Take this quiz to enter the drawing for a free book

Celebrating

To celebrate this blog's second anniversary, I've decided to give away one copy of my novel, A Thing Done, to someone who is  brave enough to take this little quiz.  It can be the winner's choice of a Kindle edition, a Nook edition, or a paperback (unless you live somewhere other than the US, in which case I don't want to fork over the money to ship a paperback, so it will have to be Kindle or Nook).  If you want it sent to somebody else as a holiday gift, no problem.  I will let this contest run until December 10 before choosing a winner.

If you're not sure of all the answers, try anyway.  You've got nothing to lose.  And since some answers may be debatable, or the questions a bit sneaky, winners will be determined by use of a complex algorithm.  (No, I have no idea what I mean by that either, but you can get away with just about anything if you use a complex algorithm.  Just ask Amazon.  Or Goodreads.)  Comments count.  Creativity counts.  Flattery counts.   Becoming a blog follower counts.  Give me your answers in the Comments section, or send them to me privately if you prefer.  (And try not to look at any previous comments containing the answers!  Honor system applies.)

Ready?  Okay.  Think hard about the 13th century, about Florence, about Dante.  Once you've projected yourself back to then and there, you're all set to proceed.  It's short - only three questions.  Good luck! 

Question the First:  

I'm going to give you two lists, each describing an individual in late 13th century Florence.  Then I'm going to give you a list of political parties.  See if you can figure out which political party each individual belongs to.

If you are the First Individual:

• You think the Pope is a really great guy.
• You're a fan of Count Guido Guerra, who's the cousin of Guido Novello (who you don't like very much).
• You think Emperor Frederick II was the Antichrist.
• Your fortress has square crenellations.
• You fight under a banner that sports a fleur-de-lys.
• You're from Florence, or from Lucca.
• When you look back on the 1216 fracas that was the subject of A Thing Done, your sympathies are with Buondelmonte and the Donati.
• You really respect Charles of Anjou.  Or at least you'd like to keep him on your side.
• You'd love to exile your opponents and tear down their towers, houses, and businesses.

If you are the Second Individual:

• You think the Emperor is a really great guy.  When there is an emperor, at least.
• You're a fan of Count Guido Novello, who's the cousin of Guido Guerra (who you don't like very much).
• You think Emperor Frederick II was the Wonder of the World.
• Your fortress has swallowtail crenellations.
• You fight under a banner that has an eagle on it (even though it looks like a scrawny chicken about to be plucked)
• You're from Pisa, Siena, or Arezzo.
• When you look back on the 1216 fracas mentioned above, your sympathies lie with Oddo Arrigo dei Fifanti, the Lamberti, and the Amidei.
• You hold Farinata degli Uberti in high regard. 
• You'd love to exile your opponents and tear down their towers, houses, and businesses.

If you are the Third Individual:  

• You'd rather the Pope didn't put your city under interdict, and you wish the Emperor would just occupy himself elsewhere and stop appointing vicars.
• You don't really care much about any of the Conti Guidi.
• You suspect Fred II was a heretic, but he was also pretty cool in a lot of ways.
• You don't have a fortress.  You have a perfectly good house, thank you.
• You prefer not to fight.  Somebody's got to keep the shops open.
• You're Florentine.  You're not nobility, and you're not a mere laborer, either.  You might even have a surname, or be about to acquire one.
• When you look back on 1216, you think, "What were they thinking?!?"
• You respect anybody who can hold his own against the magnates.
• You wish you could exile all the big shots at once, rent out their towers and houses, and take over their businesses. 

And here are the political parties (only three will apply, but I like to provide lots of choices):

1. Primo Popolo
2. Whigs
3. The Silly Party
4. Guelfs
5. Tories
6. Christian Democrats
7. Libertarians
8. Ghibellines
9. The Tea Party
10. Communists

Assign one party to each of the three individuals.  Easy-peasy, eh?  Try the next one:

Question the Second:

All you Dante scholars, here's your chance.  Dante's Commedia is divided into three parts:  the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso.   Tell me to which of those three regions of the afterlife Dante assigned each of the following: 

1. Brunetto Latini, philosopher, civil servant, and Dante's mentor
2. Alexander the Great, world conqueror
3. Ciacco, notorious glutton
4. Paolo and Francesca, famous lovers
5. Mosca, whose comment provided the title for A Thing Done
6. Jason of the Argonauts, adventurer and fleece fancier
7. Pope Celestine V, who abdicated
8. Brutus, Roman patriot who killed Julius Caesar
9. Helen of Troy, problematic beauty
10. Ulysses, extremely clever Greek guy
11. Filippo Argenti, Dante's neighbor
12. Frederick II, either Antichrist or Wonder of the World

Helen, Celestine, Alexander, Frederick

 So far, so good.  Now, for our last question of the day, an easy one:

Question the Third:

I'm going to list eleven women who were important in Dante's life in one way or another.  Then I will list several possible roles for these women.  Match each name with the role she played in Dante's life.  (It is possible for an answer to be used more than once.  In fact, it's downright necessary.)

Here are the women, in alphabetical order:

1. Antonia
2. Beatrice
3. Bella
4. Fioretta
5. Gemma
6. Gentucca
7. Lapa
8. Lisetta
9. Lucia
10. Tana
11. Violetta

And here are the possible roles:

• Muse and inspiration
• Mysterious woman mentioned in Dante's writing (and scholars would just love to know more about her)
• Stepmother
• Mother
• Half-sister
• Wife
• Daughter
• Favorite saint

That's all there is to it.  Have fun, send me your answers, and we'll see who takes the prize.  Good luck!

Images in this post are in the public domain, except for the photo of the bust of Helen of Troy, which is licensed to Yair Haklai, and the photo with the swallowtail crenellations, which is licensed to Chfono.  Both are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, Wikimedia Commons.

The Spendthrift Brigade

Inferno, Canto 29:  Codex Altonensis, Tuscany, 1350-1410

Dante didn't think much of them, those twelve spoiled rich kids from Siena.  He made that perfectly clear in the Inferno - the relevant page is pictured above.   One can almost imagine the great poet sniffing disapprovingly as he looked down that substantial nose of his at the dastardly dozen - wastrels and profligates all.

"Now was there ever a people so foolish as the Sienese?  Certainly not [even] the French, by far!"  These are the words Dante the poet puts in the mouth of Dante the character, speaking to his guide Virgil as they observe a few unfortunate Sienese in the Inferno.  Then as now, Siena and nearby Florence did not exactly constitute a mutual admiration society.

 They were Dante's contemporaries, the members of the notorious Brigata Spendereccia (also sometimes called the Brigata Godereccia, from the verb "godere" - to enjoy).  Their reputation persists even today, when critics of certain political initiatives in Tuscany invoke the name as a way of saying "Wasteful, careless, irresponsible use of funds."

Who were these young men, and what did they do to live in infamy for the past 700+ years?  This is the season for conspicuous consumption, and in that arena we all have a lot to learn from these fellows.

They are said to have been a group of wealthy young men who pooled their resources - to the tune of 18,000 gold florins apiece.  With the resulting fund of 216,000 gold florins (estimated to be the equivalent of 12-15 million euros today), they purchased a palace and lived like kings until the money ran out.  Like very, very extravagant kings. 

They spent enormous amounts of money on fine dining, with all that accompanied it - entertainment, servants, gold and silver plate and flatware.  They each maintained a sumptuous apartment in their shared palazzo.  They were said to throw the dishes, table-ornaments, and knives of gold and silver out the window after a banquet.  If reports are to be believed, they fried gold florins and served them to one another, and they had their horses shod with silver.  Their food was prepared with the most costly spices, using them in vast excess, perhaps even cooking game birds on a fire fueled by outrageously expensive cloves.

While some of this may well be hyperbole, it's pretty obvious that these young men were out to impress.

Observers differ on how long it took them to exhaust their treasury:  10 months, two years.  No more than that.  One can imagine frantic parents, scrambling to legally emancipate their sons before the entire family fortune was eaten up by debt.  What little we know about the men suggests that some were permanently reduced to poverty, while others managed to make a fresh start and maintain a standard of living that was, if not as ridiculous as the one they had just enjoyed with the rest of the brigata, at least fairly respectable.

There's no shortage of stories about them, but it is surprisingly difficult to pin down exactly who they were.  Historians, Dante scholars, and contemporary or near-contemporary chroniclers have reached different conclusions, and as fascinating as Dante's words are, they do not clarify identities and details.  We do have enough, however, to hazard guesses about the identities of at least five possible members.

Illustration of Inferno, Canto 13:  Giovanni Stradano (aka Jan van der Straet), 1523-1605

The first brigata member that Dante encounters in the Inferno is one Lano of Siena, one of the squanderers, who is being pursued by a pack of ravenous black hounds.  Despairing, he cries out to death to hurry and save him:  "Or accorri, accorri, morte!"  We know it is Lano because his companion, Iacopo di Santo Andrea, calls him by name:  "Lano, not so nimble were your legs at the jousts at Toppo!"  (Dante translations in this post are by Robert Durling.)

So what is this cryptic reference?  For background information we turn to the many Dante commentators who lived close to the poet's own time, and they tell us that Lano is Arcolano di Squarcia Maconi, a member of the Brigata.  Boccaccio further tells us that Lano squandered his wealth.  Impoverished, the young man took part in an expedition against Arezzo in 1288, and when the Aretines ambushed the Sienese, Lano allowed himself to be slain, even though he could have escaped, rather than continue to live in poverty.  This ambush took place at the Pieve del Toppo.  Thus, Lano twice sought death, but in the Inferno there will be no cessation to his torment.

The pursuing hounds are sometimes interpreted as demons, as in this illustration:

Inferno, Canto 13:  Giovanni di Paolo (1403-1483)

The other four Brigata members in the Inferno are made known to us much deeper in Hell, all the way down in Canto 29.   A nasty, scabrous fellow named Capocchio ("Blockhead") tells us about them, though we don't actually see them or hear them speak. 

Capocchio says, in response to Dante's remark about the Sienese (above):

"Except for Stricca, he knew how to spend moderately,

    and Nicholas, who first discovered the rich custom of cloves, in the garden where that seed takes root,

    and except for the crew for whom Caccia d'Asciano used up his vineyard and his great farmlands, and to whom Bedazzled displayed his wisdom."

Taking the four one at a time, let's start with Stricca.  

Again, the commentators provide much fascinating background. Modern interpreters tell us that Capocchio's description of Stricca's spending as moderate is ironic, though I would have thought sarcastic was a better term.  Who was he?  Several persons with the same or similar names have been suggested.  Most popular is the idea that he was the son of Giovanni Salimbeni, which is to say, a member of one of Siena's most prominent families, and that the next man on our list, Niccolò, was his brother. 

However, there are those who hold that Stricca was of the Tolomei family (another prominent Sienese clan), in which the name Baldistricca (Stricca for short) recurred.  

Assuming that he was the Salimbeni Stricca, he was probably a city official (despite his youth and profligacy), and he served as podestà in Bologna (in 1276 and again in 1286, a lucrative position that could have gone a long way toward reestablishing his fortune), and possibly in other cities as well.  We know little more about him.

His brother Niccolò, however - if brother he was - is known as the clove guy.  That is to say, he's the one who either (depending on how you read it) stuffed gamebirds with the wildly expensive spice, or grilled them over a fire composed of cloves, or simply had his meat cooked with a lot of cloves.

Niccolò was either a Salimbeni or a Bonsignori.  Again, we're not certain, though most commentators say Salimbeni.  If the former, then he was Stricca's brother, assuming Stricca was a Salimbeni and not a Tolomei; if the latter, then he wasn't.  It appears there may have been two men by that name, and of those two families, in the Brigata.  Also, just to complicate matters, there may have been more than one brigata.

I rather arbitrarily favor the idea that he was of the Bonsignori clan, if only because I have a bit more information about him if that is the case.  If this is true, he was a knight, a staunch Ghibelline, the warrior who captained the Sienese at the battle of Castiglion d'Orcia in 1279, a supporter of Henry VII of Luxembourg, and he lived an active life at least until 1314, which is the last we hear of him.

A recipe book by Niccolò's cook has survived the centuries.  It's entitled "Il libro delle vivande trovate dalla brigata" (the book of foods for the brigata) and includes recipes "per dodici ghiotti" (for twelve gluttons).

Next comes Caccia d'Asciano, whose historical identity doesn't seem to be quite as controversial as the previous two.  Caccia (short for Caccianemico) was the son of a knight, messer Trovato degli Scialenghi.  "Caccianemico" is one of those gloriously descriptive Italian names that means something like "Hunts his enemy."  We know of Caccia only that his spendthrift ways cost him (and his family) a vineyard and other lands in Asciano, near Siena. 

And finally, there's l'Abbagliato.  This nickname is usually translated as "Bedazzled," though at least one modern scholar thinks the intent was closer to "Sucker."  Be that as it may, l'Abbagliato historically was Bartolomeo dei Folcacchieri.  His brother was known as a comic poet.  We know of l'Abbagliato that he was once fined for drinking in a place where it was forbidden, and that later he played a leading role in Sienese politics and often served as podestà in other cities.  He died in 1300. 

All of that dining must have required some drinking, too

So.  We don't know who all of these men were; we don't know with certainty that all of them were in the brigata; we don't know that there was only one brigata.  And yet, the legend persists.  Perhaps it would have persisted even without Dante, at least locally; we'll never know.

The poet Folgore da San Gimignano also wrote of a similar brigata (and may have been a member), but he was born in 1270, so he must have been writing about a later group, although the idea of lavish spending on fleshly pleasures seems to have carried through. 

So, as you do your holiday shopping and worry about the state of your credit cards, remember the brigata, and then you can feel fiscally virtuous by comparison.

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of expired copyright, except for the photo of  cloves, which has been released into the public domain by the photographer.

"You must come..."

Recently I got to thinking about town criers in medieval Florence.

Now, I realize that this is not exactly the sort of thing that invades people's consciousnesses very often, but once in a while these things do crop up.  This time, it stemmed from last week's blog post, in which I mentioned in passing that Dante's brother-in-law, Leone Poggi, was a town crier in Florence.

And then it dawned on me:  when Dante was forced into exile as a result of (probably spurious and certainly politically motivated) criminal charges, somebody - some town crier, in fact - had to make the rounds and publicly announce the sentence.  Had to bring the bad tidings to Dante's own home, not to mention the public piazzas and other busiest parts of the city.

Was it his brother-in-law who got stuck with this awkward task?  If it was, wouldn't that likely make things really difficult the next time the whole family got together to celebrate a feast day?  What would Dante's sister - Leone's wife - have thought?  What about Dante's wife, Gemma?  Sounds like a perfect recipe for family discord, doesn't it?

So I looked it up.  And was relieved to find that it was not Leone who got assigned the job, but one of his five colleagues, a fellow named Duccio di Francesco.  But of course, by the time I came across this reassuring tidbit of information, I was hooked, and found myself deeply engaged in trying to figure out the byzantine workings of this aspect of the Florentine justice system.  Never mind the system as a whole - entire books have been written tracing Florentine law to its origins in Roman law and Germanic tribal law.  I was concerned, at least for now, with the communication flow.

What I learned first was that it was all much more codified, and more complicated, than I would have guessed.

For one thing, there is some confusion in some of the histories about whether the nuntio and the bannitore (or banditore) were the same, or whether they were different offices.  The nuntio is a messenger who brought official notification to people in writing; the bannitore was a herald who made public announcements of the city's official proclamations, but who also bore responsibility in some cases for bringing this information directly to an individual.  There is no reason why one man could not have performed both functions, yet it appears that (for most of the time, anyway) these were two separate offices.  

The nuntio had to be a Florentine citizen, and had to have been resident in the city for at least ten years.  He took an oath of office, posted a bond, and proudly wore a peaked wool cap decorated with four Florentine lilies, a symbol of office legally reserved for these civil employees.  I do not know how many nuntii the city employed at any given time; it probably varied with the city budget.

The nuntio, when a person was accused of a crime, had the job of finding the accused and handing him a document which included the name of the judge of the case, the crime with which the recipient was accused, an invitation to present himself to the court within a specified time period, and the name of the messenger.  This would typically be the first legal contact with the accused.

The bannitore, on the other hand, was one of a select group of six, one for each sesto of the city.  Elected annually by the signory of Florence, these elite employees were required to be Florentine citizens, and they were required to identify their families.  A bannitore had to be able to read and write, he needed to possess a "light and clear voice" and he had to own a small silver trumpet and be able to play short fanfares on it, to call people to hear his announcements.  He needed to provide a good horse, one not also registered in the cavalry (no double duty here), and worth at least 20 florins of gold. (This was necessary because he would also be riding out to the suburbs and the surrounding countryside to perform his duties.)

If he met these exacting requirements and was chosen for the job (which, by the way, in 1307 paid exactly as much as a city trumpeter received, 3 lire per month), he would receive a new outfit of clothing twice a year, in a single color (either green or scarlet), and would be given a silver ornament called a maspillos to wear around his neck. 

(I've often thought that medieval livery had something in common with bridesmaids' dresses - just fine for its intended purpose, but not much use for anything else.  Maybe that was the idea.)

His duties included announcing fairs and festivals, meetings of councils, levies of taxes, militia parades, bankruptcies, public auctions, and criminal and civil sentences.  Prior to each announcement, he had to sound his trumpet call three times to call the people together.  He was required to make his announcements at the gates of the city officer's palace, at the church of Or San Michele, and at a minimum of two public locations in each of the city's districts.  Certain announcements concerning individuals (legal sentences, bankruptcies of individuals) had also to be announced near the individual's home.

Let's take a moment to talk about Florence's most famous bannitore, Antonio Pucci.  Antonio, however admirable he may have been as a bannitore, was actually famous for his poetry, but his public career is nonetheless interesting.  The son of a bronze caster who specialized in church bells, Antonio became a bellringer for the city, beginning in 1334, when he was probably about 25.

Perhaps he rang the city's bells to celebrate the victory of the Florentine militia over Padova in 1337, or the overthrow of the Duke of Athens in 1343.  When the Black Death struck Florence with brute force in 1348, could it have resulted in the bannitore post opening up for Antonio?  We don't know, but we do know that he continued overlapping both jobs for a while, and served as a bannitore for nearly twenty years. 

 In both of his public positions he would have been privy to the decisions of Florence's governing elite and would have played a role in communicating those decisions to the populace.  Perhaps his job put him in a good position to observe the foibles of his fellow Florentines, because his poetry reflected some wry observations, like the one about the poultry vendor who sold him a dry old hen, or the ode to a notoriously sloppy barber.

But getting back to communications and to Dante's legal woes, I found an interesting breakdown of exactly how the legal process worked in Dante's case, in a book called Contrary Commonwealth:  The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, by Randolph Starn.

Dante, a member of the White Guelf party who had recently served as a member of Florence's ruling body, was in Rome as part of an official Florentine delegation to the Pope when the exiled Black Guelfs triumphantly re-entered Florence and turned the political tables, targeting prominent White Guelfs for retribution.  I'll summarize the steps of their legal assault on the absent Dante here:

Step One:  Messer Cante Gabrieli of Gubbio, the podestà (the foreign rector, or chief magistrate, chosen to serve for a half-year term, and in this case very much allied with Dante's political foes), appointed messer Paolo of Gubbio as special judge of crimes committed by public officials.

Step 2:  Messer Paolo initiated proceedings and investigations against several of those who had recently served in the White Guelf government, and brought charges against Dante and three co-defendants:  messer Palmiro Altoviti, Lippo Becchi, and Orlanduccio Orlandi.  The four were accused of crimes-in-office including extortion, corruption, misappropriation of funds, fraud, accepting bribes, and plotting rebellion.

Is there any surviving evidence of any truth to these charges?  No.  They appear to have been wholly politically motivated.  We cannot know for sure whether any specifics were cited, but if they were, they did not survive in the record.

Step 3:  The court cited Dante and the other three and sent a nuntio (messenger) with written instructions, ordering them to appear by a certain deadline.  Dante, you will recall, was in Rome at the time, probably with no direct knowledge that these things were going on.  Thus, the nuntio would not have been able to hand him the document, and instead would have affixed it to the front door of Dante's home.  All attempts to deliver the document would have been scrupulously recorded.  At this point, Dante's legal status was that of citatus - a person accused of a crime.

Step 4:  When Dante and the others did not respond, they were subject to being "called under the ban" (cridatio in bannum).  It was at this point that the town crier, in this case Duccio di Francesco, rode forth on his horse worth at least 20 gold florins, blew three blasts on his silver trumpet, and voiced his message:  "You must come."

He did this in a number of locations around the city, including just outside Dante's home.  He must have done it at least twice in January 1302.  He noted Dante's previous failure to appear (the fact that he was in Rome didn't count) and placed the poet under the ban of the commune of Florence; he was now required to pay a fine of 5000 florins within three days (though 15 days would have to pass before further action could be taken), and this was true even if he returned and proved his innocence, which would have been difficult under the circumstances, and would probably have exposed him to torture to elicit a confession.

Dante's status was now that of bannitus.

After the total of 18 days had passed, thanks to Duccio's efforts, Dante's status was exbannitus pro maleficio, meaning that he was considered a confessed criminal due to his contumacy (failure to appear).  He had no right of appeal, and he had lost the rights of citizenship.  Any citizen could assault or even assassinate him with impunity, provided the attack took place within Florentine territory.

And Dante may still not have known what was happening. 

Step 5:  On 27 January 1302 the magistrates pronounced a definitive sentence:  since Dante and the others had not appeared to contest the accusations against them (probably a good idea on their parts, all things considered), they were considered confessed criminals and sentenced to pay the 5000 florins in fine within three days, plus any illicit gains to any legitimate claimants.  If they did not - and how could they? - their property was to be confiscated and destroyed.  Even if they did somehow manage to pay that vast sum of money within three days, they would still have been confined outside Tuscany for two years and banned forever from public office in Florence.  It was now too late for innocence.

Step 6:  The sentence was formalized and officially recorded by the court notary (ser Bonora da Pregio).  Duccio di Francesco was among the witnesses.

On 10 March 1302, Dante and 14 other White Guelfs were sentenced to death by fire, should they ever return to Florentine territory.  In 1311, an amnesty offered to those condemned in 1302 required an act of public penance, which Dante refused to perform.  In 1315 he and his sons were proclaimed rebels and sentenced to be decapitated if they were captured.  (One wonders if this superseded being burned at the stake.)  On each of these occasions, the steps above (notification, public announcements, passage of a specified amount of time) were undertaken yet again.

The outcome?  Dante never returned to his native Florence.  He died in Ravenna in 1321, having written his masterwork La Commedia while living in exile.

In 2008, the city council of Florence finally got around to voiding Dante's sentence.

*

Today, this blog has been in existence for exactly one year!  Its readership has been growing, slowly at first, but faster all the time.  We've covered a vast variety of topics, most of them at least loosely related to research - the process or the results.  It's been fun, and I hope my readers have enjoyed it, too.

But although the blog is a year old, the little follower thingie on the right side of the page is only a couple of weeks old.  If you'd like to help me celebrate this important milestone, perhaps you'd consider doing so by choosing to follow the blog.  

Or, to be just a tad irreverent about it:

Follow this blog, or the peacock gets it!

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of having expired copyrights.

Who was the historical Beatrice?

Dante and Beatrice, 15th century

Today I'd like to see what we can figure out about the real woman behind Dante's inspiration and muse, the beautiful and otherworldly Beatrice.  She was the focus of Dante's adoration from a distance, his beloved - his lady, in the parlance of the medieval culture of courtly love.

• But first, one quick announcement:  I've recently added a "follower" thingie up on the top right corner of this blog, and if you're someone who visits here from time to time, I hope you'll choose to follow it.  I probably should have enabled this at the outset, but I didn't, and now I'm trying to catch up.  Thank you.

Please follow this blog...

Returning you now to your regularly scheduled blog post, we were about to talk about Beatrice.

Often I find myself staring at a mass of dry facts - dates and names and incidents - and sifting through them as I search for the human beings in the factual record.  Searching for the story.

But in the case of Dante's Beatrice, "the glorious lady of my mind," as he called her, it's the other way around.  We know next to nothing about the historical woman, yet her name endures in legend, in art, in music, in poetry.  A particular favorite among 19th century romantics, as you can see from the art in the rest of this post, poor Beatrice is awash in sentimentality.  I suspect this would have left a young medieval Florentine woman bemused, at best. 

Marie Spartali Stillman, 1895

So who was she?  What do we know?  We know that Dante exalted her; that he vowed to write about her "what has never before been written about any woman."

But we don't know with certainty that she even existed.  There have been scholars who insist that she is wholly allegorical, or metaphorical, or some such thing.  Most, however, seem to accept the word of Dante's son Pietro and of Giovanni Boccaccio that Beatrice was indeed a real woman:  Beatrice, usually known as Bice (that's BEE-chay, rhyming with eBay, not with mice, lice, or rice), the daughter of Florentine banker and philanthropist Folco Portinari.  (Her full name would be pronounced Bay-ah-TREE-chay.  Not that these phonetic renditions capture the vowels properly, but you get the general idea.)

Washington Allston, 1819

I'm going to accept that Bice was indeed Folco's daughter.  And since we know so little about her life, her personality, or even her physical appearance, I'm going to try to see how much I can glean indirectly from the historical record - what we can learn about her family, her times, her situation.  It's not solid biography, but it may take us in some interesting directions.

Pietro Alighieri tells us that Bice is of the Portinari family, and Pietro should have known.  He was one of the first commentators on his father's work.  It seems unlikely to me that he would have erred in this.

As for Giovanni Boccaccio, author of The Decameron and early Dante scholar, he tells us that Bice was the daughter of Folco Portinari.  Boccaccio was only eight years old when Dante died in 1321, but he did his research well.  He was acquainted with Andrea Poggi, Dante's nephew (son of Dante's sister, whose name we don't know, and her husband Leone Poggi, a bannitore or town crier), who was said to look remarkably like the poet; also, Boccaccio's stepmother Margherita Mardoli was a cousin of Bice's.

Dante encounters Beatrice, Henry Holiday, 1883

From Dante's own work (La Vita Nuova, in which the poet arranges his early poetic works and his running commentary on them in a sequence that is somewhat autobiographical), we know that Bice was about a year younger than Dante, which means she was probably born in 1266.  We know, too, that she died in 1290, at only 24 years of age.  Dante tells us, in one poem, that she did not die of fever or chills, but he doesn't tell us what she did die of.  Scholars have guessed that she died in childbirth. It's not illogical to assume that of a young married woman in a time when pregnancy and childbirth were very risky for a woman, but it's always possible she died of something else.  After all, even in 1348 a few people managed to find things other than the plague to sweep them away. 

Poul S. Christiansen, 1895

What about her family?  The Portinari were wealthy bankers, and their political background was Ghibelline.  By Bice's time, however, Florence was solidly Guelf, and most of the former Ghibellines, particularly the businessmen, had managed to change their spots accordingly.  Folco must have succeeded, because he served Florence as Prior several times.

Folco, in addition to serving his city as an elected official, was a generous supporter of many charities, including his parish church of Santa Margherita, but he is perhaps best known and remembered for founding the hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, which is still operating in Florence today.  His family provided the hospital's main financial support for several generations after Folco endowed it in 1288.

Some say that Folco was given the idea by a servant, one monna Tessa, who is sometimes described as Bice's nurse.  Some have even said that he founded the hospital in self-defense, because his servant kept bringing sick people home and installing them in his house so she could care for them.  Monna Tessa, the wife of a saddle-maker named Ture, founded the Order of the Oblates in 1288 while employed by the Portinari.  These Third Order women worked in Folco's hospital and in other settings, caring for the ill and the elderly as an act of charity. 

Dante and the friends of Beatrice, Marcel Rieder, 1895

Bice's mother, Cilia dei Caponsacchi, was also from a Ghibelline family.  The Caponsacchi, unlike the Portinari, were classified as magnates, a legal category in medieval Florence which suggested that they were among the powerful and wealthy families who not infrequently took the law into their own hands (and in fact we do know that members of the Caponsacchi were involved in magnate-style violence in the 1280s).

Laws designed to curb the lawlessness and fractiousness of the magnates began to be passed in the 1280s, and continued through the famous Ordinances of Justice in 1293, by which time magnates were barred from holding public office, required to post monetary bonds against the potential bad behavior of their families, and severely penalized if they caused harm to one of the popolani (the non-magnate population).  In 1293, some 72 Florentine families were designated magnates.  (A definition of magnate from the 1280s included any house which had had a knight among its members in the previous twenty years, those which public opinion considered to be magnates, and any that had already been so designated by any previous law.)  Magnates could be of the nobility, but very wealthy merchants who emulated the behavior of the nobles, such as the Bardi family into which Bice married, could also be so designated.  (I keep a list of these families on my refrigerator for quick reference, and yes, they are indeed my refrigerator magnates.)

Gustave Doré, 1857

Folco predeceased his daughter Bice by less than a year.  His last will and testament survives, telling us much about his family.  At the time of his death in 1289, Bice was married and so was one of her sisters:  Ravegnana was married to Bandino dei Falconieri, and they had one son, Niccolò.  (Bandino was brother to Saint Giuliana Falconieri, 1270-1341, who founded a Servite tertiary order in 1305.)  Two of Bice's brothers must have been adults at this time, as they were named as tutors for their younger siblings:  Manetto and Ricovero.  Younger siblings, probably listed by order of birth within gender, were Folco's sons Pigello, Gherardo, and Iacopo, and his daughters Vanna, Pia (or Fia), Margarita, and Castoria.  So, we know that Bice came from a large family.  We also know from this will that Folco was wealthy enough to dower his daughters generously and provide for his sons, as well as for his widow, his natural sister, many charitable causes, and his hospital. 

Carl Wilhelm Friederich Oesterly, 19th century

Folco and other members of his family were buried in the family vault at Santa Margherita  (now known as the Church of Dante).  For a very long time it was believed that Bice was also interred there, but recently scholars have been saying that it was more likely she would have been buried with her husband's family, in Santa Croce.

James Blake, 1800

Let's now take a look at Bice's marriage.  Until fairly recently it was believed that she married Simone (called Mone) dei Bardi, a member of the great magnate banking family, when she was in her late teens, but recent discovery of an earlier document which she had signed as Simone's wife suggests that she was already married by the time she was fifteen.

There exists some doubt about which Simone she wed (since the Bardi seemed to have several Simones in every branch and every generation), but there is substantial agreement that it was Simone son of Geri, and that he was a knight and a man who served more than once in high elected office in Florence. 

Andrea Pierini, 1853

Did Bice have children?  We don't know.  We do know that Simone di Geri had at least three children, but we don't know whether their mother was Bice, or his second wife, Bilia (Sibilla) di Puccio Deciaioli.  We do know that Simone's daughter Ceccha (Francesca) married Francesco di Pierozzo Strozzi in 1313.  If Ceccha was born to Bice, who died in 1290, she would have been at least 23 at her marriage - not impossible, but older than the usual pattern with magnate families, where daughters tended to marry young.  Simone also fathered Bartolo and Gemma (who married either a Medici or a Baroncelli, depending on which account you believe).

What about Bice's friends?  We know from Dante's poems and commentary that she had a friend called Giovanna, nicknamed Primavera ("Springtime"), who was the ladylove of Dante's "first friend" Guido Cavalcanti, a poet and nobleman (yes, from a magnate family).  Another woman associated with Primavera and Bice in a poem was Lagia, the ladylove of another poet, Lapo Gianni.

And it seems distinctly possible, even probable, that Bice knew the young woman who was to become Dante's wife - Gemma Donati (the Donati were the magnates to end all magnates).  They were neighbors, they were more or less the same age, and Florence was not such a big city, nor its young women so protected in those years, that the two would not have known one another.  They may have spent time together; they may have been schooled together; they certainly attended the same small parish church.

Philipp Veit, 1817-1827

We know where Bice lived - only a few doors away from Dante (today's Banca Toscana is built on the land where Folco's house once stood).  And we know that she became much less available to Dante as an object of daily devotion after she married Mone dei Bardi, because the Bardi lived across the Arno. 

And that's what I've been able to learn.  So little, really.  Over 700 years ago there lived in Florence a young woman known to everyone as Bice.  She came from a large and wealthy family, she married young, she died young.  She may have been beautiful.  She certainly was, to one young poet who has made her immortal. 

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of more than a century having passed since the deaths of their creators.

Where there's a will

Last will and testament of Folco Portinari, January 1287 (or 1288)

I have just spent the day studying the last will and testament of Dante's mother-in-law.

(Now, before you mutter "Get a life!" and turn away, please do remember that this is supposed to be a blog about research.)

I am actually quite amazed at how much you can learn from a document of this sort, written in medieval legalese as it is. 

The document pictured above is a different will, that of Folco Portinari, the Florentine banker and philanthropist (and father of Dante's beloved Beatrice) who died on December 31, 1289.  It predates the will I want to talk about by about 25 years, and it is useful for purposes of comparison.  (It also gives away many times more money, and even establishes and funds a hospital - one which still exists in Florence.) 

Dante may have doted on Beatrice, but he married Gemma Donati.  Betrothed in early 1277, when Dante was only twelve, the two probably wed and set up their household in the mid to late 1280s.  Their families were neighbors, and even owned neighboring properties in the rural areas around Florence.  The two children (and also Beatrice) grew up living only a few doors apart.

Gemma's mother, the author of the will, was Maria.  We do not know the surname of the family she was born into, but she married messer Manetto Donati, a member of a prominent and powerful Florentine magnate family, who died sometime after 1304.  (The title "messer" means that Manetto was a knight; "ser" generally refers to a notary.)

Let's first take a look at what I knew about Maria before I studied her will:

I knew who she married (see above).  I knew that she had at least two children, Gemma and her brother Teruccio.  I knew that she lived at least until 1315.

And that's about it.

And now?

I know that she had two other sons, both already deceased in 1315, when she wrote the will, and that they both had children.  I know that by this time she was a widow.  I think that she had paid for the funeral of one of her sons, and was now absolving his heirs from that debt.  (My grasp of medieval Latin is not all it might be.)

I know how much money Dante and his brother owed on at least three debts for which Maria's husband had co-signed.  I know who got her bed, sheets, and tablecloths.  I know that she gave money to clothe paupers.  I know that she added a codicil three months later, threatening to disinherit Teruccio if he didn't stop nagging a certain Rinaldo to pay back a debt he owed to the late Manetto.

I think that in addition to Gemma she had another daughter who predeceased her, and that daughter in turn had a daughter.  (If this was not so, then the young woman is Maria's niece, and not her granddaughter.)  I know she knew how to price and set up a sale of land, and to arrange things so that her heirs would do things the way she wanted.  I know that she dictated the terms of this will to a notary named ser Opizzo di ser Pipino da Pistoia, and I know the names of the churchmen and laymen (seven of them) who served as her witnesses.

I know that this was done at the small church of Santa Maria in Campo, located near the cathedral and baptistery of Florence.  Santa Maria in Campo was the seat of activity for the diocese of Fiesole, a nearby town, because Pope Gregory IX had given the Florentine church to the Fiesolans to make up for some of the property Florence had taken from them.  I know that Maria requested burial in the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, though some other family members were interred in their local parish church and some in the cathedral.  Perhaps her husband had been buried in Santa Maria Novella, or perhaps she had an affinity for the Dominican mendicants. 

Santa Maria in Campo

And as a result of all this, as well as a couple of tangential forays into sorting out the different types of currency and reading a bit about charitable bequests, I feel as if I know Maria, at least a little.  I think she must have been devoted to her family, financially astute, no-nonsense, capable, fair, conventionally but not excessively religious, and probably quite up to the task of being a respected matriarch to an occasionally contentious family.  I think she was both generous and practical.

Her generosity:  at least some of those charitable bequests were probably legally mandated for anyone wanting to file a will in Florence, most notably her donation of 5 soldi toward building and maintaining Florence's city walls.  Others, such as 20 soldi for the benefit of poor persons incarcerated in the prison called Le Stinche (who were dependent on charity even for basic necessities) and the casting of a new bell for a church, may have been mandated, or may have been her own idea.  She made a donation (10 soldi) to the hospital Folco Portinari founded in his will (above).  But most of these are small amounts of money.  Her real generosity was directed toward her family.

She left Gemma 300 lire piccioli (a money of account, at this time worth approximately 150 gold florins if we use the exchange rate from 1296, which we will since it's the closest year to 1315 that I can find a rate for right now).  At the time Maria wrote her will, Dante had been exiled from Florence for over a decade, and there was no particular reason to believe he'd ever return (he didn't) and be in a position to pay his debts or help his family.  So Maria explicitly forgave Dante's family's obligation to pay some debts for which Manetto had co-signed, thereby transferring the responsibility to her heirs.  Those debts were for 480, 90, and 46 gold florins, respectively.  (The largest of these was not fully settled until 1332.)

Maria left her bed (shades of Shakespeare!), with all her sheets, coverlets, mattress, and a chest - probably the long low wooden chest that sat alongside the bed, to hold household items -  as well as two tablecloths and two towels to Bartola, daughter of Bartolo Scambagni.  So who was Bartola? 

In the Italian translation of the will, Bartola is described as Maria's "nipote", which can mean either niece or granddaughter.  The original Latin should clarify things (the word is "nepti", which my dictionary says means granddaughter), except that medieval notaries were perfectly capable of latinizing an Italian word, so we still are not sure.  If Bartola was a granddaughter, then Gemma must have had a sister.  Bartola's mother is not named; the example of Folco's will, above, suggests that it would have been usual for the testator to identify a sibling as such, so if Bartola's father Bartolo had been Maria's brother, she might well have said so.  It's a puzzle, and I don't know the answer.  I am guessing Bartola is a granddaughter, but I don't really know. 

In any case, Maria must have had a care for the young woman's welfare, because she also left her a tract of partially-wooded land outside Florence, worth about 150 lire (75 gold florins, if we apply the same rate of exchange).  We know its worth because she also offers her three official heirs (more about them next) an opportunity to purchase the property from Bartola during the first year after her (Maria's) death, if they so choose, at a price of 50 lire apiece.  The land is described very precisely:  it is bounded on one side by the property of Giuducci Donati, on another by the Giuochi heirs, on a third by Giani Aldobrandini, and on the fourth by a ditch.  You can't miss it.

Maria's bequests included money for her granddaughters (Lina, Giovanna, and Maria, daughters of the late Neri), presumably for dowries and quoted in gold florins, and also gifts of land to all of her grandsons.

Her remaining property was to be divided three ways:  her son Teruccio; her grandson Niccolo', the son of her deceased son Foresino; and the three sons of her deceased son Neri:  Gherardo, Manetto, and Silvestro, sharing equally in their father's third of the estate.

Those are the main features of Maria's will.  She also compensated her executors and paid a modest amount for masses to be said for her soul.  No doubt she  compensated the notary too:  ser Opizzo di ser Pipino da Pistoia, the son of another notary.

To do anything legal in Italy at that time, you had to have a notary.  Paintings of St. Francis's famous pact with the wolf that had been terrorizing the Umbrian town of Gubbio often include the notary, standing by to make an official record of the agreement.  No doubt once he had taken down the necessary information, he would then make three copies, get the wolf's pawprint on all of them, and file one with the city, keep one for his records, and hand the other to St. Francis (or maybe the wolf).

Notary at the ready

Maria's will reveals more details, but I think that what we have here is enough for us to begin to see this medieval woman as a human being, and to deepen, at least a little, our understanding of her world.  For that, it's well worth wading through legal jargon.

Images in this post:  Folco Portinari's will is printed in the book Chiesa di Santa Margherita detta Chiesa di Dante, by Giovangualberto Ceri and Roberto Tassi.  Other pictures are in the public domain.

Was There a Florence Before the Renaissance?

Florence. Could this iconic picture be anywhere else? This is how people think of Florence, the dazzling city of the Renaissance: its cathedral crowned with Brunelleschi's dome, the militant-looking Palazzo Vecchio, the shop-laden Ponte Vecchio spanning the Arno, museums full of glorious art, and magnificent churches and palazzi of gleaming marble facing spacious piazze.

But what if you're writing of an earlier Florence? What if you want your readers to erase from their mental picture that vast dome, the ornate marble facades, and those open spaces and replace them with smaller medieval churches, rusticated stone, houses in wood and brick, and tight urban spaces with everything crammed together and little space to get around? What if you want them to replace those dignified palazzi in their minds' eyes with buildings crowded together and bristling with jetties and balconies that jut out over the street, blocking out the light?

What if you want them to see the city not as the postcards show it, but as Dante would have seen it?

Here's a little exercise: Look at the following pictures of Florence, and try to guess how many of these sights Dante would have seen. Ready? Here goes.

The Duomo

Palazzo Vecchio

Giotto's Campanile

Ponte Vecchio

Loggia dei Lanzi

Michelangelo's David

Schlock shopping

All but that last one look pretty old, don't they? So how many of them would Dante have seen, before his exile in January 1302?

None. In fact, a market stall full of *stuff* might well have been the image that would have been most immediately recognizable to the poet. To be fair, he would have seen earlier versions of some of those structures. He probably saw the earliest beginnings of the Palazzo Vecchio (started in 1299) and of the cathedral (built, beginning in 1296, around the much smaller existing cathedral of Santa Reparata), and he certainly walked across an earlier version of the Ponte Vecchio. But to show you an example of how different Florence was then, here's a schematic comparing Dante's cathedral (Santa Reparata) with Arnolfo di Cambio's plan and with the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore as it is today.

Santa Reparata (red), compared to planned Cathedral (orange)
and actual Cathedral (yellow)

As for the others, he missed the campanile by 32-35 years, the current version of the Ponte Vecchio by 43 years, the Loggia dei Lanzi by 74-80 years, and The David (which, by the way, is nothing at all like The Donald) by 200 years. And that dome atop the Cathedral wasn't finished until 1436, or 134 years after Dante's exile.

So Dante's Florence wouldn't have looked like the picture at the top of this post. What would it have looked like? Here's an earlier picture:

Madonna del Bigallo (ca. 1342)

But even that is too modern. The cathedral is in place (though not the dome). Perhaps these earlier illustrations from Villani's Cronica capture the mood, if not an accurate representation:

And finally, we can gaze upon a building that was in place in Dante's day, and well before: the Baptistery, his "bel San Giovanni." (You can see it in the first Villani illustration above, as well as in the Madonna del Bigallo.) Here it is as it appears today:

Baptistery (San Giovanni)

Dante's Baptistery was surrounded by a graveyard, including many recycled Roman sarcophagi, and of course the buildings nearby were very different, most especially the neighboring cathedral. But this last image is one he would have recognized.

But how do you get readers to shake loose those firmly-ingrained images of Florence in the Renaissance? Put the Author's Note first and hope they read it? Preface all with a banner reading "Abandon all preconceptions, ye who enter here"? If anybody has any ideas on this, please share them. Are you writing about a place people know better from a different time? If you are, how did you deal with that?

Images in this post: Madonna del Bigallo, photo by Sailko, is US-Public Domain because it represents a two-dimensional image whose copyright has expired; Villani illustrations are US-PD (expired copyright); the schematic of the cathedral(s), also by Sailko, is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported; all other photos are by Tim Heath.