Tales From the Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio

  2. Saladin Of Kurdish origin, the Muslim leader Salah ad-Din (1137–93), popularly known as Saladin, gained enormous respect and popularity in the Christian world for his diplomacy, military genius, scholarliness, and generosity of spirit. The last of these qualities is splendidly celebrated in the Decameron’s penultimate narrative (X, 9). In the Commedia, Dante had placed Saladin in the area of Limbo reserved for the souls of virtuous Pagans.

  Fourth Story

  1. Dioneo Significantly, the first of the Decameron’s salacious tales is told by the most extrovert member of the brigata. After the first day, he secures the privilege of telling the tenth and last story each day, invariably choosing a narrative that is to a greater or lesser degree improper. He it is who presides over the seventh day’s storytelling, devoted to the ingenious stratagems of adulterous wives.

  2. Lunigiana A mountainous region of north-west Tuscany, stretching down from the border with Emilia-Romagna to the Ligurian Sea. There is evidence to suggest that in choosing the location for this story, B. may have had in mind the Benedictine priory of Santa Croce del Corvo, north of Lerici.

  Fifth Story

  1. Montferrat A region now in northern Italy, lying south of Turin, on the direct route between France and the major Italian seaport of Genoa. In the Middle Ages, it was an independent march, or marquisate.

  2. a Crusade to the Holy Land The aim of the Third Crusade (1189–92) was the recapture of Jerusalem, which had fallen to Saladin’s armies in 1187. The crusaders failed to achieve their objective. B.’s story is set a few months before March 1191, when King Philippe, en route to the Holy Land, signed a treaty of alliance in Sicily with Richard I (‘Lionheart’) of England.

  3. Philippe Le Borgne Philip Augustus II of France (‘Le Borgne’, or ‘one-eyed’) embarked at Genoa for the Third Crusade at the end of August 1190. The ruler of Montferrat at that time was Guglielmo il Vecchio, whose wife, Giulia of Austria, already over seventy years old, was unlikely to have stirred Philip’s amorous inclinations. Guglielmo died in 1191, to be succeeded by his son Corrado degli Aleramici, who had left for the Holy Land several years earlier, becoming famous for his defence of Jerusalem and Tyre. Corrado was a widower at the time of his marriage in Constantinople in 1187 to Theodora, the sister of the Emperor. Theodora never set foot in Montferrat. Philip is in any case known to have arrived in Genoa, not by the way of Montferrat, but via the Riviera. The intermingling of fact and fantasy is a recurrent feature of the Decameron’s narratives.

  Sixth Story

  1. an inquisitor The papal Inquisition for the apprehension and trial of heretics has a longer history than is commonly supposed. It was instituted by Pope Gregory IX in 1231. The use of torture to obtain confessions was first authorized by Innocent IV in 1252. Those found guilty of heresy could be sentenced to a wide range of penalties, from simple prayer and fasting to the confiscation of property and imprisonment.

  2. cum gladiis et fustibus ‘with swords and staves’. The phrase is biblical (see Matthew xxvi, 47).

  3. Saint John Golden-Mouth Saint John Chrysostom, the fourth-century Archbishop of Constantinople, earned his nickname (Gr. chrysos [‘gold’] + stoma [‘mouth’]) through the clarity of his preaching. In its italianized form, the name San Giovanni Boccadoro was used by medieval satirists to connote the money-grubbing practices of the clergy.

  4. an Epicurean In the medieval mind, Epicurus (341–270 BC) was associated with the denial of the immortality of the soul. Dante’s circle of the heretics is a cemetery of flaming tombs, containing the souls of ‘Epicurus and all his followers, who make the soul die with the body’ (‘con Epicuro tutt’ i suoi seguaci,/che l’anima col corpo morta fanno’) (Inferno, X, 14–15).

  5. ‘it was that passage… hundredfold’ See Matthew xix, 29: ‘And everyone that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands, for my name’s sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting life.’

  Seventh Story

  1. Can Grande della Scala Lord of Verona from 1311 to 1329, Can Grande was the younger brother of Bartolomeo della Scala, the ‘great Lombard’ with whom Dante had taken refuge in the early years of his exile. Can Grande is eulogized by Dante (Paradiso, XVII, 76–93) for both his military prowess and his outstanding generosity.

  2. Frederick the Second King of Sicily (1197–1250), Duke of Swabia (1228–35), German King (1212–50), and Holy Roman Emperor (1220–50), Frederick II was arguably the most powerful ruler in medieval European history. A patron and practitioner of the arts, he attracted numerous poets and men of letters to his court, which was the focal point of the earliest Italian school of poetry, the so-called Scuola Siciliana. His liberality became a byword among generations of later writers.

  3. Primas A canon of Cologne, Primas achieved a wide reputation in the first half of the thirteenth century as a witty and spontaneous Latin versifier. Under the name of Golias he composed a number of popular student songs. He was much in demand as an entertainer of prelates and princes.

  4. Cluny The Benedictine abbey at Cluny in Burgundy, founded in 910 by Duke William the Pious of Aquitaine, became legendary in the Middle Ages for its wealth and its patronage of the arts.

  Eighth Story

  1. Ermino de’ Grimaldi The Grimaldis were one of the oldest and most powerful patrician families in the Genoese republic. No Ermino de’ Grimaldi is recorded as head of the family in the city’s archives. B. seems to have invented the character to illustrate the miserliness of the Genoese in general, which was (and still is) proverbial. In a later story (II, 4) the Genoese are described (p. 93) as ‘a rapacious, money-grubbing set of people’.

  2. Guiglielmo Borsiere Guiglielmo Borsiere had been named in Dante’s Inferno (XVI, 70) as a recent newcomer to the circle where punishment is being inflicted on the souls of homosexuals who had gained distinction for, military valour and impeccable manners. The reference to Borsiere leads straight into Dante’s famous denunciation of the Florentine nouveaux riches, who had brought shame upon the city by their arrogance and materialism (‘La gente nova e’ subiti guadagni/orgoglio e dismisura han generata,/Fiorenza, in te, si che tu già ten piagni’ – ‘Upstarts and quick profits have generated such pride and excess in you, Florence, as to make you weep’). The fiercely admonitory tone of the episode from the Inferno doubtless explains B.’s own apparently irrelevant diatribe at this point against the ill manners of his contemporaries.

  Ninth Story

  1. the first King of Cyprus Guy de Lusignan, dispossessed King of Jerusalem, was installed as the island’s first monarch in 1191 by Richard I ‘Lionheart’, who had conquered the island on his way to the Third Crusade. Guy was a notoriously weak and incapable ruler. So too, however, was Godfrey of Bouillon, who assumed the title of Defender of the Holy Sepulchre (Advocatus Sancti Sepulchri) after Jerusalem had fallen a century earlier, in 1090, to the Christian armies of the First Crusade. The anachronistic reference to Godfrey is superfluous to the narrative unless B. intended his story, the shortest in the Decameron, to be read as a warning against the consequences of weak government in general.

  Tenth Story

  1. Master Alberto The character is probably based on a famous Bolognese physician and academic of the time, Alberto de’ Zancari, who was born around 1280 and was still alive towards the end of 1348. His second wife was called Margherita, which is the name B. gives to the female protagonist of his tale. A similar theme (the failed attempt of a younger woman to taunt an elderly admirer) is treated in VIII, 7, but whereas here the scholar’s reproof is administered with the utmost delicacy, in the later story, violently anti-feminist, the woman is punished with extreme cruelty and vindictiveness.

  (Conclusion)

  1. to restrict the matter of our storytelling From now on, with the exception of the ninth day, each of the remaining days will be devoted to the narration of stories on a single prescribed topic. Even the stories already told, those of the first day, have cert
ain unifying elements. All depend for their effect on a display of eloquence or quick-wittedness on the part of the main character. All involve the reversal of the outcome that characters (and readers) have been led to anticipate.

  SECOND DAY

  First Story

  1. Saint Arrigo The main characters in the story are fictive reconstructions of actual people. A church chronicler of the period reports that the Blessed Arrigo had led a blameless life working as a porter in Treviso. The same writer claims that when Arrigo died, on 10 June 1315, his body was taken into the cathedral and that contact with his corpse wrought various miracles, including the healing of a paralytic. His tomb in the cathedral of Treviso still bears an inscription claiming that the cathedral bells rang of their own accord at the moment of his death. Stecchi and Martellino were two notoriously bawdy Florentine travelling clowns, or buffoni, who specialized in mimicry and impersonation. The story itself contains obvious echoes of the accounts found in Mark ii, 2 and Luke v, 19 of the man stricken with the palsy who is at first prevented from reaching Jesus by the throng of people surrounding him.

  2. swarming with Germans Compatriots, presumably, of Arrigo, who had been born in Bolzano, where German was and still is the main vehicle of communication.

  3. out of the frying-pan… straight in the fire The translation is literal. B.’s use of the proverbial saying pre-dates its first recorded English appearance, in Sir Thomas More’s treatise on heresy (1528), by nearly two centuries.

  Second Story

  1. Saint Julian’s paternoster A popular prayer in the Middle Ages, especially among travellers, Julian being their patron saint. Saint Julian (‘Julian the Hospitaller’) had his origins in medieval romance rather than historical reality. His story is told in the Legenda aurea (Golden Legend), a collection of so-called lives of saints compiled by Jacques de Vorágine in the thirteenth century, where Julian is described as a nobleman who through a mistake of identity killed his own father and mother. He expiated his unwitting crime by going to live with his wife beside a ford across a river, where they assisted travellers and built a refuge for the poor. As B.’s text makes clear (p. 77), his ‘paternoster’ included ‘reciting an Our Father and a Hail Mary for the souls of Saint Julian’s father and mother’ and ended with a prayer to God and the saint for a good night’s lodging. Implicit with-in the good night’s lodging was the provision of an attractive sleeping companion.

  2. a war in the countryside Probably an allusion to the struggle between Azzo VIII of Ferrara and his brother Francesco over hereditary rights, brought about by the former’s marriage to Beatrice of Anjou in 1305.

  3. as if he had been turned into a stork The expression, used by Dante (Inferno, XXXII, 34–6), occurs again in the story of the scholar and the widow (Decameron, VIII, 7). The noise made by storks with their beaks is similar to the sound of chattering teeth.

  Third Story

  1. Agolanti The Florentine merchant in the previous tale was called Sandro Agolanti. The profession with which the Agolanti family was associated was moneylending.

  2. a totally unexpected war. Unusually for B., the historical framework of this story is as shaky and improbable as the plot itself. The ‘unexpected war’ referred to at one point in the narrative is possibly the rebellion against Henry II led by his sons, Henry and Richard, in 1173. But in 1173 the King of Scotland was William I, still only thirty years old, who would hardly fit the pseudo-Abbot’s description of him as ‘a very old man’. Other features of the tale suggest a period closer to Boccaccio’s own day, possibly during the turbulent reign (1307–27) of Edward II, marked by continuous conflicts including his defeat at Bannockburn in 1314. A more plausible candidate as the princess’s prospective husband would therefore be Robert the Bruce, who by 1327 was in his early fifties and suffering from the terminal illness, possibly leprosy, which led to his death in 1329.

  3. Bruges The main Florentine banking houses, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, had branches in Bruges, which during the fourteenth century established itself as the mercantile metropolis of Europe.

  4. Earl of Cornwall The choice of name suggests a possible association between the bestowal by Edward II of this title on his favourite, Piers Gaveston, and the homosexual overtones of the encounter between Alessan-dro and the Abbot (‘The Abbot… began to caress him in the manner of a young girl fondling her lover, causing Alessandro to suspect… that the youth was possibly in the grip of some impure passion’, p. 88).

  5. he later conquered Scotland Alexander (italice Alessandro) was the name of three Scottish kings, of whom the last, Alexander III, was married when he was ten to the eleven-year-old daughter of the King of England, Henry III. Neither he nor his predecessors was of Italian origin, but the marriage of a later Scottish king, Edward de Balliol, to a niece of King Robert of Naples around 1331 (when B. was moving in Angevin courtly circles there) offers a possible clue to the unravelling of the tale’s Scottish connection.

  Fourth Story

  1. the Amalfi coast In this fond description of the Amalfi coast, south of Naples, there is more than a hint of the nostalgia B. was known to have experienced for the playground of the Neapolitan nobility, with whom he associated during the years he spent as a young Florentine businessman in the Angevin capital.

  2. Ravello A small town in the hills above Amalfi, where B. had a number of friends including the grammarian Angelo di Ravello. Its cathedral contains an ornate pulpit dedicated to the Rufolo family, who lived nearby in one of several stately palaces with extensive gardens overlooking the Amalfi coast. The hero of B.’s tale is based on one Lorenzo Rufolo, who after losing the favour of the Angevin king turned to piracy before being captured and imprisoned in a castle in Calabria, where he died in 1291.

  3. the Archipelago i.e. the Greek Archipelago, in the Aegean.

  4. two large Genoese carracks Carracks were large merchant ships. It was usual for them to be heavily armed like the ocean-going galleons of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

  Fifth Story

  1. The Fleshpots In Italian, Malpertugio (‘Evil Hole’), a district near the commercial centre of Naples which took its name from an aperture in the city walls that provided a shortcut to the harbour. It was notorious in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries as the city’s red-light quarter.

  2. a supporter of the Guelphs… King Charles… King Frederick The reference is to the struggles between the dynasties of Anjou and Aragon for control of Naples and Sicily in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Charles I of Anjou, with the support of the papacy, had conquered Naples and Sicily in the 1260s, putting an end to the last representatives of the Hohenstaufen dynasty. The uprising known as the Sicilian Vespers against the harsh rule of Charles I in 1282 led to the expulsion of the French and their Guelph adherents from the island and the advent of the Aragonese, who, supported by the Ghibellines, eventually proclaimed Frederick III as King of Sicily in 1296. B.’s tale is set at a later date, some years after the treaty of Caltabellotta (1302), under which the King of Naples, Charles II, agreed to give up his claim to Sicily after a series of abortive attempts to restore the Angevins to power in the island. It is presumably to one of these failed conspiracies that the lady’s embroidered account of her marriage to a Guelph-supporting Sicilian relates.

  3. Greek wine A white wine that was popular in southern Italy.

  4. Madonna Fiordaliso The name of the Sicilian courtesan (‘Fleur-de-lis’) has similar floral associations to that of Madonna Jancofiore, her close counterpart in a later story (VIII, 10), who is also Sicilian. The two characters were probably based on a Sicilian lady reported in a document of 1341 as living in a house in the Neapolitan Malpertugio quarter, a certain Madonna Flora, whose acquaintance B. may well have made when relaxing from his duties as a young banking official in the city.

  5. Ruga Catalana An important thoroughfare leading from the harbour to the upper part of the city, deriving its name from the numerous Catalan expatriates who occupied influenti
al positions at the Angevin court.

  6. Butch Belchfire The Italian reads ‘il scarabone Buttafuoco’, literally ‘the villain Flingfire’. The surname can still be found in Sicily. A document dated May 1336 from the Neapolitan royal archives records that a Sicilian named Francesco Buttafuoco, recently deceased, had received an income for loyal services to the Angevin cause. Like Madonna Flora, he may possibly have been a prototype for one of B.’s characters in this, the most Neapolitan of his stories.

  7. Filippo Minutolo Because the archbishop Minutolo died on 24 October 1301, it is theoretically possible to date the events of the novella with absolute precision. But the stifling heat which had caused Andreuccio to remove all his clothes in the Sicilian lady’s bedroom suggests high summer rather than late autumn. The mingling of historical fact with literary fiction is a characteristic of many of B.’s narratives.

  Sixth Story

  1. Manfred The last of the Hohenstaufen emperors, Manfred was in fact crowned King of Sicily (i.e. the whole of southern Italy, including Naples) in August 1258, eight years after the death of Frederick II. As protector of the Italian Ghibellines, his rule was marked by bitter conflict with the papacy. Pope Clement IV offered the Sicilian throne to Charles of Anjou, who, having sailed for Rome in May 1265, defeated Manfred’s armies near Benevento in February 1266. The circumstances of Manfred’s death at Benevento are recalled by Dante in a memorably dramatic episode of the Commedia (Purgatorio, III, 103–45).