in 1598, quotes an old report that Chaucer was in attendance on his former master when Lionel went to marry Violante Visconti. That, we know, is not exactly right, since the wedding party left in May, and Chaucer not only received his annuity on May 25 (though not “into his own hands”) but was still in England two months later (July 17, 1368), when he received a license to sail from Dover with £10 in exchange. If Chaucer was not back in England before October 31, 1368, when a half-yearly payment on his annuity was made, he may have been gone for 106 days. The £10 Chaucer was allowed to take with him was easily enough to carry him to Milan; but it’s unlikely that he could make the long round trip, which in those days was usually taken overland, in 106 days. It therefore seems more likely that he traveled to Flanders in connection with the marriage negotiations involving Margaret of Flanders and Edward’s son Edmund Langley (Chaucer would travel often as a marriage negotiator); or he may have gone as a diplomat to France or, possibly, Spain.
In 1369, as we’ve seen, he was with Gaunt in France, and he was again “abroad in the king’s service” during the summer of 1370. Since his absence was brief, he may have gone to the Netherlands, or possibly to northern France, where Sir Robert Knoll’s small army was raiding. The likelihood is that his business, once again, was diplomacy. A new treaty with Flanders was just at this moment about to be completed, and when Chaucer sailed home, negotiations with an envoy from Genoa were about to begin.
What may have been Chaucer’s first major diplomatic assignment came in November 1372, when he was appointed to serve in a commission with two men of Genoa, Sir James of Provan and John of Mari (apparently head of the commission), to negotiate with the duke, citizens, and merchants of Genoa over the choice of some English port where the Genoese might form a commercial establishment. For his journey Chaucer received 100 marks ($16,000) in advance of the day he left London, December 1. He was away for about a year and eventually received for his expenses 138 marks ($21,480), calculated at the rate of 13s. 4d. ($160) a day. As his expense account suggests, his business was important. Foreign commercial establishments in English ports meant revenue for the English crown, and England was now—as usual—in desperate straits. But the trip was perhaps even more important for Chaucer the poet. The roll which records the payments made to him mentions that Chaucer’s business had taken him to Florence as well as to Genoa, probably to negotiate a loan to King Edward, who depended heavily on the Bardi and Florentine financial houses; and there is reason to believe that he also saw Padua and there met the great Italian scholar-poet Petrarch. The trip is usually called Chaucer’s first Italian journey, and though doubts have been expressed, the description is probably accurate. He was probably chosen for this present mission because he spoke some Italian. He had known Italians since his youth in London, where his father and mother had been associated with pepperers—guildsmen who dealt mainly with that exotic Italian fruit—and when he returned from Italy he would again be associated with Italians as controller of customs for the port of London, where he would deal with both royal creditors and Italian merchants.9 Whether or not he knew Italian when he left for Italy, Italian poetry would be the chief influence on his own poetry when he returned.
The trip down to Italy was laborious and dangerous. Channel crossings—the first small step—could in themselves be murderous. Froissart tells us that Harve of Leon once set sail from Southampton with “the intent to arrive at Harfleur; but a storm took him on the sea which endured fyftene dayes, and lost his horses, which were cast into the sea, and Sir Harve of Leon was so sore troubled that he had never health after.” King John of France, a few years later, took eleven days to cross the Channel, and King Edward once had a passage so grim he was convinced he was the victim of necromancers and wizards. Since Chaucer’s main ambassadorial missions came after the English naval defeat of 1372, he had reason to fear not only rough weather but also French privateers.
Though winter had set in when Chaucer began his long journey, the trip down through France was serene enough. The weather was cold and the party had to press through heavy snow and wind, but it would warm as he moved southward; and as for the troubles between France and England, his papers from the king protected him. His party would encounter, in that bitter season, no battles in progress. But crossing the Alps in the dead of winter was an enterprise now almost unimaginable—“travel” in the original sense of “travail.” The mountain trails were narrow, crooked, and badly kept up, roads the width of modern broad sidewalks that wound up mountainsides heavy with snow when Chaucer passed. (He would look down tentatively past his furs and the flanks of his wary horse and make out, far below him, dazzling icy rocks and that gray rushing water one sees only in Switzerland and the Himalayan mountains, and he would close his eyes for a moment and whisper, “A Goddes half!”—to which his fur-draped horse with a shudder expressed agreement.) The inhabitants of the mountains were queer, dour people, herdsmen and bandits who could appear from nowhere and vanish, it seemed, into the ice of the cliffs—though they would hardly dare trouble a large, well-armed party like Chaucer’s. Then, when the Alps were towering behind his back, came what Dante called, in his Purgatorio, that “most desolate, most solitary way between Lerici and Turbia.” For us, heirs of the Romantic poets, the dangers and privations of the long, hard trek would be redeemed by the breathtaking beauty of it all, but that sentiment would seem to Chaucer outlandish. There were, of course, some men of his time who liked such things—Yorkshiremen, for instance, like the Gawain-poet, who could say in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, after scrutiny of the scene,
They rode by hills where every bough lay bare
And climbed in the bloom of cliffs where coldspots hung—
The dark sky overcast, the low clouds ugly;
Mists moved, wet, on the moor, and the mountain walls
Were damp, every mountain a huge man hatted and mantled;
Brooks boiled up muttering, bursting from banks all about them,
And shattered, shining, on the stones as they showered down.
The way through the wood wound, baffling, out and in,
Till the hour of sunrise came and the sun rose cold
and bright.
They rode on a high hill’s crown,
The snow all around them white…
But the beauty of the landscape, to Chaucer’s way of thinking, would be curious stuff for a man to be squandering his wits on. Genoa, on the other hand, where the weather was as warm and fresh as an English summer, where highly civilized, artistic eyes had transmuted nature to a celebration of man’s will—Genoa was something else again.
Italy was far ahead of England in many respects, though hindsight may tell us she was behind in others. England had what we now call Oxford rationalism, sire of modern science and industry; and England had the old Anglo-Saxon respect for human life, a sentiment Chaucer would find less primary, despite the influence of great men like Dante, in the land of ingenious torturers and poisoners. But Italy was, for Chaucer, as it would be for Henry James long afterward, impressively old and, however perilous, at least in an aesthetic sense, highly civilized. In England the Renaissance would be a startling discovery. In Italy it was already in full bloom.
Chaucer left a London of quaint stone, plaster, and wooden houses, winding streets like alleyways, lumbering cogs that could be broken to splinters by a good Channel storm, and arrived in a Genoa of Roman and mock-Roman (or Romanesque) columns—the Genoa Ruskin recorded in its decline—wide, smooth old streets, great domes and portals, a harbor where the fleet was, from an English point of view, futuristic. What Chaucer had grown up with, the wonderful rough-and-ready character of Englishmen,
the blunt honesty and childish impulsiveness that could lead a devoted retainer to forget and draw his sword on the king himself, was a matter for aloof amusement to the Genoese. At least in the eyes of an Englishman like Chaucer, they were cool, darkly impressive, these Genoese. They had the aplomb we associate with English bank clerks, and they had, besides, a reputation as sharp traders. That Chaucer should be sent to deal with them is an indication of the respect his employers had for his facile tongue and canny eye. He was beginning to be known as an unusually good poet, and in fourteenth-century diplomacy, tone was important.
Not the least of Italy’s charms was its music—a charm not lost on Geoffrey Chaucer, whose poetry makes repeated reference to music of every kind, from the singing of the old carpenter’s young wife, “like a swallow on a barn,” to the devilish thrum of tavern guitars in the Pardoner’s Tale or the raucous brattle of bagpipes that brings the Canterbury pilgrims out of Southwerk. Leaning from his carriage, bending toward the window of his urban palace, or walking somewhat cautiously through the crowded, noisily polyglot markets, Chaucer heard music brimming, as it seemed, from all directions. Italy, then as now, was a country of song. Ancient Rome’s musical leavings had become common street songs, as Puccini’s arias are in our time the property of Naples’ garbage men. In France, Chaucer knew, music was more experimental, more advanced—Machault was at about this time composing the first musical Mass by a single composer—but in Italy serious music, both religious and secular, was popular with all classes, as popular as were, back in England, barbaric lays like “Little Musgrave.” In Italy as in England and throughout much of Europe, court composers wrote motets in the style of Machault, but in Italy, where so many kinds of music thrived, the delightful and intricate motet went more or less unnoticed.
Even more important, for Chaucer’s future career at least, was Italian architecture. He would become, late in life, clerk of the king’s works, that is, the public official responsible for most of the crown’s great building projects; and it seems likely that Chaucer was involved, in one way or another, with repair or building projects throughout much of his career. He would be appointed controller of customs just when repair and rebuilding of the custom office and wharf were in progress, and he would move from that job to another involving building and maintenance, clerk of the king’s works at Eltham, Sheen, and Greenwich. None of these jobs involved Chaucer directly as architect, but the hiring of architects was partly or wholly his responsibility—along with the buying and transporting of materials, payment of workers, and inspection of the work done—so his first-hand knowledge of Italian architecture was an important qualification. Since he began as controller immediately after his return from Italy, and since years later he would be sued for debt by (apparently) the carpenter in charge of the custom-office work (one never sued the crown, only the officer in charge of crown work; hence this suit against Chaucer may indicate that he was the supervisor of custom-office renovations), it seems possible that in choosing Chaucer for the mission to Italy, his employers instructed him to take a more than casual look at Tuscany’s famous program of construction.
Especially in Florence, Italian architecture was a thing to widen a sophisticated Englishman’s eyes. Chaucer saw, for instance, the extraordinarily beautiful double belt of stone walls that encircled the city, and the even more impressive ancient baptistry of St. John—to this day one of the most distinguished Christian monuments in Europe. Modern experts have been unable to determine whether it was built in the period of declining Rome, that is, sometime in the seventh century, or later;10 but to the courtly nobleman who showed the baptistry to Chaucer, it was definitely known to be the oldest building in the world, going back to pagan times, when it was a temple of Mars (a legend believed until the end of the nineteenth century, when excavations proved the building was, ah origine, Christian). Actually, of course, Chaucer and his Italian guide were right, standing in that great, dim, mysterious building, imagining it filled with pagan specters performing the solemn and terrible rites of Mars; for whatever the persuasion of the unknown architect, those majestic columns, capitals, and architraves he’d assembled from abandoned pagan temples had kept, as they keep even now, their ancient mood. Other northern poets might take a small-minded view of the old religion, imagining its rites to have taken place in huts, old mounds, dripping caves; but Chaucer, having seen the baptistry, knew better and could give ancient worshippers dignity and space:
This Troilus, as he was wont to gidë [guide]
His youngë knyghtës, lad hem up and down [led]
In thilkë large temple on every sidë, [this same]
Byholding ay the ladiës of the town…
And he knew by those massive columns and stern, spare capitals the solemnity and threat in the old religion, so he could write with grim humor of Troilus’ comeuppance when he mocks the God of Love, and then
caste up the browë,[raised his eyebrow]
Ascauncës, “Loo! is this naught wisëly spoken?” [askance, as if to say]
At which the God of Lovë gan loken rowë [began to gaze down ruefully]
Right for despit, and shop for to ben wroken. [planned to be avenged]
He [Troilus] kidde anon his [Cupid’s] [found out pretty soon]
bowë nas naught broken;
For sodeynly he hitte hym attë fullë…
When Chaucer saw it, the incrustation of white and green marble, inside and outside the baptistry, had been in place for many years, as had the glowing mosaics of the interior (far brighter then than now), the mosaic envelope of the apse with its triumphal arch, and the mosaics of the cupola, source of some of Dante’s most striking images.
A few hundred steps eastward of the baptistry rose the palace of the podesta (now known as the Bargello), one of the most impressive piles reared anywhere in Italy in the age of the emerging third estate. Though it was built by burghers—strong competitors, in Italy, of the old feudal class—it outwardly followed the model of the square, stiff feudal castles that dotted the hills of Tuscany, equipped with gates, moats, drawbridges, and battlements. But if, from outside, its imposing walls of rough-hewn stone and its vigorous battlemented tower made it seem the soul of Italian feudalism, it was something else altogether within: a people’s palace with a large and handsome inner court, columns supporting a spacious vaulted portico, and a great ceremonial stairway leading to an impressive loggia at the level of the first storey.
Chaucer saw other great buildings throughout Florence, many of which survive today. The Dominicans had constructed, over the past century, their splendid monastic group of structures—churches, including Santa Maria Novella, cloisters, a refectory, a library, a chapter house, and a great bell tower. The Franciscans had constructed Santa Croce, a striking departure from stern, squared-off Florentine tradition, not quite northern Gothic but capturing some of that style’s best features—well proportioned, rising on slender piers, the spacious interior flooded with light from choir and clerestory. There was the palace of priors—the present Palazzo Vecchio—and the bright, warm piazza created by the clearing away of the wrecked Uberti houses—the present Piazza Signoria.
There was the graceful hexagonal campanile still admired today, at that time part of the church of the Badia (the church itself was vulgarly rebuilt in the seventeenth century); the newly dedicated Or San Michele with its great covered loggia; and the rose-colored, marble-encrusted campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore, generally regarded as the loveliest architectural work in Florence. Much of this was new when Chaucer saw it: the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made up a great period in Florentine building, though also there were structures as old as the Tuscan hills.
The crowning architectural pleasure of Chaucer’s tour, a work that cannot help having influenced his artistic vision, subtly moving him toward his late, so-called realistic style (whether or not it left its mark on some English building long since fallen), was Giotto’s campanile, just nearing completion when Chaucer first looked at it
. (Giotto had died in 1337, at the age of seventy; the tower was not completed for another half century.) Though its effect was achieved not by buttresses and windows but by the ingenious patterning of light stone and dark, it made most other towers seem old-fashioned and sunk in gloom. Giotto had lived to carry his project only to just above the first row of sculptures, but that was enough to give his stamp to the entire work, and it was finished with only minor deviations from his plan. Probably the first seven panels on the west face of the campanile are Giotto’s own. In any event, it is in their subject matter and style that these were chiefly important, we may imagine, for Chaucer. The series begins with the creation of Adam, continues with the creation of Eve, then depicts the Fall. On this third panel, Adam is delving and Eve spinning, in accord with the curse they’ve drawn down on themselves. From this orthodox beginning Giotto and his disciple, Andrea Pisano, move, in a continuous band enclosing the four sides of the tower, to a record of the inventions and occupations which measure the rise of civilized man. (The tower’s fourth side was blank when Chaucer saw it, to be filled in long afterward.) It was this startling development from the populist premise of Florentine architecture—this “humanism” in Giotto’s work, not only in the sculptures but in his paintings and richly colored frescoes as well—that made his art so new and exciting and for a time informed the vision of every artist around him.