1346-1350

IN ROMAGNA—THE PLAGUE—THE DEATH OF FIAMMETTA

The few notices we have of Boccaccio's life at this time are almost entirely mere hints which enable us to assert that in such a year he was in such a place: they in no way help us to discover why he was there or what he was doing. Thus we are able to affirm that probably between 1344 and 1346, certainly in 1345, he was in Naples, but why he went there, unless it were for the sake of Fiammetta, we cannot suggest, for if Florence was a shambles, so was Naples. In much the same way we know that he was in Ravenna with Ostasio da Polenta not later than 1346; for in a letter Petrarch wrote him in 1365 he reminds him that he was in Ravenna "in the time of the grandfather of him who now rules there."[334] But why Boccaccio went to Ravenna, unless it were that, finding Naples too hot to hold him and Florence impossible, he took refuge with some relations he had there, or with the Polenta who had befriended Dante, we do not know. Nor do we know what he did there. It may be that during his stay in Naples he had already begun to think of writing a life of Dante; and hearing that the great poet had left a daughter Beatrice in Ravenna he set out to see her. This, however, is but the merest conjecture. Baldelli,[335] indeed, thinks that Boccaccio was at this time in Romagna as ambassador for Florence. For Ravenna was not the only place he visited about this time. If we may believe the third Eclogue, he was also the guest of Francesco degli Ordelaffi, the great enemy of the Church in Romagna and of King Robert the Wise.[336]

In the third Eclogue Palemone reproves Pamfilo for idly reposing in his cave while all around the woods ring with the cries of Testili infuriated against Fauno. Now Fauno, as Boccaccio tells us in his letter to Frate Martino da Signa,[337] where he explains some of the disguises of the Eclogues, is Francesco degli Ordelaffi, and Testili, although Boccaccio does not say so, is without doubt the Church, which had in fact no greater enemy in all Romagna than Ordelaffo, the usurper, if you will, of the ecclesiastical dominion, who held in contempt the many excommunications launched against him, replying always by an attack on some bishop, and by making continual war on the legates sent against him.[338]

Those cries, and the anger which causes them, fill the first part of the Eclogue. In the second part, it is clearly recounted how King Louis of Hungary came down into Italy to avenge the murder of his brother Andrew. Argo, the head shepherd worthy to be praised by all, has perforce abandoned the sheep.[339] Argo is Robert King of Naples,[340] wise as King Solomon, who follows the Muses. Alexis is Andrew of Hungary and Naples, who, made free of the woods by Argo, being careless and without caution, has been assailed by a she-wolf, pregnant and enraged, that is by Queen Giovanna; for here, at any rate, Boccaccio eagerly sides with the rabble and accepts the guilt of the Queen as fact. They say, he adds, that the woods held many cruel wild beasts and lions, and that Alexis met the death of Adonis. Now Tityrus, that is King Louis of Hungary, the brother of the dead Alexis, heard of this beyond Ister or the Danube, and set forth with innumerable hunters to punish the wolf and the lions.[341] And many Italians joined with Tityrus, says Boccaccio; among them was Faunus, although Testili threatened him and cursed him sore.[342]

What this means is obvious. The Pope, dismayed by the descent of King Louis into Italy,[343] having tried unsuccessfully in a thousand ways to turn him from his purpose, hindered him as best he could when he had once set out. The Vicar in Romagna, Astorgio di Duraforte, was ordered not to allow him to enter any city; a papal legate met him at Foligno, forbidding him on pain of excommunication to enter the Kingdom. In spite of the papal prohibition the signorotti of Romagna gladly entertained the king. Francesco Ordelaffi above all, as Villani tells us,[344] "bade him welcome, and went out to meet him in the contado of Bologna with two hundred horse and a thousand foot, all under arms. On December 13 he received him in ForlÌ with the greatest honour, furnishing his needs and those of all his people. And there they sojourned three days with much feasting and dancing of men and women, and the king made knights of the lord of ForlÌ and of his two sons."

This, however, did not content Ordelaffo, for with three hundred of his best horse he followed King Louis to help him in his undertaking on December 17, 1347.[345] Now Ordelaffo was not only a lover of the chase and of war, but in his way a humanist also, who, like Sigismondo Malatesta later, surrounded himself with poets and men of letters. Among his friends and counsellors was that Cecco da Meleto who was the friend of Petrarch and Boccaccio.[346] He was a great admirer of Petrarch, and merited the title Boccaccio gave him in that letter to Zanobi: Pieridum hospes gratissimus.If that letter is authentic,[347] then Boccaccio not only met King Louis of Hungary[348] at ForlÌ, but accompanied him and Francesco degli Ordelaffi into the Kingdom in the end of the year 1347 and the beginning of 1348.[349] His sentiments with regard to the murder and the war which followed it are clearly expressed there. He speaks of the King's arms as "arma justissima," and though it surprises us to find Boccaccio on that side, the letter only states clearly the sentiments already set down in allegory in the third and eighth Eclogues, and clearly but more discreetly stated in the De Casibus Virorum. In the fourth Eclogue, however, he commiserates the unhappy fate of Louis of Taranto, and hymns his return. Can it be that, at first persuaded of the Queen's guilt, he learned better later? We do not know. The whole affair of the murder, as of Boccaccio's actions at this time and of his sentiments with regard to it, are mysterious. If in the third and eighth Eclogues he tells us that Giovanna and Louis of Taranto were the real murderers of Andrew and wishes success to the arms of the avenger; in the fourth, fifth, and sixth Eclogues he sympathises with Louis and tells of the misery of the Kingdom after the descent of the Hungarians, and at last joyfully celebrates the return of Giovanna and her husband.[350] And this contradiction is emphasised by his actions. So far as we may follow him at all in these years, we see him in Naples horrified and disgusted at the state of affairs, leaving the city after the torture and death of the Catanesi and repairing to the courts of the Polenta and of the Ordelaffi, the enemies of the Church which held Giovanna innocent, and of the champions of the Church, Robert and Naples. Nor does he stop there, but apparently follows Ordelaffo in his descent with King Louis on Naples in the end of 1347 and the beginning of 1348. Yet in 1350 he was in Naples, and in 1352 he was celebrating the return of those against whom he had sided and written. The contradiction is evident, and we cannot explain it; but in a manner it gives us the reason why, when Frate Martino da Segna asked for an explanation and key to the Eclogues, he supplied him with one so meagre and imperfect.[351]

King Louis of Hungary, as we know, had not been many months in the Kingdom when he was forced to fly for his life, not by a mortal foe, but by the plague—the Black Death of 1348. It was brought to Italy by two Genoese galleys which had been trading in the East and had touched at Pisa. In April it had spread to Florence, a month later to Siena, before Midsummer all Italy was in its grip, and by the following year the greater part of Europe. No chronicler of the time in Italy but has more than enough to say of this "judgment of God"; and beside the wonderful description by Boccaccio in the introduction to the Decameron, there is scarcely a novelist who does not recount some tale or other concerning it.[352]

Perhaps Tuscany suffered most severely. "In our city of Florence," writes Matteo Villani,[353] for old Giovanni Villani perished in the pestilence—"in our city of Florence the plague became general in the beginning of April of the year 1348, and lasted till the beginning of September. And there died in the city, the contado, and the district, of both sexes and of all ages, three out of every five persons and more, for the poor suffered most, since it began with them who were utterly without aid, and more disposed by weakness to be attacked." Already Giovanni Villani had noted that in 1347 "there began in Florence and in the contado a sort of sickness which always follows famine and hunger, and this especially fell on women and children among the poor."[354] Giovanni Morelli[355] tells us that in Florence it was a common thing to see people laughing and talking together, and then in the same hour to see them dead. People fell down dead in the streets, and were left where they fell. "Many went mad and cast themselves into wells or out of windows into the Arno by reason of their great pain and horrible fear. Vast numbers died unnoticed in their houses, and were left to putrefy upon their beds. Many were buried before they were actually dead. Priests went bearing the cross to accompany a corpse to burial, and before they reached the church there were three or four biers following them. The grass grew in the streets. So completely were all obligations of blood and of affection forgotten, that men left their nearest and dearest to die alone rather than incur the danger of infection."[356] Nor was this all. Every sort of moral obligation was forgotten. Boccaccio more than hints at this, and we have evidence from many others. In the continual fear of death men and women often forgot everything but the present moment, which they were content to enjoy in each other's arms, even though they were strangers. Ah, poor souls! Amid the terror and loneliness of the summer, when the hot sunshine was more terrible than the darkness, which at least hid the shame, the disorder, and the visible horror, there was no lack of opportunities. All social barriers were gone, and rich and poor, bond and free, took what they might desire. It was the same in Siena; and if in Naples and the Romagna the deaths were less numerous, what are a few thousands when the lowest mortality was more than two in every five? People said the end of the world was come. In a sense they were right. It was the end of the Middle Age.

In Florence there perished among the rest Giovanni Villani, as I have said, and, as we may believe, Bice, the second wife of Boccaccino. In Naples it seems certain that Fiammetta died.

But where was Boccaccio during those dreadful five months of 1348? Was he with Fiammetta in Naples? Did he perhaps close her eyes and bear her to the grave? Or was he in Florence with his father, or in ForlÌ with the Ordelaffi? All we know is that he was not in Florence,[357] and it therefore seems certain that he was either in Naples, though we cannot say with Fiammetta, or in ForlÌ with Ordelaffo. Wherever he was, he did not escape the terrible sights that the plague brought in its train. He tells us of one of these which he himself had seen in the Introduction to the Decameron. On the whole, however, it seems likely that Boccaccio was in Naples at this time, and Baldelli even cites the letter to Franceschino de' Bardi, which he tells us bears the date of May 15, 1349,[358] and which was certainly written in Naples. Wherever he may have been, however, he was recalled to Florence by the death of his father, which befell not in the plague, for in July, 1348, he added a codicil to his Will,[359] but between that date and January, 1350, when, as Manni proved, Giovanni was appointed tutor to his brother Jacopo.[360]

In that year, 1350, Boccaccio was thirty-seven years old, and, save for his stepbrother Jacopo, he was now alone in the world. His father was dead, his stepbrother Francesco had long since been in the grave, and now Fiammetta also was departed. And those last ten years, which had robbed him of so much, of his youth also, had been among the most terrible that even Italy can ever have endured. He had seen Florence run with blood, and every sort of torture and horror stalk abroad in Naples. Rome, if he ventured there, can have appeared to him but little less than a shambles. Rienzi, with all that hope, had come and vanished like a ghost. The fairest province in Italy lay under the heel of a barbarian invader. And as though to add a necessary touch of irony to the tragedy that had passed before his eyes, he had taken refuge and found such peace as he enjoyed among the unruly and riotous signorotti and bandits of the Romagna, where properly peace was never found, but which amid the greater revolutions on the western side of the Apennines seemed perhaps peaceful enough. And then had come the pestilence, which cared nothing for right or wrong, innocent or guilty, young or old, bond or free, but slew all equally with an impartial and appalling cruelty that was like a vengeance—the vengeance of God, men said. In that vengeance, whether of God or of outraged nature, all that he loved or cared for had been lost to him. That he always loved his mother, dead so long ago, better than his father goes for nothing; that he loved his father as all men love him who has given them life is certain, he could not choose but love him. But in spite of the easy laugh, too like a sneer to be quite true or sincere, at the beginning of the Decameron, the wound he felt most nearly, that he never really forgot or quite forgave, was the death of Fiammetta, whom he had loved at first sight, with all the eagerness and fire of his youth, with all his heart, as we might say, ruthlessly keeping nothing back. From this time love meant nothing to him; there were other women doubtless in his life, mirages that almost lured him to despair or distraction, for he was always at the mercy of women; but the passion, if we may so call it, which henceforth fills his life is that of friendship—friendship for a great and a good man which, with all its comfort, left him still with that vain shadow, that emptiness in his heart—