Chapter Seven—
The Origins

Italians at German Courts

I have posited a connection between the military and sociopolitical ethos of the nobility and the education of high civil servants, and I have assumed that this process started with the development of curiality at the German imperial court. Evidence of early Italian connections with Germany at this level is abundant, if scattered.

The history of education in Italy between Charlemagne and A.D. 1000 hinges on the cathedral schools, in addition to the monasteries, the rare private schools, and such notarial chanceries as that of the notarii sacri palatii of the royal palace at Pavia, already active under the Longobard kings.^[1] An important episode is the presence at the royal court of Pavia of a school of grammar under a deacon named Felix at the time of the Longobard King Cunipert (671–700). Much beloved and honored by the king, Felix left a progeny of teachers: his nephew Flavianus trained Paulus Diaconus (who recorded this information). Cunipert was the first orthodox Catholic king in Italy, his predecessors having favored paganism, Arianism (like the Ostrogoths before them), or the Three Chapters' schismatic observance; as such he started endowing churches and monasteries, thus establishing the kind of regular intercourse between courts and abbeys that would characterize the curial tradition of later times.^[2] Liutprand (712–744) enriched his court by setting up, alongside the court school, a royal chapel with its own clergy of the palace, while members of the royal family were being appointed as

bishops of Pavia and Milan. The prestige of his thus refurbished court attracted illustrious Italian and foreign intellectuals and grandees like Pippin, who was sent over by his father Charles Martel in 735 to be educated there. Charlemagne hastened to invite Paulus Diaconus (d. 799) to the Frankish court of Aachen, where the Longobard scholar and courtier spent five years (782–786). While there Paulus inaugurated the genre of episcopal biographies with his Gesta episcoporum Mettensium, on the pattern of the Liber pontificalis.^[3]

The Carolingian revival of grammatical instruction continued to have an impact in the ninth and tenth centuries. In the tenth century “the guiding model for education remained, as in the previous century, the learned bishop.”^[4] When the German emperors began shaping policies for episcopal training and behavior, there may have been German influences on Italian bishops, too. By the year 1000, however, the lay notaries, versed in the law and later on in the dictamen version of rhetoric, were clearly replacing clerics in both communal and episcopal chanceries (Witt 1988: 38). Between 1000 and 1400 the Italian communes employed lay litterati whose training, the notarial art, combined the study of law with the study of rhetoric in the form of ars dictandi, although after 1350 the two branches started to separate and the studium iuris became divorced from the studia litterarum or humanitatis.^[5]

Maria Picchio Simonelli has recently suggested that the impressive Latin poem Waltharius Manufortis once attributed to Ekkehart of St. Gall (d. 973) might have originated, instead, around Berengarius I Marquis of Friuli (874), king of Italy since 888 and emperor after 915, holding court mainly at Verona.^[6] Classical influences are at work in this poem in Virgilian hexameters about heroic/romantic adventures involving the Aquitanian Walther and his bride Hiltgunt, who escape from captivity among the Huns and survive a series of frightening encounters with the Burgundians Gunther and Hagen, who covet their treasure.

In the cosmopolitan high society of the Middle Ages it is no wonder that at the distant courts of northern Germany one could also find Italians. Italian scholars and clerics who acquired curial ideals in German imperial and episcopal courts included such prominent courtier prelates as Liutprand of Pavia, Gunzo (of Novara ?), Leo of Vercelli, Anselm of Besate, Benzo of Alba, Siccardo of Cremona, Acerbo Morena, and, as far down as the fifteenth century, Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini. The cathedral school of Würzburg (962), one of the earliest to be vitalized by the Ottonian educational policies, flourished under an Italian master

teacher, Stephen of Novara (Stephanus Grammaticus), called there by Otto I (962–973) and the local bishop, Poppo.^[7] Liutprand, born in Pavia of noble Longobard ancestry, first served at the courts of the Italic kings Hugh of Provence and Berengarius, until he was made bishop of Cremona by Otto I in 961, as a reward for his support and services since 956. He traveled widely, twice as ambassador to Constantinople (949–951 and 968), and in Germany he learned enough German to act as interpreter between Otto and Pope John XII (963) in Rome. He praised his high protector in the polemically lively Liber de rebus gestis Othonis imperatoris.^[8] The mysterious and cantankerous grammarian Gunzo, perhaps a deacon from Novara, turned up at the Saxon court, too. Leo of Vercelli, a cultured diplomat and man of law with ties to the school of Pavia, became bishop of Vercelli in 998 after having been archdeacon of Otto III's sacred palace (iudex sacri palatii ). His influence was felt in the organization of the chancery after the significant unification of the chanceries of Germany and Italy decreed in 998 under the aegis of the archilogotheta Eribertus, archbishop of Cologne.^[9] Gerbert of Aurillac (d. 1003), the famous teacher and bishop of Reims and then tutor to Otto III, is connected with the history of Italian education as he later influenced it when he became Pope Sylvester II: his mark was to be felt long thereafter in France insofar as the “Twelfth-Century Renaissance” at Chartres still kept a fresh memory of the work done there by Gerbert's pupil, Bishop Fulbert.

At the court of Henry III (1039–1056), alongside such luminaries as Wipo, Anno (later bishop of Cologne), and Adalbert, bishop of Bremen, there was also the Italian (?) Anselm of Besate known as the Peripatetic, educated at the cathedral school of Milan, and the author of the manneristic Rhetorimachia (ca. 1050). Henry III's court also enjoyed the services of Bishop Benzo of Alba, perhaps the most interesting Italian figure at the north German courts thanks to his numerous writings addressed ad Heinricum IV imperatorem, purportedly for the emperor's instruction and originally composed in the third quarter of the eleventh century but recompiled between 1086–1090.^[10] Benzo was an eager participant in the struggle over investiture, and his polemic writings were aimed at lending support to the cause of Henry IV against Pope Gregory VII, royal chaplains having much at stake in defending imperial prerogatives in the naming and controlling of bishops and high ecclesiastics. Without meaning censure, Benzo could objectively portray the royal chaplains “as drawing long sighs after the benefice of an episcopal ring,” “regales capellani longa suspiria trahentes pro anuli beneficio”

(Monumenta Germaniae Historica SS 11: 599, v. 44). For him the court was an impressive assemblage of noble characters who could have graced the ancient senate with their political and rhetorical Ciceronian skills: “Multi quidem nobiles et sapientes viri morantur in curia domini mei, qui Ciceronicis amministrationibus valuissent sedare commotiones imperii” (ibid. 614, vv. 11 ff.). Indeed, he did not hesitate to model the king's council on the Roman Senate: the court itself he called senatus and the courtiers, senatores, whom he addressed as patres conscripti (MGH SS 11: 622, v. 47; 631, v. 7; 671, v. 48). In his verses he vividly reflected a humanistic spirit by reviving classical imagery in order to invest the new imperial court with the glories of ancient Rome:

Transcendens Fabios et Cicerones,
Cunctos Fabricios atque Catones,
Das populis iura cum Salomone.

As Jaeger puts it (123), “over Henry [IV]'s shoulders Benzo casts the mantle of the divine emperor, the successor of Julius Caesar and other noble Romans.”

It seems appropriate to presume that at least some of these prelates contributed to the diffusion of ideas of courtliness around Italian episcopal courts and cathedral schools. We can add that Benzo, for one, addressed many of his humanistically-slanted remarks to Italian bishops. He praised the bishop of Turin for “finding his place in the annals of illustrious men by following Cicero and Sallust”: “Imitaris Ciceronem, sequeris Salustium, / In katalogo virorum es scriptus illustrium” (MGH SS 4.4: 639, vv. 21 f.). He urged Archbishop Theobald of Milan to come to the aid of the emperor, citing the previous cases of barones episcopi under Otto III, including Leo of Vercelli (ibid. 4.1: 634–636). To persuade imperial appointees to perform according to their lord's expectations, he tried to stir up the noblest instincts in them by composing a praise of man (ibid. 4.12: 654, vv. 33–36) which Jaeger (124–125) finds worthy of a Renaissance humanist. Elsewhere (ibid. 7.3: 673, vv. 20 f.) he produced an interesting allegory of Virtue that Dante could have accepted as a good definition of inner nobility: “Virtue is dignity of mind and nobility of soul, that makes man an object of wonder and, even more, deifies him”:

Virtus est mentis dignitas et animi nobilitas,
Quae homines mirificat, insuper et deificat.

In Benzo's allegorical “Palace of Virtue,” the sun in the firmament of worldly life is amicitia: “Huius virtutis gratia sol est in mundi patria”

(ibid. 674, v. 13). Elsewhere he had postulated a bond of love between king and courtiers, in terms that Castiglione might have found fitting for his ideal court (ibid.: 600, vv. 31 f.).

Benzo cultivated another motif with a humanistic ring to it: the lessons of history. He admonished Henry IV to study the records of his predecessors in order to imitate their imperial customs: “legat quantulumcunque de historiis patrum praecedentum, ut inde sibi assumat bonae imitationis emolumentum. Legere enim aliorum annales plurimum valet ad instruendos ritus imperiales” (ibid.: 600, vv. 35 f.). Machiavelli and Guillaume Budé would have agreed, too.

We encounter in Italian biographies the same personal dispositions and educational features we have seen prescribed for the curial cleric or courtly diplomat as well as the chivalrous ruler. Gaufred of Malaterra, a monk of Norman descent who shortly after 1099 was commissioned by Robert of Sicily to write a history of the conquest of Sicily by his brother Robert Guiscard (d. 1085), described the Norman warrior race in terms that incorporated courtly qualities: “Their princes spare no expense in cultivating fame and good report. This people knows the art of flattery, practicing the study of eloquence to such a degree that even their young boys appear rhetors . . . . They delight in rich clothing, horses, and other instruments of warfare.”^[11] The apotheosis of the heroes of Norman Italy involves a different slant from that of the partisans of the Germanic empire. For the Normans of Italy and particularly Robert Guiscard shared a grand scheme of Christian knighthood which included the Spanish reconquista and came under the aegis of the papacy (of which the Normans were avowed vassals), in direct opposition to German imperial policies. Among the later Normans of Italy, Roger II of Altavilla, king of Sicily (1130–1154), was probably the most learned ruler of his time. He called to his court outstanding intellectuals, including Arab poets and scientists who translated a large number of there-tofore unavailable Greek masterworks, like Plato's Meno and Phedo. Yet, in contrast with such centers as Oxford, Reims, and other northern cathedral schools, the lack of regular schools limited the impact of this splendid court to isolated sectors of specialists.^[12]

Writing shortly after his subject's death, one of his three biographers reported that Bernard of Parma, who died as bishop of that city in 1133 and had been a friend of the powerful Countess Mathilde of Canossa, grew up with a good education in letters and was “handsome, strong of character, generous in giving, skilled in arms, pleasantly eloquent, devoted to his mother, eager to win honor,  . . . and gracious and dear to

all those who knew him.”^[13] In a long poem completed in 1115 Donizo, a Benedictine monk in St. Apollonius of Canossa, praised the Countess Mathilde for her generosity toward minstrels and for gracing with a rich library a court that was a paragon of courteous living.^[14]

Siccardo da Cremona applauded Frederick Barbarossa as “illiteratus, sed morali experientia doctus,” stressing the difference between literary instruction (which Barbarossa allegedly lacked) and moral education (which he possessed in a high degree), the latter being sufficient to educate the good courtier even in the absence of the former (Jaeger: 216 f.).

Another Italian, Acerbo Morena, drew a comprehensive series of portraits of Barbarossa's court around 1164 (Jaeger 171–173). The dominant personal characteristics of both the emperor and his entourage, including the empress Beatrix, are physical and psychological rather than moral, starting with physical beauty. Barbarossa himself was “so cheerful that he always seemed ready to break into laughter,” “hilari vultu, ut semper ridere velle putaretur.” All personages at court displayed an eminently cheerful disposition (hilaritas, iocunditas, laetitia ), a curial and courtly quality that was obviously of great value in social intercourse and was regularly found among the chivalrous knights and rulers of twelfth-century romances, even though it clashed with the ascetic ideals sternly advocated by Peter Damian and Bernard of Clairvaux; for the latter the pursuit of laetitia was an aspect of pride, and laughter a sign of downright stupidity (see my chap. 2 at passage with note 38).

The choice of language in the Middle Ages for literary purposes depended as much on the genre as on the writer's native language.^[15] Like several of his Italian contemporaries who used Occitan for the lyric, French for didactic verse, and Franco-Venetian for chivalric romance and epic, so did a courtier from Cividale del Friuli, Tommasino dei Cerchiari (ca. 1185—before 1238) use German for an interesting poem on court manners, Der Wälsche Gast (1215–1216), dedicated “to the stout knights, good ladies, and wise clerks.” Tommasino became part of medieval German literature under the Germanized name of Thomasin von Zerclaere (or Zirclaere, Circlaere, Cerclaere). He had been a priest at the court of Wolfger von Ellebrechtskirchen in Aquileia, where Wolfger, formerly a German bishop, was serving as patriarch. It was at that court that Tommasino learned the principles of French chivalry. The title of his poem meant “the Italian guest among Germans.”^[16] The northeastern region of Italy was particularly imbued with both German

cultural elements and feudal traditions,^[17] but it is notable that an early poem on manners and courtliness composed in Italy would use the German language as a natural medium not only for the audience it addressed but also for the subject matter.

Together with such ideally related works as Vincent of Beauvais's De eruditione filiorum nobilium and Gerald of Wales's De principis instructione, this fourteen-thousand-line didactic poem marks the birth of a new genre of princely education at a time when the teaching of courtly virtues had shifted away from the cathedral schools to the secular and ecclesiastical courts. Tommasino meant to convey to his aristocratic courtly audience the educational message of civic humanism that was first formulated in the Ottonian bishops' biographies and then passed on to the cathedral schools of the eleventh and early twelfth century. It was now ready to become the staple of treatises of princely or courtly education as well as treatises of manners. The first of the poem's ten books contains advice to young men and women, including instruction on table manners; courtly epic poetry is declared to be an educational genre. The moral doctrine is laid out in the following books and focuses on staete, constancy of mind, condemning the evils of its opposite, unstaete. Mâze (conceived as moderation), milte (generosity), and reht (respect for law) are the principal attendant qualities. Once again, as in the pedagogy inculcated by the masters of the cathedral schools leading to Fulbert of Chartres, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and John of Salisbury, teaching remained inherently conservative, since the cult of the great teacher and the imitation of his exemplary life was an essential part of the educational process, which transcended the search for truth per se. For Tommasino change is a form of corruption, and a good society is stable in its aristocratic order. Most noteworthy is that in stressing the courtly content of the romances he recognizes for that genre the right to allegorical exegesis, normally reserved for biblical literature: romances “contain representations of courtliness [zuht ] and of truth: in them truth is clothed in lies” (for higher purposes).^[18]

Troubadours, Dictatores, and Political Theorists in Italy

Even while they also participated in the life of the communes, the ubiquitous minstrels, those vagrant professionals of oral literature who freely roamed all parts of medieval Europe from the Iberian peninsula to Russia, made their presence felt at Italian courts.^[19] It is interesting

that among his samples of letters for all occasions, Buoncompagno da Signa (d. ca. 1240) included a set of letters from around 1200 recommending jongleurs and minstrels (both male and female) who could perform at court as well as at dubbings and nuptials (militia atque nuptiis ).^[20] That authoritative master of ars dictaminis taught mostly at the flourishing school of Bologna but was also active throughout Italy and claimed to have been in Constantinople. Francis of Assisi dignified that class of homeless artists by calling himself and his followers joculatores Domini, “minstrels of God.” For a festivity in 1324 the Malatesta lord of Rimini was said to have gathered at his court no fewer than fifteen hundred minstrels.^[21]

The first surviving Italian poem in the Occitan vernacular is probably the sirventes by Peire de la Caravana (or Cavarana, Cà Varana near Verona ?) exhorting the Lombard communes to put up a common front against the Germans. It has been dated 1157 or 1194.^[22] The tenso between the Marquis Alberto Malaspina and Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (after 1195) is the first example of an Italian lord writing in Provençal: the marquis adopted the troubadour's conventions and dealt with him on a level of social parity even to the extent of exchanging burning insults.^[23] In those years Raimbaut was once again a guest of the powerful Marquis Boniface I of Monferrat, nephew of Emperor Conrad III (he had first been the guest of Boniface around 1180). The two remained together and participated in military undertakings in Piedmont and then Sicily, where Boniface dubbed Raimbaut a knight in 1194. They then departed for the fourth Crusade, Boniface I having been elected general of the army. After the conquest of Constantinople they both disappeared in 1207 in a battle against the Bulgars. Raimbaut wrote of assisting Boniface in his joven fagz, youthful knightly deeds in defense of young ladies in distress. Together they rescued Saldina del Mar from a Malaspina and returned her to her lover; then they freed Giacomina di Ventimiglia, daughter of the Count Guido Guerra of Dantesque memory, from the tyrannical tutelage of her uncle Otto, restored her to her patrimony, and handed her over to a suitable husband.^[24]

Rambertino Buvalelli was a typical Italian troubadour insofar as he combined the culture of the courts with that of the bourgeois communes, having served as podestà between 1201–1221 in Brescia, Milan, Padua, Mantua, Modena, Genoa, and Verona. An adventurous Italian troubadour, the Mantuan Sordello (1200–1269 ?), gave a com-

prehensive definition of the courtly man in his famous ensenhamen d'onor, “Aissi co'l tesaurs”:

Amesuratz e ver disenz,
francs e de bels acuillimenz,
be respondenz en totz mos ditz,
netz en mos faitz granz e petitz,
ben acuillenz e gen onranz,
umils e ben aparianz,
de bon aire, gent ensengnatz.

(Moderate and sincere, affable and hospitable, elegantly articulate in all my words, neat in all my deeds big and small, ready with my hospitality and with doing honor, humble and sociable, of good appearance and well educated—vv. 187–193.)

In this poem gent ensengnatz refers to the bos noirimenz, “good education,” that makes an educated and well-mannered knight (gent noirit and be acostumat ) preferable to one well endowed by nature (ben aibit ). Whether or not this was a self-serving definition privileging the jongleur over the born nobleman, as Köhler chooses to interpret it,^[25] it neatly synthesizes much that the curial tradition had been teaching.

Partisans of the imperial party could prosper even in the shadow of the papal throne and at the height of the investiture struggle during the Gregorian reform. In his Orthodoxa defensio imperialis of around 1112, Gregorius of Catina, a monk at Farfa, recognized the emperor alone as logical leader of armed defensores for all just causes, with the right to head not only the empire but the Church itself and the Crusade.

Despite its being addressed to a foreign monarch, Italians could find the influential De regimine principum of Egidio Colonna (Giles of Rome, ca. 1280) consonant with their needs too, since, for example, on Aristotle's authority it grounded all principles of civilized organization in the towns—thus misinterpreting, but not by much, the Greek notion of polis, explicitly rendered in Tuscan with “ville e città.”^[26] In this tract of Guelf orientation that praised monarchic rule above republican order, Giles says that cities and realms are healthy when they abound in people of median state (“mezzane persone,” “abbondanza di gente di mezzo,” which we could interpret as pointing to the middle class of burghers). The statement made particular sense in highly urbanized Italy.^[27]

When Fra Salimbene Adami da Parma (1221–1287 or shortly thereafter) praised Frederick II for his “cunning” (calliditas ) in “dissimulat-

ing,” so as not to hear offensive personal remarks and thus spare incautious court jesters, he did so by referring to biblical proverbs of wisdom rather than to the literature on curiality.^[28] Yet it is precisely this Franciscan chronicler who has given Georges Duby an opportunity to obtain clear testimony of the force of courtly cultural models.^[29] A study of Salimbene's vocabulary by one of Duby's students shows how this third-generation follower of St. Francis evaluated and praised human character only in courtly and chivalric terms, ignoring any virtues that would smack of Franciscan spirituality. All the laymen he approved of were “handsome and noble,” all the men of the Church, “saintly and learned.” The former he praised for being “docti ad proelium,” well versed, that is, in the arts of the knight; also courtly, liberal, adept at writing good songs, and rich (no apparent appreciation for poverty, chosen or not). This terminology with which we are by now familiar reflects the relative unavailability of cultural and ethical models other than those of the knight and the cleric, which, together with the model of the king/prince, were the only ones admired by the masses. Duby goes on (307) to speculate—and this corresponds to the assumptions of our study—that the point of origin of such collective models could only be the princely courts, where the two coexistent and competing groups of clerics and knights exerted their influence on each other and on the remainder of society. We could add that the court games which so often included debates on whether a lady should prefer a cleric or a knight are proof that the competition between the two orders was not just a literary matter or a joke for Andreas Capellanus to make, but part of the serious question of relative preeminence. Since they were of clerical origin, such literary debates naturally tended to give the advantage to the cleric.^[30]

A systematic and authoritative treatment of chivalry within the established orders of Christian society appears in the De insigniis et armis by the prominent jurist and theorist of canon law, Bartolus of Sassoferrato (1314–1357), who distinguished among “theological nobility” due to God's grace, “natural nobility” due to birth, and “civil nobility” issuing from the will of the sovereign, hence formally recognized by law. Natural and civil nobility were thus to be understood as necessitating a degree of wealth, since generosity (Fr. largesse, free spending to reward one's dependents), a concomitant of nobility, is impossible without something to give. Aristotle had rightly postulated the need for wealth for the free members of human society, and Bartolus also agreed with Aristotle's distinction between men who are naturally free—hence born

with the capacity to rule—and those who are only apt to serve. Indeed, the French term franchise meant the moral attitude of the naturally free, who consequently bear themselves as free persons.^[31] Bartolus' thoughts on nobility, framed within a commentary on Justinian's Code and using the ancient juridical notion of dignitas as implying the modern concept of nobility, remained a major source for four centuries.^[32]

First Poetic Schools and Early Prose Narrative

When, in 1220, the twenty-five-year-old Frederick of Swabia, the future “stupor mundi,” entered Italy to claim his imperial crown, the troubadour Aimeric de Peguilhan (1190–1221) saluted him as the one who would bring back the knightly ideal: “I thought that Valor and Liberality were dead . . .. Never did a man see a physician of such youth, / so handsome, so good, so generous, and so knowledgeable, / so courageous, / so firm, so conquering, / so apt in speaking and understanding. / . . . See how much valor in a mere boy!”^[33]

Giacomo da Lentini, the most important poet at Frederick II's court, where the Italian poetic tradition started, was a notary, as was the court's most significant prose-writer, the protonotario, “first notary” or chancellor, Pier della Vigna. Imitating the Provençal lyric and the Bolognese notarial dictamen as well as the Roman stilus rhetoricus of the chancery of Honorius III, these courtiers carried on the civilizing trend that had imposed the patterns of cortesia on the urbanized knighthood. A striking novelty of this school is the practical deletion of the political context: love reigns supreme at a court where the centralizing will of the sovereign obviates the charged dialectical play of interests and special pleadings that characterized the careers of free agents at the feudal courts. From the status of a symbolic and allusive cover, courtly love could now turn to purely psychological and spiritual considerations. Frederick II's poets were no longer spokesmen of warrior knights but high bureaucrats who had to eschew all references to social, political, or economic claims.^[34]

As we have seen (chap. 5), courtoisie could perform a metaphysical function analogous to the theological one of divine grace; the opposition courtoisie/vilenie, originally meaning aristocracy versus both bourgeois and peasant estates, came to imply secular transcendence of social limitations whereby the poor or landless knights, even when nonnoble by feudal standards, could be redeemed and ennobled by courtesy

alone, the domna replacing God. This meaning of “true nobility” could find its place in the Provençal partimens or in the thoroughly secular neo-Platonic mysticism of the Perceval figure.

Moving along such lines, in the subsequent doctrine of the Dolce Stil Nuovo the argument for spiritual refinement played a key role, stressing personal inner nobility versus social privilege. Dante's Convivio would soon lend powerful support to this thesis. True nobility was, for these poets, gentleness of heart, and the “gentleman” was inescapably marked by the capacity for love. The motif of the noble heart as source of true nobility reminds us of Gottfried's edele herzen: it implied a happy yet tragic conspiracy, like that of Tristan and Isolt, individuals isolated by their virtuous superiority to the intrigue, dishonesty, baseness, raw ambition, and material impulses of the crowd at court. Cavalcanti was known, even as late as Boccaccio's Decameron, for his aristocratic will to stay aloof from the materialistic crowd of his fellow Florentine merchants, and Dante's own scorn for the bourgeois ideals of his fellow citizens was tied to his despair about the future of Florentine policies. All this notwithstanding, we must bear in mind that the Stil Nuovo is essentially a bourgeois movement, numbering among its leaders lawyers (like its “founder” Guinizelli and Dante's admired friend, Cino da Pistoia) and high merchants (Cavalcanti issued from a merchant Guelf family). It was not without social reason that it flourished in areas with strong popular bases, namely Bologna and Tuscany. The unashamed espousal of the vernacular, as most consciously with Dante, was an explicit act of faith in the popolo. In his Convivio Dante meant to share science with the common man, a goal that required the vernacular.

Popular sentiments were vocal all around on the political and cultural levels. The chroniclers of the bourgeois commune, typically Dante's contemporaries Dino Compagni and Giovanni Villani, could not hide their sympathy for the comune del popolo. Their keen analyses of events displayed the mentality and sense of values that characterize bourgeois rather than aristocratic societies, namely: a taste for parliamentary and free representative electoral procedures; respect for the rule of law; and concern for the cost of government—all matters of little concern to high noblemen and their acolytes. They criticized the very things that marked aristocratic life styles and their imitators among the high merchants, namely conspicuous consumption, sumptuous dress, and aggressively heroic individual postures.^[35] These same chroniclers and their communal predecessors held the view that noblemen tended to be bellicose, unruly, hard-headed, and arrogant in their unbounded ambitions—Starcateruses in potentia. The nobles could only survive by

banding together and forming collective consorterie around their own families and their allies. Deep down, their morals were those of the Nibelungs. Yet the environment of the city also acted on them as a civilizing force, though their resistance compelled the burghers to do their best to either tame them completely or oust them beyond city walls.

Cavalcanti reminded his audience of the Christian virtue of humility as a requirement for courtliness and courtesy when he attributed umiltà to his lady (“donna d'umiltà”) in “Chi è questa,” a sonnet that, for a textual competition with Guinizelli's “Io voglio del ver la mia donna laudare,” is textured in a sort of “parodia-analogia sacrale” of biblical terminology, as G. Contini put it.^[36] It was an idiosyncratic example of the blending of secular and religious mysticism that characterized late courtly lyric from Provence on. Courtly love had been the romantic side of that broad sense of love, compassion, human sympathy (reverentia ), and ultimately “humanity” that made up courtliness as a whole. Gottfried, we remember, had closely bound together nobility and morality: “[moral teaching] is given to all noble hearts as a nursemaid,” “[moraliteit] sist edelen herzen allen / zeiner ammen gegeben” (8014 f.). Around the same time that Cavalcanti wrote the Novellino (end of the thirteenth century), the prolific Florentine translator and moralist Bono Giamboni defined moral virtues as “courteous habits and beautiful, pleasing manners.”^[37]

The other genre that concerns us, the primer of conduct or treatise on social manners and mores, which may be ideally related to the early episcopal biographies, started in Italy with the Florentine Brunetto Latini and the Milanese Bonvesin da la Riva, popolani both (aside from the case just mentioned of Thomasin von Zerclaere, who wrote in German for a noble audience). This genre, too, like the lyric, developed by bending for a burgherly society standards that originally derived from the chivalric society and that had to be tamed and adapted—often by sheer transposition without transformation. Brunetto (1220 or after-1294) is the more striking case: a citizen of the most mercantile-minded commune, he adopted all the paraphernalia of chivalric education for the edification of his burgher citizens and city leaders. In the 1260s, Brunetto's portrait of a knight whose bearing befits his status as he rides through the city, comprised the advice to proceed with restraint—the traditional mesure —and an easy yet distinctive and dignified self-assurance:

Consiglioti che vade
molto cortesemente:
.   .   .   .   .     .   .

ch'andar così 'n disfreno
par gran salvatichezza.
.   .   .   .   .     .      .     .   .
Guarda che non ti move
com'on che sia di villa;
ma va sicuramente.

(Go  . . . in a stately manner [cortesemente ], . . . for to ride without restraint betrays great boorishness . . .. Guard against moving like a man from the country; but go self-assuredly.) (Tesoretto vv. 1806–1817)^[38]

Latini's Tesoretto describes a court inhabited by canonical chivalric figures allegorically representing, at first, the four cardinal virtues (the foundation of civic education in Cicero's De officiis ). Among these he assimilates the traditional “temperance” to the more chivalric term of “mesure ” (“Qui sta la Temperanza, / cui la gente talora / suol chiamare Misura”—vv. 1284–1286). Fortezza is defined as “Valenza-di-coraggio” (v. 1298). Virtue, the “Empress” of the court, is said to be “capo e salute / di tutta costumanza / e de la buona usanza / e d'i' bei reggimenti / a che vivon le genti” (vv 1239–1244)—in other words, all the qualities of good social conduct. Then follow the more specific chivalric virtues of Cortesia, Larghezza (Liberality), Leanza (Loyalty), and Prodezza (Prov. proece ] (vv. 1343–2054). Brunetto advises his reader (vv. 1350–1356) that more virtues related to these are treated on a loftier level in his Trésor. Cortesia declares Larghezza to be “il capo e la grandezza / di tutto mio mistero” (vv. 1587 f.). We are reminded that in speaking we need “provedimento [care, circumspection], . . . lingua adorna, . . . detto soave,” avoidance of “gravezza” [something like Castiglione's affettazione ], since it ingenerates “noia,” and finally, once again, “misura” (vv. 1559–1622).). As the poem proceeds, we meet Fino Amore with Ovidio intervening in the discussion.

Brunetto's Rettorica dealt more specifically with the art of government, in accordance with a false etymology that related rhetoric to regere, the art of the city's rettori.^[39] It is not clear whether his major work, the French Trésor, was earlier or later than the Tesoretto, but both stemmed from his period of exile in France (1260–1266). The Trésor was based on the Nicomachean Ethics, Guillaume Perrault's Summa aurea de virtutibus (vulgarized in Cavalca's Pungilingua ), the Moralium dogma philosophorum attributed to Guillaume de Conches and well known in Germany, and, for the last book on rhetoric and politics, Cicero's De inventione and some unidentified Italian political tracts reflecting communal democratic ideas.^[40]

Bonvesin (ca. 1250–1315) was a successful and apparently prosperous “magister” or, as in his epitaph, “doctor in gramatica,” owner of property including his private school. He implemented his role of educator of the Milanese high burghers by composing in the regional dialect a treatise in alexandrines, De quinquaginta curialitatibus ad mensam (before 1285 ?), where the curialitates of the Latin title correspond to the fifty rules of “cortesie da desco” indicated in the second line, namely “rules on civilized table manners.” It was an early and rather lively example of the genre that would culminate in Della Casa's Galateo and that was preceded by the Liber Faceti, which in turn was meant as a supplement to the popular medieval schoolbook Liber Catonis. Bonvesin's fifty rules of “cortesie” include the general principle that moderation or measure is necessary in everything (“mesura e modho,” v. 179, analogous to the Tuscan expression “modo e misura”).^[41]

The qualities of noble bearing that were traditionally attached to the civilized nobility were denied to the vilan upstart who has “climbed from lowliness to great prosperity” and political status: he is, in the words of Brunetto's and Bonvesin's contemporary, the Anonimo Genovese writing in the 1290s, devoid of “measure, grace, and kindness” —the virtues demanded of noble courtiers from Otto I to Castiglione.^[42] The vigorous versifier known simply as Anonimo Genovese offers an interesting mixture of aristocratic prejudice, mercantile experience (probably from his belonging to a prominent shipping family), and devout religious asceticism and moralism. A semantic shift from the courtly connotations of “convenience” to that of “responsibility and accountability” appears in his use of the term honesty: “for only honest works and virtues / are merchandise of quality.”^[43] The mercantile lexicon was still in its infancy, but the bourgeois ethic was clearly operative as a matter of survival.

In the nomenclature that resurfaced in Italy, after Occitan and French precedents that included Andreas Capellanus's identification of the noble and loving soul in his canonical De amore, “gentleness” (gentilezza ), “nobility” (nobiltà ), and “courtesy” (cortesia ) could be used as synonyms, but certain distinctions must be kept in mind. The ideology and the accompanying terminology were pervasive in Italian literary texts from the very beginning, and gentilezza was synonymous with civility even without losing its connotation of class nobility. But the lively debates on nobility, from Guinizelli,^[44] Dante, and on to such exemplary humanistic texts as the tracts by Buonaccorso da Montemagno,^[45] Giannozzo Manetti, and Pico della Mirandola, reflect a different social

situation from that of France, Germany, or England. Since in Italy the burghers' communes were the social and political centers, the aristocracy never attained the relatively homogeneous strength it enjoyed in those other regions. In Florence, in particular, the nobility was uneasily tolerated and constrained by the power of the burghers' guilds, which it had to join. That freedom from involvement in any form of manual labor which usually distinguished the nobleman was replaced by mercantile activities that Florentine noblemen came to share with the entrepreneurial class. Thus the theoretical debates on nobility that thrived in Guelf urban environments and around the universities retained a more abstract character and were aimed at a philosophically persuasive definition of the subject, based on spiritual and intellectual excellence rather than inherited feudal privileges and outward signs of distinction (Dante's antica ricchezza e belli costumi, Convivio 4). The theme of courtesy, on the contrary, retained its practical basis of ethical, behavioral casuistry, what the Germans referred to as schöne sîte or zuht, and was particularly popular in areas of seigniorial rule, like the hinterland of Venice (the area of the Franco-Venetian cantari ) and Ferrara.^[46]

At the time of Dante, cortesia began to be felt as a sublime moral attitude within a religious context in the Franciscan circles. Compare the Fioretti:

questo gentile uomo sarebbe buono per la nostra compagnia; il quale è così  . . . amorevole e cortese al prossimo e ai poveri . . .. La cortesia è una delle proprietà di Dio, il quale dà il sole suo e la sua piova a' giusti e agli ingiusti, per cortesia, ed è la cortesia sirocchia della carità, la quale spegne l'odio e conserva l'amore.^[47]

Remarkably, here courtesy is assimilated to charity and attributed to God himself. The most inspired collection of popular tales, known as the Novellino but entitled Libra di novelle o di bel parlar gentile in the Panciatichiano manuscript (ca. 1290), used the word as denoting effective speech—a sense it still carried markedly in Boccaccio.

Confirming the fact that from its earliest documents Italian prose narrative reflected courtly ideals, in the Novellino story after story mirrors a nostalgic longing for the gentle manners of a courtly society that the Florence of wealthy and self-conscious burghers could only dream about. The story of Prester John introduces Emperor Frederick II, a favorite character, as a paragon of courtly manners and speech, who answers the question of what is most precious in the whole world by saying: “The best thing in this world is measure” (misura ).^[48] It had been

a virtue of great prize all along. The story of Tristan and Isolde in the Novellino (no. 65 in Contini's edition) includes an exemplary illustration of courtly cunning in the deception of King Mark by the two lovers. It is the incident of King Mark watching their assignation from a pine tree and Isolde dispelling his suspicions through a clever trick.

Another text from the end of the Duecento that was close to the Novellino, I conti di antichi cavalieri, possibly of multiple French origin, contains, among others, charming stories about Saladino, starting with the first of the collection.^[49] There the Saladin is portrayed thus: “El Saladino fo sì valoroso (= prode ), largo (liberal), cortese signore e d'anemo gentile (courtois )” that he was reputed perfect. The troubadour Bertran de Born visited him and discovered his secret: every day he sought advice on what to do and say from the best experts (conoscenti )—in other words, he used his courtiers to the best advantage (548). The woman whom Bertran advises Saladino to love with high love, so that he will be inspired to even nobler deeds, imposes the condition that he depart from her town (just besieged in order to reach her), taking only her heart with him and leaving his heart with her (once again the motif of the severed heart). Conto 19 about Brunor and Galetto (Gallehault) moves on an equally high level of chivalry. A king owes his honor to good deeds, not to his possessions and power: a knightly king prefers to give away his kingdom (as Lancelot and Tristan did) in order to dedicate himself to chivalrous pursuits.^[50]Onore comes from valore, and valore from vertù. So Arthur is defined as “king only in his virtuous deeds of love, chivalry, courtesy, loyalty, and liberality.”^[51]

Francesco da Barberino (1264–1348) is remarkable for his knowledge of Provençal poets, of whom he mentions no fewer than twentyone (all from the twelfth and early thirteenth century) in his didactic prosimetric poem Reggimento e costumi di donna (before 1309–1318/ 1320), as against the merely six quoted by Dante and the fifteen by Petrarca.^[52] His didactic-allegorical poem Documenti d'Amore (before 1309–1314) treats the theory of love in awkward but learned terms.^[53] Scholarly familiarity with Provencal literature remained more operative in Italy than elsewhere, and in the Cinquecento, especially through Bembo, it would contribute to the establishment of Petrarca as the model of poetic practice. It was part of the continuity of a rich tradition of moral and behavioral sublimation that permeated the lyrical, ethical, and practical codes even in social environments largely dominated by the middle class.

After the Sicilian School, the high lyric thrived outside the courts,

but there was also a “court poetry” by professional courtiers—who, it must be said, did not show a high level of poetic inspiration. These Trecento poets are sometimes referred to as curiali, curtensi, or cortigiani.^[54] Such were the Sienese Bindo di Cione del Frate, the Ferrarese Antonio de' Beccari (1315-ca. 1370), the Paduan Francesco di Vannozzo di Bencivenne, Braccio Bracci from Arezzo (second half of fourteenth century), and the Sienese Simone Serdini, called II Saviozzo.^[55] They gravitated around the Milanese Visconti court, the principal court of northern Italy, and moved about a lot, mirroring their wandering nature through the chameleonlike opportunism of their shirting political stances, though other themes were more common to their verse, from the amorous to the burlesque. Vannozzo's work is the richest document of courtly literature extant from northern Italy. While Vannozzo showed some satirical verve in condemning current corruption and loss of courtly virtue,^[56] Braccio Bracci did not hesitate to flatter his lord Bernabò Visconti with a fictional letter of praise from the Sultan of Babylon.

The intensive use of the paradigm of servizio d'amore will disappear in the Quattrocento.^[57]Cortesia became a commonplace term, with an ever more vague meaning, still carrying along villania as its antonym. Yet the term was ready to enter the semantic field of etiquette, since as early as the second half of the fourteenth century it could be employed in the external sense of behavioral patterns that come immediately under the senses, as in the proverb “cortesia di bocca assai vale e poco costa” cited in Paolo da Certaldo's Libra di buoni costumi (79).^[58] A Tuscan merchant who may have held office in the Florentine commune, Paolo (fl. ca. 1360) had offered this interesting definition: “cortesia non è altro se non misura, e misura dura: e non è altro misura se non avere ordine ne' fatti tuoi”; “measure endures, and courtesy is nothing but measure, to wit, orderliness in your business.” Hence we may interpret the implicit values of parsimoniousness and accountability.^[59] His text is a witness to the popularity of several current manuals on conduct upon which he drew, specifically Le cinque chiavi della sapienza (a compilation of didactic sentences by various authors), L'Albertano (a summary of Albertano da Brescia's Latin works), Le quattro virtù morali (attributed to Seneca), Il libro di costumanza (a vulgarization of the Vulgarium dogma ), and La pìstola di Santo Bernardo della masserizia e reggimento della famiglia. The courtois morality of the communal bourgeois is contrasted by Paolo with “beastly,” irrational, and potentially criminal behavior of the peasant (still the uncourteous villano,

rustico, or pagano ), whom the landowner must handle with shrewdness and circumspection.^[60] The aristocratic quality of loyalty to one's liege has been turned into a bourgeois virtue: the peasant's good service toward the landlord.^[61]

In more general terms, we have seen the beginning of an Italian development that responded to transalpine cultural suggestions under the peculiar conditions of a lively burgherly society. The combination of social structures and cultural thrusts, namely, feudalism and curiality/ courtliness, that elsewhere generated the chivalrous ideals, was also a fact in Italian regions, but with a necessary adaptation to the vital conditions of mercantile forces either resisting or dominating. Chivalry thrived in Italy, too, but took peculiar forms of defense of spiritual values that were not bound to aristocratic milieus. The feudal nobility did retain a pervasive force in Italy, but was tempered, checked, and transformed by the assertive presence of the high merchants even while the new ideals were tinged by themes and motifs that originally issued from the same circles of clerical educators around episcopal and secular courts that also operated north of the Alps.