This splendid century was most glorious in Italy. But the beginnings of the glory lay in the two centuries preceding. Already in 1250 the noble citizens of Florence were resplendent in their palaces, the guilds were formed, the city was alert and alive, ready for great things. In 1265 was born the first world-famous Florentine, Dante Alighieri.
He was the son of a well-to-do citizen, and he was given the best education the times afforded. In those days the schools were all attached to monasteries. Even in the universities monks were the chief teachers. For in the peace and seclusion of their monastic fortresses the monks had been able for hundreds of years to study all the existing books. In the monastery libraries the books of Europe, all written by hand upon parchment, were carefully stored. Seated in silence at their benches, the monks slowly and beautifully copied the old books, all in the Latin tongue, making new, clean volumes, often beautifully decorated in colours. And as they copied they studied. Then the most learned would teach daily in the school within the peaceful bounds of the monastery, or they would go forth, to lecture in a university, or to teach groups of young people in some palace, or to be the tutors in some rich family.
Dante was first taught by a priest, then he went to one of the schools, then to various masters who instructed him in various subjects. All the time, till he was thirty- five he stayed in Florence, never departing to a university. This was unusual in those days. In the Middle Ages, when a man had heard the teachers and doctors of his own university, say of Oxford, he set off on foot or on horseback, wearing the grey robe of a student, and travelling peacefully along the wild roads, to another university. So many Englishmen came from the north to Oxford, and from Oxford, after their term, set off southwards for France and Italy. Everybody knew a student by his dress, and respected him for his learning. If he came to a monastery, he would at once be admitted as a guest. Then he would spend a few days in seclusion, discussing learned subjects with the abbot and the more book-loving brothers, would study some book in the library, and then, perhaps having written a Latin poem in praise of the monastery, he would take the road again, and travel till he came to the famous University of Paris, where he would settle down to hear the great teachers. Then on from Paris he would go, down to Italy, walking slowly or riding towards the great universities of Bologna, Padua, Salerno. He needed very little money indeed. Some he could earn by writing letters or doing other clerical work. When he came to a university he was sure of a welcome.
Europe then was not like Europe now. If a man were a Christian, all countries were his, for everywhere was the one Church of which he was a son. If he were at all educated, he spoke Latin, and Latin was the speech of all churchmen, of all Europeans of any standing. What did it matter if a man were English or French or Spanish? He was a European, a member of Christendom. He travelled along the roads where all travelled, and on the full high-road every European was at home. People took no notice of foreigners and foreign tongues, for the civilised countries were always full of outlandish troops, and priests might belong to any nation. So the student leaving Italy would calmly take the great north road, to come home through the Alps to Germany, walking often on foot without any fears. He would make his way to the great monastery of St. Gall, near the Lake of Constance, and there call his greeting to the gate-keeper. Nobody asked if he were English or Irish or German or Italian. He spoke in Latin to the monks and was received as one of themselves. Then in the evening they would gossip and talk. So we know many English and Irish, Spanish and Italian came to St. Gall. Some, even wild Irish, stayed and became monks, some became even parish priests to the German peasants. So there was a great, quiet interchange going on all the time; Europe was one realm of the Church as it has never been since the fifteenth century, when national boundaries began to make fixed barriers.
Learning was a hard, dry business in the Middle Ages. The four great subjects were theology, astronomy, arithmetic and history. All teaching, of course, went on in Latin. The mediaeval schoolmasters divided true learning into two branches: the Trivium or threefold, which consisted of grammar, dialectic or argument, and rhetoric or eloquent speech; then the Quadrivium or fourfold, which consisted of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy. Many a poor student wept over the clumsy difficulties of the Quadrivium, many a man cracked his brains trying to master the Trivium.
Dante, however, without a great deal of help from masters, became deeply learned in all the seven branches of mediaeval science. Alone in his room in Florence he read what books he could buy or borrow. Admitted to the libraries of the city, he studied all that was to be known. He was very happy studying and learning and thinking. It made him feel rich at heart, and cheerful.
He loved to meet with friends or learned monks, to hold deep converse by the hour. This was one of the delights of the Middle Ages, this meeting for serious, enthusiastic talk.
The family of Dante belonged to the Guelph party, and during all his youth the poet was mixed up in the serious party strife of Florence. In 1289 the Ghibelins collected from all the Tuscan cities and met the Florentine Guelphs in the battle of Campaldino. Dante, who was twenty- four years of age at the time, is said to have taken part in the battle. The Guelphs were victorious, and the Ghibelins never lifted their heads again in Florence. This victory over the united troops of the Tuscan cities made Florence finally the Queen of Tuscany.
Whilst he was a young man Dante must have met or known the beautiful Beatrice. We do not know if he ever spoke to her. But all through his after-life he made beautiful her memory. His first poem, the ‘ Vita Nuova’ or New Life, tells the delicate, touching story of his love. But Dante married and lived happily enough with his family. It was not so much the person, the actual individual, that he loved in Beatrice; it was his own vision. Beatrice was like a vision to him of the life that might come, when men were pure and spiritual, loving their women with purified love. She was a vision or illusion of the more spiritual, more passionless days to come, even the later days which Europe has known and which Dante would never know. If he had married her, she could not have remained a vision to him. And it was the fair ideal he needed, not the actual woman. So that what he calls his grief, in the loss of Beatrice, is really his wistful joy.
Dante was a member of one of the great guilds, the Guild of Doctors. In 1300 he was one of the Chiefs or Priors of this guild. There were seven guilds: the Judges and notaries, the Calimala, the Money Changers, the Woollen Manufacturers, the Doctors and Druggists, the Silkweavers and Mercers, the Skinners and Furriers. The Priors were elected for a period of two months’ time, during which period they were practically governors of the city.
There was, as usual, bitter party struggle. Dante and the Priors exiled a struggling faction. The more aristocratic exiles appealed to Pope Boniface VIII. Boniface invited the French into Tuscany. In 1301 Charles of Valois entered Florence. In January 1302 Dante left his beloved native city, exiled for ever.
He was now a wanderer, but never homeless. He was a learned, cultured man, and such a man was at home everywhere in Europe at that day. Sympathetic nobles invited him to their homes. They gave him little simple rooms within the thick walls of their great castles, and as he wrote he would look out of his loop-hole window at the wild hills or at the river. Thus he composed his long poem called the ‘ Divine Comedy,’ one of the world’s greatest works. From his writing in his lonely rooms he would go down the cold, massive stone stairway to the hall where the family dined, and there he would sit in conversation with the lords and clergy, an honoured if penniless guest. He knew the bitterness of dependence, but still we must believe he was happy, composing his work in peace and having converse with generous men. Particularly he liked to stay in the castle of his friend Can Grande della Scala, at Verona.
At times, also, he departed to the universities, where he was warmly welcomed. There, at Bologna, Padua, Paris, perhaps even at Oxford, Dante heard the doctors, and himself opened a lecture-room, where he lectured in his own way. By this means, no d
oubt, he obtained some money for his maintenance, from the fees of those men who attended his lectures and could afford to pay.
Dante spent the last three years of his life at Ravenna, that old city, half Italian, half Byzantine, where the last emperors had sheltered themselves behind the marshes when the barbarians invaded Italy. In Ravenna Dante lived with his two sons and his daughter, all guests of his good friend, the nobleman Guido da Polenta. They looked out over the wild, flat country, the old marshes; they went down to the Adriatic sea-shore; they visited the great churches. And in 1321 Dante died, and was buried in the Lady Chapel of the Franciscan Church.
Dante belonged to the close of the great mediaeval period, called the Age of Faith. His chief work, the ‘ Divine Comedy,’ tells of his visionary visit to Hell, where the violent, passionate men of the old world of pride and lust are kept in torment; then on to Purgatory, where there is hope; then at last he is conducted by Beatrice into Paradise. It is the vision of the passing away of the old, proud, arrogant violence of the barbaric world, into the hopeful culture such as the Romans knew, on to the spiritual peace and equality of a new Christian world. This new Christian world was beyond Dante’s grasp. Paradise is much less vivid to him than the Inferno. What he knew best was the tumultuous, violent passion of the past, that which was punished in Hell. The spiritual happiness is not his. He belongs to the old world.
The next great man of letters was Petrarch. He too was the son of a Florentine, but he was born in 1304 at Arczzo, to which city his father had retired when exiled from Florence by the same decree which exiled Dante. Petrarch also loved study. He was brought up by his mother for some years on a small estate which she owned, upon the Arno near Florence: then the family moved to Pisa; and then Petrarch’s father went with his wife and children to Avignon, where, being a lawyer, he no doubt found plenty to do in connection with the papal court.
When he was fifteen years old, the young Petrarch was sent from Avignon to the University of Montpellier, a university most famous in the Middle Ages for law and medicinc. There he was to study law. But instead, he got hold of the old books of Rome; the writers of the Augustan Age fascinated him. Instead of studying law he pored, fascinated, over the magnificent pagan poems of Virgil, or over the pagan treatises of Cicero. These books seemed to him so grand, so full of beautiful images and rich, deep thoughts that they moved him far more than any Christian works could do. For in those days the books of our civilisation were not written, and science had barely awakened.
From Montpellier he went to Bologna. Still he did not get on with law. He began to collect old Latin manuscripts, reading with fascination the pagan writers of great Rome. His father came to visit him at Bologna, and saw that he made little progress in law. Then he examined his son’s small but very dear library of old manuscripts, realised that this was what hindered him in law, and straightway had a fire made in the courtyard, where the old books were cast on the flames. The young man wept so bitterly when his father cast on the fire the beloved volumes of Cicero and Virgil that the stern old lawyer fished them out before they had caught.
It was no use going on with law. Yet the young man loved study so much. So he took Holy Orders, became a priest. Then he was happy. He had many dear friends, both in the Church and without. He kept these friends all his life, and it was his joy to meet with them, talk and ride and exchange ideas. He set them all busy hunting the old manuscripts of pagan Rome, and many treasures they saved for us. Petrarch set off from Avignon in 1333, to travel in North Europe. He spent some time in Paris, then went on to Ghent, Lige, and to the great bishops- city of Cologne. He loved meeting many men and having exquisite discourse. But the great adventure was in hunting for old, unknown Latin manuscripts.
He spent a good deal of his life at Avignon, and although he abuses the sinfulness of the papal court, without doubt he was happy in the old town — or near to it. For he moved about ten miles away from the too-lively city of the popes. He took a little house at Vaucluse, with hills and meadows round about, a small river near by. Here he made lovely gardens, sunny and still and rich with foliage and flowers, where he used to study. Often he wandered alone among the hills. For at this time men’s eyes began to open to the beauty of landscape and wild nature, which had not been noticed before. His friends came out to drink wine with him and talk of the wonders with which life was filled, wonderful books that they had found, beautiful old Roman ideas which now for the first time dawned on their minds.
In Avignon Petrarch met the famous Laura, the woman whom he loved, and to whom he wrote his famous poems, sonnets which taught even Shakespeare the arts of poetry. Laura was married and had many children. Petrarch was a priest. And therefore the love was once more visionary and ideal. Laura was no doubt more real to Petrarch than Beatrice to Dante. Still she was a spirit, a visionary being rather than a woman of flesh and blood. Laura died of the Black Death, the Great Pestilence, in 1348.
Much of Petrarch’s work, his world-stirring letters, his treatises, his poems, was written in Latin for the learned only. But the poems to Laura were written in pure Italian. Dante’s great poem, Petrarch’s poems, these were the beginning of real modern literature. The friends of Petrarch scolded him for wasting his time, writing in trivial Italian. But now we forget all his Latin effusions, and read only the despised Italian, most beautiful and most real.
From Avignon Petrarch went in 1341 to King Robert’s court at Naples. He was received with welcome. Already his inspired letters and his poetry were making him a name in all Europe. In 1341 he was crowned with the poet’s laurel wreath by the Senate, on the Capitol of Rome. Kings knew of him and admired him. He had a passionate love for Italy, and his burning letters to sovereigns and rulers helped to decide the course of history. He longed for the union of Italy — just as Dante did. But Petrarch stands at the beginning of the modern world, whilst Dante stood at the shadowy end of the old.
Petrarch died in 1374, at his house among the Euganian Hills near Padua, in his own country. He bequeathed his precious library to Venice.
The third great Italian writer of this time was Boccaccio. He was Petrarch’s good friend. Boccaccio was also a Florentine, born in 1313. His father was a merchant of Florence. At the age of twenty the young Boccaccio was sent to assist in the counting-house of a merchant in Naples, in order to gain experience in commerce.
But Naples at that time was a bright city. The French House of Anjou still ruled the Neapolitan kingdom. King Robert kept a brilliant, gay little court, almost reminding one of old Hohenstaufen days. The young Boccaccio was introduced to this gay court. Being of a lively, pleasant disposition, he was very happy. For he was also rich, kind, of good Florentine birth, and a true scholar. So King Robert held him an ornament to his court, and Boccaccio was often employed as a diplomatist, transacting affairs of state for Florence.
Boccaccio remained a rich merchant, but he never ceased to love learning and poetry above all things. In Naples he met the lady whom he in his turn made famous, the bright Fiammetta. Like Dante and Petrarch, Boccaccio could not marry the woman he loved, for she was already married. But he did not complain. Many a happy time they had, hunting in the country, or dancing at court; or, at some lovely villa among the hills, reading together; or telling tales under the trees with a company of bright and beautiful men and women; or listening to the singing of poems, or playing games on the grass: all rich and rare and bright women and men, delighting in life.
In 1350 Boccaccio returned to Florence, just after the Great Plague. There he wrote the hundred Italian tales, called the Decameron. The introduction to the Decameron gives a terrible description of the plague in Florence, from which the ladies and gallants withdraw to a secluded villa in the country. But the tales which these ladies and men are supposed to tell are mostly gay and amusing, sometimes sad, touching, but never tragic.
These hundred little novels of the Decameron form the most famous work of Boccaccio. They are written in pleasant, simple Italian which we c
an read to-day without much difficulty. It is said that these stories gave the form to modern Italian. Certainly they seem much nearer to us than the dark, difficult old Italian of Dante, or the more learned old Italian of Petrarch.
But Boccaccio, like Petrarch, was scolded for not writing always in good solid Latin. The native dialects, as the European tongues were then called, were despised by the learned. And Boccaccio was very learned — his big palace in Florence was thronged with scholars, poets, ladies, gay as well as clever. Boccaccio must have been a delightful man to know: so fine in himself, yet so kind and generous and patient, more lovable than the austere Dante or the scholarly Petrarch.
At this time the Greeks from Constantinople were beginning to visit the new cities of Europe. Constantinople shrank and sank lower, but Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, were becoming every year more brilliant. At that time very few people in Europe, save in the east, knew anything about Greek. Petrarch had heard all about Homer and Plato, but he could never read them in the original. He bitterly wanted to know Greek. But no one could teach it him, and there were no books to learn it from. The wonderful Greek language was shut off from Europeans. ‘ I have a Homer,’ said Petrarch. ‘ But Homer is dumb to me, or I am deaf to him.’
But now Greek professors began to appear in Italian towns. One of the first that came to Florence was invited to Boccaccio’s house, and maintained there. Boccaccio learned Greek, and established a Greek chair in the university of Florence. And to the ungrateful, fretful, spiteful Byzantine who came and went and was never satisfied, the kind-hearted Florentine was always gentle and generous, never heeding the petty treacheries of the stranger, never denying him a home. For to have learned Greek was like wealth to Boccaccio. To be able to read Homer, Plato, Herodotus, this was to have a new world opened to one, a new world of the past rich with thoughts.
Complete Works of D.H. Lawrence Page 910