Dante (1265–1321)

That Dante, descended from a family of poor nobles, would be sensitive to questions of nobility and chivalry is not surprising. His ancestry took him back to the “martyred” crusader Cacciaguida, whom the Emperor Conrad III had “girded with his knighthood” for “good deeds” performed in a Crusade in 1147: “Poi seguitai lo ‘mperador Currado, / ed el mi cinse della sua milizia, / tanto per bene ovrar li venni a grado” (Paradiso 15: 139 f.). Dante can hide chivalric ideals in short episodes and rather marginal figures: when Trajan agrees to delay his battle march in order to render justice to a poor widow insistently presenting her grievance to him, he behaves in the chivalrous manner expected of a prince or knight of the twelfth century, rather than of an ancient ruler (Purgatorio 10: 73–78). For that act of humility and justice, Dante reports, the pagan Trajan was saved. This image of defenders of widows, orphans, and the weak, we have seen (chap. 3), was frequently propagandized under the “royal ethic” that became part of the knightly ethic.

Dante's ethic incorporated much of the chivalric ideal but excluded from it feudal militarism, which concurred neither with his being the citizen of a merchant commune nor with his personal espousal of the royal ethic's antifeudal policies. His striking emphasis on “sweetness,” including the denomination of his “school” as the Sweet New Style, is a semiotic index of his departure from the rough, warlike edges of mili-

tant chivalry and the heroic mode. In this sense he was carrying further than ever the process that brought the late troubadours to question and occasionally condemn the heroic elements in the knights' behavior, the ardimen as a necessary ingredient of proeza.^[1] Yet his animosity toward the Capetians, whom he indicts as usurpers in the process of unifying France, reflects not only his “Ghibelline” support of the emperor against the pope and his ally the king of France, but also Dante's feudal sympathies for the French barons resisting national policies.

In the Fiore attributed to Dante and derived from the Roman de la rose, the allegorical character of Cortesia looms large and Larghezza operates as Cortesia's close ally. Cortesia is the mother of Bellaccoglienza, who plants the Fiore in the Garden of Piacere. She is charged with keeping the Vecchia at bay and is the first to enter the castle of Gelosia after killing Malabocca, whereupon she and Larghezza can free Bellaccoglienza and plead with her on behalf of Amante.

Dante's harmonization of vita activa and vita contemplativa carried to sublime fruition the intellectual and moral desiderata of twelfthcentury Chartres.^[2] It is also rewarding to contrast Dante's idiosyncratic conservatism with the anticourt sentiments of reactionary clerical spheres (see my chap. 2). Dante praised the simple, austere customs of virtuous ancestors (Cacciaguida) and accordingly criticized women's sumptuous dresses and lustful ways (see Forese's indictment of shameful feminine fashions, Pg 23: 98–111, and Cacciaguida's invective against contemporary mores, Pr 15: 97–135). These were topoi of court criticism, yet Dante also nostalgically praised the courtliness of old. His laudatio temporis acti, linked to the identification of courtliness and courtesy with virtue, contrasts with his condemnation of courtly love as sinful and immoral (Francesca). Dante resolved the conflict by embracing courtesy without the “adulterous” kind of love it had postulated (Francesca), and grafting his own theologized, Beatrice-centered love on the courtliness of old-fashioned knighthood (Borsiere, Cacciaguida).^[3]

There is a striking closeness between the troubadours' invectives (especially in such conscious moralists as Marcabru, Guiraut de Bornelh, and Peire Cardenal) and Dante's moralism—all pivoted on the ethical, social, and theological notions of cortesia, avarice, and envy.^[4] But Dante regarded wealth as inherently corrupting, a scourge of good mores, whereas the troubadours, much as they could occasionally echo the monastic, anticourtly, reformist critique of ecclesiastical greed and conspicuous consumption, criticized wealth only when it was not shared with them. They inveighed against the wicked rich, the rics malvatz,

mostly to enrich their own pots by persuading them to reward the knight/poets as they thought they deserved.

As a citizen of a nonfeudal society, Dante, like the Stilnovisti before him, had to abandon the Provençal themes whose precise meanings were part of the feudal order. Both in his behavior and in his ethic he remained a son of the commune and never adopted the canonical ways of courtiers, even when exile forced him from court to court. Surely his oeuvre reflects none of the attitudes of typical courtiers. To begin with, largueza and liberalidat could no longer play a key role as synonymous with courtesy and nobility, since only the emperor could still make the sort of gifts the knights expected, and obviously not within the confines of free communes. In Convivio 2.10.7–8 Dante specifically objected to the identification of cortesia with larghezza, and this emargination of larghezza implied criticism of the Occitanic insistence on it. The help Dante received from the lords was no longer the remuneration for courtly service but simply a humiliating bread that tasted bitterly salty (“Tu proverai sì come sa di sale / lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle / lo scendere e ‘l salir per l’akrui scale,” Pr 17: 58–60). For him avareza no longer referred to the relationship between a courtier knight and his lord; he bent that moral concept completely into an argument about the state of the world and particularly the Church. The lover's guerdon no longer counted for much after Dante discovered that he could be satisfied with a greeting alone or even the mere chance of praising his lady. Beatrice was no court domna ! And of course the lauzengiers and the hated guardians were all gone, replaced by evil, degenerate parvenus and wealthy rascals. The troubadours' satirical spirit could be turned to loftier, less self-centered, more universal causes. All this even while the violent, “vulgar” style of, say, a Marcabru could be put to good use: for example, when Dante called the Church the king's “harlot” and represented the harlot and the giant in a lewd mutual relationship. Similarly in Purgatorio 32: 149 f.: “una puttana sciolta / m'apparve con le ciglia intorno pronte,” kissing the giant (Philip of France); and the “puttaneggiar” referring to the Church of Rome in Inferno 19: 108 may remind us of Marcabru's “per que domneys ar puteia,” “courting has now become harlotry.”^[5]Mezura becomes the Aristotelian middle point between two vices, as with the avaricious and the prodigals, the only case of Dante's using the paradigm of two extremes as vices. We have seen how the notion of prodigality as a dangerous excess had appeared only late among the troubadours. In Italy it made sense to regard the rational use of property as a virtue and prodigality as folly: Dante's Sienese spoiled brats who, having joined the club of the brigata spendereccia,

squander their fathers' hard-won patrimonies, are figures of excess and ridicule.

In the De vulgari eloquentia Dante gives an interesting definition of curialitas to explain his use of the epithet curiale as one of the four prerequisites for the vulgare illustre or standard Italian language—another being aulicum, which also points to a place with noble tenants, since it literally refers to the royal hall or court. His language, he says, is rightly to be called “curial” because, even though Italians do not de facto have a royal court at which to gather and use their most excellent national language, as Germans have, they have the equivalent of it insofar as they use such a language, regardless of place, whenever they speak by the light of reason. For “curiality” is nothing but a well-balanced, self-imposed regularity in whatever we perform.^[6] In light of the German background of the ideology of curiality, it is noteworthy that Dante singled out the Germans as the people who, alone, had the right kind of physical curia. Since the librata regula of VE 1.18.4 entails “inner orderliness” and “measure,” critics have commented on Dante's focusing on “rationality” as an index of curiality and on the possible connection of his curialitas with the rhetorical dictamen curiale and curialitas loquendi of John of Garlandia and Boncompagno da Signa.^[7]

Aulicum and curiale could be interchangeable in the language of Dante's time. While aulicum unequivocally referred to the royal hall, the synonym curial could also refer to the royal chancery as well as all lesser tribunals and courts of law or to the papal chancery specifically.^[8]De vulgari eloquentia 1.12 connected the birth of Italian high lyric to Frederick II's and Manfred's southern court. The ideology of courtesy also shows its impact where, rather than amor or charitas, Dante chooses venus to denominate the theme of love as one of the three that fit the illustrious vernacular (salus, venus, and virtus; “salvation, love, and virtue”—VE 2.2.8).

Dante's oeuvre, including the Divina commedia, abounds in references to cavalieri and cavalleria: one of the most intriguing is the charming allusion of De vulgari eloquentia 2.13.12 to the youthful excitement of the knight who feels entitled to special privileges on the day of his ceremonial dubbing.^[9] Through this analogy Dante hopes to be forgiven for his own excess in challenging his formidable predecessor Arnaut Daniel while trying to outdo him by writing a double sestina, “Amor, tu vedi ben che questa donna,” which required the unprecedented technical feat of a heavily repetitive rhyme scheme, “nimia eiusdem rithimi repercussio.” The famous reference to the Arthurian legends (“Arturi regis ambages pulcerrime,” VE 1.10.2) needs no elabo-

ration here: it is one clear testimony of Dante's appreciation of the style of the romances. As already suggested in chapter 5, the term ambages must refer to the prose Lancelot' s interlacing technique, which Dante found most beautiful. Of all Arthurian literature, that was undoubtedly the text that Dante knew best: beside the passage just mentioned from De vulgari eloquentia, he alludes to it three times in the Commedia (If 5: 127–138; If 32; 61 f.; Pr 16: 13–15) and once in the Convivio (4.28). The case of Paradiso 16 is particularly suggestive. Beatrice turns her smile on Dante when he begins to address his ancestor Cacciaguida with the honorific voi, and Dante compares this smile to the cough with which the Dame de Malehaut had accompanied Lancelot's avowal of his love to Gueniévre. Some critics have seen both smile and cough as signs of encouragement,^[10] but it is more plausible that both were an ironic warning of trespassing. Lancelot was fatally violating his duty of loyalty to his king, and Dante was uneasy about his vainglorious complacency in his illustrious descent.

An important philosophical influence on Dante may have been Fra Remigio de' Girolami, a Dominican lector at Santa Maria Novella (d. 1319). In his Via Paradisi Remigio quoted the apocryphal Invectiva contra Sallustium, attributed to Cicero, where Cicero purportedly held that it was better to shine through our own deeds than through our ancestors' fame and that anyone could attain true nobility by following virtue. This coincided with both Brunetto Latini's (Trésor ) and Dante's definition of nobility (Convivio ).^[11] Dante was following an Italian poetic tradition dating to the earliest Stil Nuovo texts. Compare Convivio 4.19–21 at 20: “Therefore, let not any scion of the Uberti of Florence or of the Visconti of Milan say: ‘Since I have such ancestry, I am noble,’ for the divine seed does not fall upon a race, that is, a stock, but on the individuals . . . . Lineage does not make the individual noble; it is the individual who ennobles the stock.”^[12] Similarly, in the Commedia he inquired why noble scions often degenerated (“com'esser puó, di dolce seme, amaro,” Pr 8: 93). Here the ruling King of Naples Robert of Anjou, brother of Charles Martel, is taken to task for the ignoble vice of stinginess, despite his descent from a generous father: “La sua natura, che di larga parca / discese” (Pr 8: 82 f.).

It would be wrong, however, to infer that Dante rejected noble birth. Not only did he confess to taking pride in his noble ancestry when meeting Cacciaguida in Paradise (“nel cielo io me ne gloriai,” Pr 16: 6), he also admitted in the Convivio, even while he was arguing for the nobility of spirit, that inheritance plays its role, since God implants the

seed of true happiness (“seme di felicitade”) only in those who are naturally well formed: in those, that is, who have “l'anima ben posta, cioè lo cui corpo è d'ogni parte disposto perfettamente” (Cv 4.20.9)—a question of genes, we might say.^[13] And in Monarchia 2.3.4–7 he accepted Aristotle's definition of nobility as necessitating wealth, usually inherited: “est enim nobilitas virtus et divitie antique iuxta Phylosophum in Politicis, ” despite Juvenal's Stoic identification of nobility with virtue alone (“nobilitas animi sola est atque unica virtus”). There are two valid kinds of nobility, Dante concluded, the inner one (propria ) and the inherited one (maiorum ), as in Aeneas's exemplary case.

In defining nobility, Dante related it to cowardice (viltade ) as its opposite. Convivio 2.7.3–4 gives reason as the noble part of the accomplished human being—when, to borrow Aristotle's term, man has achieved his entelechy. This notion is confirmed in 3.7.6 within a neoPlatonic context of grades of nobility, and then again in 4.7.11–12, while 4.10.10 states that riches cannot grant nobility because they are essentially ignoble (vili ). Finally, 4.16.4–8 defines nobility as perfection of form or nature, be it in a human being or in a stone or animal. Noble is equal to non-vile (4.16.6). This perspective throws light on the striking episode of the Ante-Inferno (remember “colui / che fece per viltade il gran rifiuto,” If 3: 60).^[14] Indeed, the Ante-Inferno is the place of the vili or, better still, pusillanimi —the coward or small-souled ones, as against the great-souled ones or magnanimous that Dante, among others, identified as chivalrous or noble. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologica 2.2, Qu. 44 a.4) had distinguished timor or fear, cowardice, as the opposite of fortitudo, the cardinal virtue that was the main ingredient of true nobility.

The now familiar distrust of the villano as the antithesis of the man of nobility comes to the fore in Convivio 4.14.3 as part of the argument about nobility. The aristocratic scorn for the merchant's wealth pierces the discussion of true knowledge (scienza ): the perfection granted by scienza cannot be diminished by desire for more, which is the curse of riches, as merchants know, who tremble like leaves when they have to go through the hazards of travelling while carrying goods (Cv 4.13.11).

Convivio 2.10.7 f. states that “courtesy and honesty are but one thing: this term derived from the courts, meaning ‘courtly habit,’ because virtues and beautiful manners used to be practiced at court, just as they have now been forsaken for their opposites.”^[15] This Dantesque conception of curiality and courtesy has recently been connected with Aristotelian megalopsychia, magnanimity or heroic virtue, which can

also be seen as underlying the chivalric sense of aventure that is marked by hardement and proesce in the French romances.^[16] At 4.26 we read that the chivalric and courtly virtues of temperanza, fortezza o vero magnanimitate, amore, cortesia, and lealtade must guide our youth. Here again, Dante employs the analogy of the horseman, buono cavaliere, cavalcatore, who uses both the spur (sprone = fortezza ) and the rein (freno = temperanza ).

We realize the full impact and precise meaning of Dante's moral terminology if we keep in mind its classical context. His “la fretta / che l'onestate ad ogn'atto dismaga” (Pg 3: 11), for example, obviously does not refer to inner moral uprighteousness, which could not be affected by hasty motion, but to the decorous outer behavior that becomes a sage. In other words, his onestà is Cicero's honestas, the standard of the public man. Similarly, Beatrice's onestà, which strikes every passer-by when she walks down the street (sonnet “Tanto gentile e tanto onesta pare”), is an outer disposition which is a sign of inner qualities.^[17] True enough, Cicero had been mediated by closer authorities within the circles affected by the ideals of curialitas, including Hugh of St. Victor, who spoke of moralis composicio having an inner aspect (the cultivation of virtue) as well as an outer one that faithfully mirrored the former: this outer manifestation of virtue consisted of a dignified bearing at all times.^[18] Cicero's decor, Hugh's decens disposicio, and Dante's onestà are all akin. In the Commedia, too, onesto means “dignified” rather than “morally good.” Compare Sordello's shadow sitting lion-like, “nel mover degli occhi onesta e tarda” (Pg 6: 63), and the similar “l'accoglienze oneste e liete” (Pg 7: 1): all semantically contiguous to onorato, onorare, or onorevole (cf. If 4, nine times in the episode of the pagan sages).^[19]

Both in the Convivio and the Commedia, Dante's definition and arrangement of moral qualities is known to depend on Aristotle. As noted with regard to the Ciceronian moral scheme, however, the use of the Aristotelian scheme must be set against the background of the chivalric ethical nomenclature in order to see the differences in definition, emphasis, and application that the classical framework underwent in the Middle Ages. When in Convivio 4.17.4–7 Dante recalls the virtues according to the Nicomachean Ethics, his verbal texture entails subtle distortions, which give his listing a “chivalric” sound. He enumerates the virtues as eleven (Aristotle did not have a number, and his complex listing involved several subdivisions), namely: fortezza (defined as the middle between foolhardiness and timidity), temperanza (measure in

the use of food), liberalitade (measure in the use of material goods), magnificenza (advantageous use of wealth), magnanimitade (rational thirst for fame), amativa d'onore (measured ambition), mansuetudine (moderation of anger), affabilitade (sociability), veritade (avoidance of boasting), eutrapelia (wit), and giustizia. Prudence, the missing cardinal virtue, is kept outside this group of “moral” virtues as one of the “intellectual” virtues, as Aristotle indeed had it, and as a necessary general guide of the former (Cv 4.17.8). Dante dropped “shame” or “fear of dishonor,” given by Aristotle as a quasi-virtue (and different from the Ciceronian notion of reverentia that we find in medieval curiality and, for example, in Castiglione's vergogna, implying considerateness). The prominence given to liberality, as middle ground between avarice and prodigality, is clearly in tune with a genuinely chivalric discourse. The long Aristotelian section on liberality and magnificence (Nicomachean Ethics 4.1–2 1119b-1123a) could sound to a medieval ear like an appropriate exhortation to chivalrous behavior. While the systematic appeal to the happy medium is thoroughly Aristotelian, affability (affabilitade ), a traditional curial and courtly quality, replaces Aristotle's friendship (Lat. amicitia ), leaning on Thomas Aquinas's commentary (in Ethicam Nicomacheam 2, lect. 9, n. 354, referring to Aristotle's NE 2.6.1108 26–28). Amistade does find its place in Convivio 3.3.11, where reference is made to Nicomachean Ethics 8.4, but a typical coupling with “honesty” is suggested by the intervening scholastic commentaries: Dante's “la vera e perfetta amistade de l'onesto tratta” recalls Aquinas's “amicitia propter honestum” (in Ethicam Nic. 8 lect. 3 n. 1563) and Albertus Magnus's “honestum” (Ethica 8.1.3—see, also, Cv 3.9.14 and 4.21.1). Dante's definitions of fortitude and temperance (the curial/courtly bravery or prowess and measure) also leaned on Aquinas.^[20] Generally speaking, Dante's naming of the basic virtues (for example in Cv 4.17) was fairly standard by his time, and remained so throughout the Renaissance: it is strikingly close, for example, to Tasso's dialogue on the court (1585).^[21]

In the Commedia Ciacco charges the Florentines with harboring pride, envy, and avarizia—three traditional vices according to the courtly code: “superbia, invidia e avarizia sono / le tre faville ch'anno i cuori accesi” (If 6: 74 f.). The stern judgment is repeated by Brunetto Latini: “gent'è avara, invidiosa e superba” (If 15: 68). In a few scattered lines Dante makes much of the loss of cortesia in Italy, while, he says, it graced the good society of old. In mid-thirteenth-century Florence it went together with virtue and valor in such leaders as Guido Guerra,

Tegghiaio Aldobrandi, and Jacopo Rusticucci. Guido Guerra, Dante says, “fece col senno assai e con la spada,” “achieved much with his wisdom and with his sword” (If 16: 39), which is the classical and medieval topos of joining the two heroic virtues of sapientia and fortitudo. These three honorable Florentine statesmen are in the circle of the violent against nature, where Brunetto also dwells. Jacopo asks Dante if cortesia e valor still dwell in Florence as they used to in their time, since they hear a recent arrival, Guglielmo Borsiere, insistently mourn the departure of those two virtues (“assai ne cruccia con le sue parole,” If 16: 67–72). Dante answers that, indeed, they have forsaken a city that is now ravaged by the opposite vices of pride and excess, “orgoglio e dismisura,” sadly brought along by the “gente nuova e i sbiti guadagni,” the quickly enriched upstarts who have come in from the countryside (If 16: 73–75). Let us note that the derogatory reference to the parvenus as nouveaux riches reflects the nobility's century-old effort to close ranks and harden class barriers in order to preserve inherited privileges threatened by the mercantile classes. Similarly, the critique of fancy dresses and conspicuous consumption without misura, as in Cacciaguida's discourse (Pr 15: 97–129), implies the nobility's defense of its traditional privilege of distinctive dress, not to be outdone and nullified by the nouveaux riches' right to display their wealth, which the sumptuary laws futilely attempted to stem.^[22]

In Purgatorio 14: 109–111, Guido del Duca nostalgically reminisces on the beautiful customs of arduous tests and pleasing deeds once inspired by love and courtesy in the Romagna:

  le donne e' cavalier, li affanni e li agi
che ne 'nvogliava amore e cortesia
là dove i cuor son fatti sì malvagi.

The complaint was, after all, commonplace in Italy: compare Folgòre da San Gimignano: “Cortesia, cortesia, cortesia chiamo, / e da nessuna parte mi risponde.”^[23] Once again, in Purgatorio 16: 115–117 Marco Lombardo regrets the disappearance of that “valore e cortesia” that could still be found in northern Italy before Frederick II's defeat:

  In sul paese ch'Adice e Po riga
solea valore e cortesia trovarsi,
prima che Federigo avesse briga.

Dante's sense of chivalric virtues was central to his conception of the moral roots of the present world's political, social, and economic imbalance.^[24] The binomium of valore e cortesia in Inferno 16: 67 and

Purgatorio 16: 116, echoing the proz et curteis of the French epic ever since the Chanson de Roland, is opposed by Dante to orgoglio e dismisura (If 16: 74, besides viltà and villania elsewhere). The roster of the basic virtues which Dante sadly missed can be summarized as: cortesia, valore, misura, prodezza, nobiltà, senno, gentilezza, leggiadria, and belli costumi (remember MHG schöne sîte )—all of them typical of the medieval knightly code. To these we must add the Aristotelian magnanimity we also found mentioned in the Convivio Dante's Farinata had been a great-hearted leader of his party (magnanimo, If 10: 73).

Given Dante's closeness to the Provençal poets and the presence of some of them in his works, we must pay attention to his treatment of four leading figures, namely Guiraut de Bornelh, Arnaut Daniel, Bertran de Born, and Sordello (we can forego Folquet of Marseille from Pr 9).^[25] It is fitting that in De vulgari eloquentia 2.2 he would praise Guiraut de Bornelh (fl. 1165, d. after 1211) as the poet of moral rectitude (directio voluntatis, rectitudo, P. dreitura ) by quoting from his canso “Per solatz revelhar, / que s'es trop endormitz,” a complaint about the disappearance of courtly virtues (solatz is usually translated there as “courtly pleasures”) from a corrupt world now given to base material pleasures. A similar mood rings through Dante's own complaints concerning the disappearance of courtly values from present-day northern Italy (Marco Lombardo in Pg ), even though Guiraut was speaking of southwest France a hundred years earlier. In that same passage of De vulgari eloquentia, calling himself “the friend of Cino da Pistoia,” Dante placed himself alongside Guiraut as a kindred poet of the theme of rectitudo: he exemplified by quoting his own canzone 106, “Doglia mi reca ne lo core ardire,” a poem of th time of exile, in which the poet indicted men and women for having abandoned virtue (“Omo da sé vertú fatto ha lontana; / omo no, mala bestia ch'om simiglia”).

In both De vulgari eloquentia and the Commedia (Pg 26: 115–148) Dante shows his great appreciation for Arnaut Daniel (fl. 1180–1210) as chief master of the trobar clus. In De vulgari eloquentia 2.2.9 he had placed him below Guiraut de Bornelh, but in Purgatorio 26: 117 f., Guido Guinizelli declares him the “miglior fabbro del parlar materno,” who “versi d'amore e prose di romanzi / soverchiò tutti.” Historically, Marcabru and Raimbaut d'Aurenga were the original and more influential practitioners of the “closed” style, but Dante could no longer understand the cultural implications of that rather mysterious phenomenon, best illustrated by the tenso “Ara.m platz, Giraut de Borneill” between Raimbaut and Guiraut de Bornelh (see chap. 4 above). Just as Raimbaut's position was to be echoed later by Petrarca's equally

elitist belief that serious literature was unsuitable for large and uninitiated audiences, so was Guiraut's position in that polemical exchange similar to Dante's with regard to the merits of the vernacular for high literary and cultural purposes. Guiraut had defended the trobar leu or plan (“plain” like the “comic,” “low,” or “humble” style of the DC ) as the most apt to reach a universal audience. Likewise Dante protested that his vernacular poetry (like his preceding vernacular prose of the Cv ) aimed to reach, in a fitting style, the largest public. Nonetheless, Dante was attracted to Arnaut's difficult style as part of his lifelong experimental interest in testing all styles and pressing them into service in order to express deeply hidden allegories.

Equally significant is the episode of Bertran de Born (If 28: 113–142) as a clear sign of Dante's attitude toward courtliness. Bertran (b. ca. 1140 ?, d. ca. 1200) had been the most outstanding spokesman of the ideal of the knight-warrior, while Dante had made the momentous shift from the combination of war and love to an exclusive espousal of love/charity. He had definitively rejected feudal bellicosity in favor of that “peace”—the necessary condition and very goal of the Empire—that could jeopardize the knights' livelihood. An antimilitarist by choice, Dante never boasted of his military experiences, citing them either in humorous contexts or as matter-of-fact incidents; still more important, he declined to do what the feudal code regarded as a family duty, to wit, to avenge his relative Geri del Bello. Paramount in Dante's mind was the logical necessity of espousing the cause of the emperors, which had been the cause of peace ever since the Ottos identified their interests with the meekness of good curial administrators. Thus Dante had to condemn Bertran's role as a sower of discord between Henry II's son Richard Lion-Heart and his eldest son, el rei jove (il re giovane of If 28: 135). That role had made sense in the environment of the class of landless knights of which Bertran was a spirited leader and most eloquent poet, but what was logical and positive among the courtly poets had become criminal from Dante's vantage point.^[26]

Indeed, Dante's unqualified espousal of the cause of peace amounted to a reversal of the feudal ethic of chivalry, which he had to transcend in order to lay a new foundation for his doctrine of the imperial order. Seen from this angle, the contrast betweeen his treatment of Bertran and that of Sordello (Pg 6) is paradigmatic. Dante does not hesitate to distort the image of Sordello, certainly no partisan of peacefulness, who differed from Bertran only in that the latter unashamedly advocated violence for the sake of the resulting loot. Sordello's planh/sirventes for

the death of Blacatz, a fitting echo of Bertran's planh for the death of el rei jove and an anticipation of Dante's gloomy picture of the unworthy rulers of his own day, sarcastically rebuked the ruling princes of Europe for their sloth and cowardice in the face of loss of their inherited lands. This motif of chivalrous condemnation of contemporary moral decay runs from Dante through Petrarca and even, for different yet convergent reasons, to Machiavelli. Sordello appears in a memorably dignified courtly posture in Purgatorio 6 and 7, where he has a surprise encounter with the fellow poet and fellow Mantuan, Virgil, as a paragon of brotherliness among neighbors. This leads to Dante's invective against Italy, a land divided into warring factions and regions.^[27]

Cacciaguida's laudatio of the sober and happy old days (Pr 15: 97–135) fills in the picture anticipated by the eloquent hints we picked up in Guglielmo Borsiere's, Guido del Duca's, and Marco Lombardo's episodes. Searching for the sources of Dante's representation of Florence's past, Charles T. Davis (1984) has continued Arnold Busson's, Raffaello Morghen's, and others' studies on the Cronica attributed to Ricordano Malispini. This research has shown the continuity among chroniclers and poets on the matter, but, against Morghen, Davis agrees with Paul Scheffer-Boichorst's (1870) and Giovanni Aquilecchia's (1955) argument that the Malispini Chronicle, instead of a late thirteenth-century source of Dante and Villani, is a much later compilation from Villani's text, done after 1350.^[28] Consequently, Davis claims that Dante's views on the progressive corruption of Florentine mores did not echo the chroniclers but were his own. It was the chroniclers who somewhat clumsily and contradictorily repeated his views, regretting Florence's civil strife and political excesses but without seeing its economic prosperity as a sign of impending doom. Dante's condemnation of Florentine greed, on the other hand, was an integral part of his philosophy of history and political order, whereby human happiness could be based only on harmonious acceptance of the monarchic regime by all elements of the empire. This original assessment was strongly colored by the particular context of courtois ideology within which Dante's thinking still moved. Curiously enough, the “burgher” Villani seemed to borrow from Dante a view of Fiesolan wickedness as an element of dissent and disorder within Florence, as part of the Fiesolani's “racial” constitution, whereas Dante, the “aristocrat,” vigorously insisted that nobility is not based on “blood” and is not inherited, but consists of our virtuous deeds alone.

The nostalgic critique of contemporary moral decay and the conse-

quent invidious comparison with the good old virtues was commonplace between 1250 and 1350, in Tuscan writing and elsewhere, and although Dante did not invent it, he powerfully contributed to it. Compare Matteo Frescobaldi's (d. 1348) canzone “Cara Fiorenza mia” (“Dear Florence mine”): “As long as you were still adorned, O Florence, / by good and ancient citizens and dear, / people far and near / admired the Lion and its sons. [The lion was another symbol of Florence.] / Touted even among Muslims, whore you are now the world round.”^[29]

It may seem surprising that Dante, without textually coupling the terms, would associate cortesia and sobriety of customs in the golden age of Florence (Cacciaguida's time, ca. 1150), followed closely by the similar picture given by Giovanni Villani (but with chronological displacement of the buon tempo antico to ca. 1250). Textually, Dante and Villani are close, and both are very close to Ricordano Malispini, but with the difference that Ricordano (like his supposed immediate continuator, his nephew Giacotto, covering the years 1282–1286) eschews the moral judgment that disapproves the present and praises the past (Davis 1984, chap. 4). Dante's judgments reflect an aristocratic, antibourgeois vantage point where, typically, wealth, hence luxury, are associated not with civilized refinement, as in the tradition of curialitas, but with decadence, as, traditionally, among knightly and monastic circles.

If the anticourtly tradition is the distant background of Dante's sense of values, he also lent the most powerful poetic voice to the court critics' ultimate cause, that is, Church reform, even while he sublimated courtly love into a theological idea that could only be his. Dante was on the side of court critics insofar as he was on the side of Church reformers with some of the same arguments: those which aimed at both the lifestyle of the curiales and the state of the Church; both curiales and Church prelates were guilty of excessive worldliness. To illustrate this, Dante hit upon the allegory of Lady Poverty as Francis's means to attain virtue by chasingavaritia, the she-wolf of the Commedia. For Dante the welfare of mankind depended on whether the Church and its prelates could accept Caesar's authority and divest themselves of all worldly possessions.^[30]

Dante felt that the emperor should have complete jurisdiction over all temporal possessions; the Church, none. The mendicant orders, spearheads of Church reform, had preached and practiced apostolic poverty: like Christ before him, Dante's Francis had “married” Lady Poverty, and Bonaventura spoke of Dominic as being of the same ilk in

this as Francis. Yet Dante went further than Francis and Dominic by advocating total poverty not only for the mendicant friars but for the whole Church and clergy. In this Franciscan state of affairs there would be little room indeed for any trappings of curialitas.

Immediate sources of Dante's moral views were Bonaventura's Legenda maior and the radical literature of the Franciscan Spirituals, especially Pietro di Giovanni Olivi and Ubertino da Casale, who in the stirring prophecies of their mystical tracts had advocated the reform of the order and of the Church through the literal adoption of Francis's injunction of total poverty. Dante's political system was, however, his own, since neither the Spirituals nor the Joachites, who in part also inspired both the Spirituals and Dante, had room for any imperial role in their vision of Church reform. Dante was truly a Ghibelline at least in his expectation of a new Augustus who would restore universal authority for the empire and force the clergy to give up their economic privileges. Only this would cleanse the world of the curse of universal cupidity, since even the Mendicants, as both Aquinas and Bonaventura bitterly pointed out in Paradiso 11 and 12, had gone astray and could not be expected to reform themselves. Frederick II's manifesto to the princes of Europe (1245),Illos felices, professing as his life-long purpose the restoration of the clergy to its pristine evangelical state of poverty, sounded ominously like Dante's warnings to the high clergy. Salimbene Adami da Parma had attributed to Frederick the wish that “the pope and the cardinals should be paupers and go on foot” (Davis 54 f.).

Dante's political views are a landmark in the evolution of ideas and feelings concerning the role of government and public officials, in a sense that is an integral part of our discourse about the ethical framework of the man of court. I can best summarize a complex history of interpretation with some well-phrased definitions by Lauro Martines (1979), which are based on the research of A. Passerin d'Entrèves, C. T. Davis, J. R. Hale, Nicolai Rubinstein, J. K. Hyde, and others.^[31] Martines goes over the literature on the role of public officials, especially the podestà, according to Brunetto Latini's Trésor and Tesoretto. He then discusses the role of St. Augustine's De civitate Dei on one side and Aristotle's Politics and Cicero's rhetorical treatises on the opposite side in the shaping of these ideas, but with a strong emphasis on the determining value of communal experiences. He goes on as follows:

To see the birth of the state in a divine judgment, or to root it in the nature of man himself without any pejorative suppositions regarding his fallen condition: these were the rival views, even if they were not seen in this guise, and Aristotle best represented the latter. In the first view, the state is a re-

pressive force, as much a punishment as a remedy for sin, and certainly a monstrosity unless circumscribed by a Christian framework; in the second, the state is a positive institution, which not only regulates and protects men but also perfects their companionship and makes possible their most worthy enterprises. In the former view, public service can have nothing good about it unless it is related, in some manner, to the Christian vision of loss and redemption; in the latter, public service is a manifest good in itself, requiring no mystical act of enablement or ennoblement.

Dante, for one, parted ways with St. Augustine in that he firmly conceived of the state and the empire as the foundation of virtuous action and indeed of the temporal happiness of civilized man—beatitudo huius vitae as distinct from but collateral to beatitudo vitae aeternae (Monarchia). At the same time, he clearly reflected the environment of a communal society by referring to citizenship in a city as the conditio sine qua non for civilized living when, for example, Charles Martel asked him whether there can be civilization outside the city (Pr 8).

It may seem remarkable that the change [from the Augustinian to the secular view] took so long in coming, but this is to underestimate the force of the Christian lexicon. The transition from one view to the other was not in the first instance a process of abstract cerebration, as historians of ideas like to imagine, but one of action and feeling, experience and attitude. [It] involved a community process and a fund of expressive attitudes from which any gifted individual might fitfully draw new insights.

Such a man was . . . . Remigio de' Girolami . . . . Yet his idea of the common public good was not necessarily pinned to Aristotle; it had welled up from local feeling and was lodged in the statutes of the communes, the speeches of the podestas, and the musings of poets.

The episode of Pier della Vigna plays an important role in Dante's representation of the order of divine justice.^[32] I wish to call attention to the relevance, for the correct understanding of that episode, of the role of Envy, scourge of the courts—a key concept in the structure and message of the Commedia, together with its symmetric parallel, Avarice, scourge of the Church. We have already noted that envy as the demon of court life was a standard topos in medieval narrative and didactic writing. John of Salisbury had warned: “Ubique autem qui illustrioribus clarescunt meritis acrius invidiae toxicato dente roduntur” (Policraticus 7: 24; Webb ed.: 2: 215). In Walter Map's De nugis curialium (James ed.: 1: 12, 16 f.) the “unknown youth” who finds favor at the King of Portugal's court is ultimately brought down by the courtiers' envy. In the Nibelungenlied Siegfried arouses the envy of King Gunther's courtiers, who will successfully plan his undoing. Gottfried's Tristan is per-

secuted by the envious courtiers, and their envy will bring about both his and Queen Isolt's death. One can appropriately add the biblical precedents of Joseph at the Pharaoh's court and Daniel at the courts of Nebuchadnezzar, Belshazzar, and Darius (Jaeger 236 f.). We also recall how, after a lively and contrasted career as a courtier, Peter of Blois had spoken of envy and avarice as the scourges of courts, and of himself as envy's victim. Dante's figure of the unhappy courtier/chancellor had a tragic predecessor of sorts in another exemplary victim of envy, the powerful Bishop Adalbert of Bremen. There is a remarkable parallelism between these two careers. Both men were beset by unforgivable faults of character and behavior, yet both were exemplarily driven by unwavering loyalty to their king as the pivot of their private and public careers.^[33] Dante seems to blame Piero, implicitly yet forcefully, for lacking the courage of the good courtier to resist courtly vices, including jealousy and hateful envy: a modern reader of medieval romances is reminded here of Gottfried's Tristan, when, after a moment of despair, he heeded King Mark's advice (vv. 8353–8366).

Dante's Ulysses also comes into this discourse as an example of successful courtier-counselor, whom Dante, however, condemned for his desmesure in worldly curiosity and in counseling cunning.^[34] Jaeger (95–100) has located a text that he considers unique, the Ars versificatoria by Matthew of Vendôme, where a portrait of Ulysses appears as third, after two others of a pope and of a ruler named Caesar, and in a capacity that Jaeger, without any reference to Dante, thinks could have been labelled curialis or consiliarius. Two manuscripts titled “Causa Aiacis et Ulixis I–II” (edited by P. G. Schmidt, 1964) present a debate between the two heroes that, Jaeger believes, can be attributed to Matthew himself or one of his students, and where Ulysses successfully argues for the superiority of the courtier (himself) over the knight (Ajax). This appears to be the only medieval case of identification of Ulysses as a pedagogic model for the courtier cleric (Jaeger 99). Cicero, De officiis 1.113, had contrasted the characters of Ulysses and Ajax by pointing to the former's endurance of insult for the sake of his long-range plans, and to the latter's impatience of any contradiction.^[35]

As a dissimulating, fraudulent counselor, Ulysses is in the company of his modern counterpart, Guido da Montefeltro, who represents Dante's rejection of cunning or duplicity (“lunga promessa con l'attender corto,” Guido's counsel to Pope Boniface—If 27: 110) as a necessary quality of both the military leader and the politician, the knight and the courtier.^[36] For Dante the statesman must be a lion, not a fox

(“l'opere mie / non furon leonine ma di volpe,” says Guido, If 27: 74 f.). We can anticipate here the shift in emphasis and function between Dante's view and Castiglione's appreciation of non-knightly mansuetudo in the courtier (Cortegiano 2.7), even though Castiglione recommended it as a way to avoid the ostentation of military arts. Mansuetudo, we shall recall, was a traditional requirement in the court chaplain, a non-military man. Incidentally, Castiglione sided with the moderns in the running arguments concerning the comparative virtues of ancients versus moderns, and accordingly rebuked the laudatores temporis acti who kept complaining about the disappearance of the good old courtly virtues (2.1–3).

The ongoing controversies concerning the deep meanings of Dante's characters and their structural role within his orthodox Weltanschauung could receive better light through a greater awareness of the poem's inner tensions and multiple orientations. Perhaps it is time to outgrow the recently triumphant emphasis on a supposedly absolutely consistent, rigorously unitary theologism on the poet's part. Some non-American critics, in particular, have been voicing uneasiness with such approaches. Robin Kirkpatrick (1987), for example, criticizes the excessive emphasis on the philosophical character of the poem and favors greater attention to language and structural tension,^[37] and Peter Dronke (1986) as well as Jeremy Tambling (1988) react against what they consider reductively allegorical readings.^[38] The main thrust of American Dante critics has been to privilege the theological at the expense of other cultural factors and of the inner tensions of expression and style. The factors I have been stressing should contribute to a better balance among the rich elements that Dante inherited. For he was not only a reader of theological manuals: his political and moral views, which were just as central to him, were derived from traditions that exalted the worldly duties, the ones that St. Augustine had purposely downplayed but which the needs of society and of government had forced upon many a Christian conscience. Semiotically, the Dante critics who have overemphasized theologizing allegorism are naive readers because they assume their deep reading will discover the only true meaning of the text. Their interpretation is methodologically contradictory because, while they speak of irony and ambiguity, they aim to discover a true meaning that is a priori neither ironic nor ambiguous at all, namely, that Dante's intentio auctoris is really to deliver nothing but a perfectly consistent and conformist theological message.