Of the three great writers who open the literature of the modern world, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, it is perhaps the last who has the greatest significance in the history of culture, of civilisation. Without the profound mysticism of Dante or the extraordinary sweetness and perfection of Petrarch, he was more complete than either of them, full at once of laughter and humility and love—that humanism which in him alone in his day was really a part of life. For him the centre of things was not to be found in the next world but in this. To the Divine Comedy he seems to oppose the Human Comedy, the Decameron, in which he not only created for Italy a classic prose, but gave the world an ever-living book full of men and women and the courtesy, generosity, and humanity of life, which was to be one of the greater literary influences in Europe during some three hundred years.

In England certainly, and indeed almost everywhere to-day, the name of Boccaccio stands for this book, the Decameron. Yet the volumes he wrote during a laborious and really uneventful life are very numerous both in verse and prose, in Latin and in Tuscan. He began to write before he was twenty years old, and he scarcely stayed his hand till he lay dying alone in Certaldo in 1375. That the Decameron, his greatest and most various work, should be that by which he is most widely known, is not remarkable; it is strange, however, that of all his works it should be the only one that is quite impersonal. His earlier romances are without exception romans À clef; under a transparent veil of allegory he tells us eagerly, even passionately, of himself, his love, his sufferings, his agony and delight. He too has confessed himself with the same intensity as St. Augustine; but we refuse to hear him. Over and over again he tells his story. One may follow it exactly from point to point, divide it into periods, name the beginning and the ending of his love, his enthusiasms, his youth and ripeness; yet we mark him not, but perhaps wisely reach down the Decameron from our shelves and silence him with his own words; for in the Decameron he is almost as completely hidden from us as is Shakespeare in his plays. And yet for all this, there is a profound unity in his work, which, if we can but see it, makes of all his books just the acts of a drama, the drama of his life. The Decameron is already to be found in essence in the Filocolo, as is the bitter melancholy of the Corbaccio, its mad folly too, and the sweetness of the songs. For the truth about Boccaccio can be summed up in one statement almost, he was a poet before all things, not only because he could express himself in perfect verse, nor even because of the grace and beauty of all his writing, his gifts of sentiment and sensibility, but because he is an interpreter of nature and of man, who knows that poetry is holy and sacred, and that one must accept it thankfully in fear and humility.

He was the most human writer the Renaissance produced in Italy; and since his life was so full and eager in its desire for knowledge, it is strange that nothing of any serious account has been written concerning him in English,[2] and this is even unaccountable when we remember how eagerly many among our greater poets have been his debtors. Though for no other cause yet for this it will be well to try here with what success the allegory of his life may be solved, the facts set in order, and the significance of his work expressed.

But no study of Boccaccio can be successful, or in any sense complete, without a glance at the period which produced him, and especially at those eight-and-forty years so confused in Italy, and not in Italy alone, which lie between the death of Frederic II and the birth of Dante in 1265 and the death of Henry VII and the birth of Boccaccio in 1313. This period, not less significant in the general history of Italy than in the history of her literature, begins with the fall of the Empire, its failure, that is, as the sum or at least the head, of Christendom; it includes the fall of the medieval Papacy in 1303 and the abandonment of the Eternal City, the exile of the Popes. These were years of immense disaster in which we see the passing of a whole civilisation and the birth of the modern world.

The Papacy had destroyed the Empire but had failed to establish itself in its place. It threatened a new tyranny, but already weapons were being forged to combat it, and little by little the Papal view of the world, of government, was to be met by an appeal to history, to the criticism of history, and to those political principles which were to be the result of that criticism. In this work both Petrarch and Boccaccio bear a noble part.

If we turn to the history of Florence we shall find that the last thirty-five years of the thirteenth century had been, perhaps, the happiest in her history. From the triumph of the Guelfs at Benevento to the quarrel of Neri and Bianchi she was at least at peace with herself, while in her relations with her sister cities she became the greatest power in Tuscany. Art and Poetry flourished within her walls. Dante, Cavalcanti, Giotto, the Pisani, and Arnolfo di Cambio were busy with their work, and the great churches we know so well, the beautiful palaces of the officers of the Republic were then built with pride and enthusiasm. In 1289, the last sparks, as it was thought, of Tuscan Ghibellinism had been stamped out at Campaldino. There followed the old quarrel and Dante's exile.

The Ghibellines were no more, but the Grandi, those Guelf magnates who had done so well at Campaldino, hating the burgher rule as bitterly as the old nobility had done, began to exert themselves. In the very year of the great battle we find that the peasants of the contrada were enfranchised to combat them. In 1293 the famous Ordinances of Justice which excluded them from office were passed, and the Gonfaloniere was appointed to enforce these laws against them. A temporary alliance of burghers and Grandi in 1295 drove Giano della Bella, the hero of these reforms, into exile, and the government remained in the hands of the Grandi. That year saw Dante's entrance into public life.

The quarrel thus begun came to crisis in 1300, the famous year of the jubilee, when Boniface VIII seemed to hold the whole world in his hands. The dissensions in Florence had not been lost upon the Pope, who, apparently hoping to repress the Republic altogether and win the obedience of the city, intrigued with the Neri, those among the magnates who, unlike their fellows of the Bianchi faction, among whom Dante is the most conspicuous figure, refused to admit the Ordinances of Justice, even in their revised form, and wished for the tyrannical rule of the old Parte Guelfa. Already, as was well known, the Pope was pressing Albert of Austria for a renunciation of the Imperial claim over Tuscany in favour of the Holy See; and Florence, finally distracted now by the quarrels of Neri and Bianchi, seemed to be in imminent danger of losing her liberty. It became necessary to redress the balance of power, destroyed at Benevento, by an attempt to recreate the Empire. This was the real work of the Bianchi—their solution of the greatest question of their time. The actual solution was to come, however, from their opponents: not from the leaders of the Neri it is true, but from the people themselves. These leaders were but tyrants in disguise: they served any cause to establish their own lordship. Corso Donati, for instance, the head and front of the Neri, was of an old Ghibelline stock, yet he trafficked with the Pope, not for the Church, we may be sure, nor to give Florence to the Holy See, but that he might himself rule the city. Nor did the Pope disdain to use him. Alarmed even in Rome by the republican sentiments of the populace, who wished to rule themselves even as the Florentines, he desired above all things to bring Florence into his power. On May 15, 1300, the Pope despatched a letter to the Bishop of Florence, in which he asked: "Is not the Pontiff supreme lord over all, and particularly over Florence, which for especial reasons is bound to be subject to him? Do not emperors and kings of the Romans yield submission to us, yet are they not superior to Florence? During the vacancy of the Imperial throne, did not the Holy See appoint King Charles of Anjou Vicar-General of Tuscany?" Thus as Villari says, "in a rising crescendo," he threatened the Florentines that he would "not only launch his interdict and excommunication against them, but inflict the utmost injury on their citizens and merchants, cause their property to be pillaged and confiscated in all parts of the world, and release all their debtors from the duty of payment." The Neri, fearing the people might, with that impudent claim before them, side with the Bianchi, induced the Pope to send the Cardinal of Acquasparta to arrange a pacification. But though the city gave him many promises, she would not invest him with the Balia.

Meanwhile the Pope, set on the subjection of Florence, without counting the cost, urged Charles of Valois, the brother of Philip IV of France, to march into Tuscany. Nor was Charles of Anjou, King of Naples, less eager to have his aid against the Sicilians. Joined by the exiles in November, 1301, he entered Florence with some 1200 horse, part French, part Italian. His mission was to crush the Bianchi and the people, and to uplift the Neri. He came at the request of the Pope, and, so far as he himself was interested, for booty; yet he swore in S. Maria Novella to keep the peace. On that same day, November 5, Corso Donati entered the city with an armed force. The French joined in the riot, the Priors were driven from their new palace, and the city sacked by the soldiers with the help of the Neri. The Pope had succeeded in substituting black for white, that was all. A new "peace-maker" failed altogether. The proscription, already begun, continued, and before January 27, 1302, Dante went into exile.

But if the Pope had failed to do more than establish the Neri in the government of Florence, Corso Donati had failed also; he had not won the lordship of the city. He tried again, splitting the Neri into two factions, and Florence was not to possess herself in peace till his death in a last attempt in 1308. It was during these years so full of disaster that Petrarch was born at Arezzo on July 20, 1304.

The medieval idea of the Papacy has been expressed once and for all by S. Thomas Aquinas. In his mind so profoundly theological, abhorring variety, the world was to be governed, if at all, by a constitutional monarchy, strong enough to enforce order, but not to establish a tyranny. The first object of every Christian society, the salvation of the soul, was to be achieved by the priest under the absolute rule of the Pope. Under the old dispensation, as he admitted, the priest had been subject to the king, but under the new dispensation the king was subject to the priest in matters touching the law of Christ. Thus if the king were careless of religion or schismatic or heretical, the Church might deprive him of his power and by excommunication release his subjects from their allegiance. This supreme authority is vested in the Pope, who is infallible, and from whom there can be no appeal at any time as to what is to be believed or what condemned.

Before these claims the Empire had fallen in 1266; but a reaction, the result of the success of Boniface, soon set in, and we find the most perfect expression of the revived and reformed claims of the Empire in the De Monarchia, which Dante Alighieri wrote in exile. Dante's Empire was by no means merely a revival of what the Imperial idea had become in its conflicts with the Holy See. It was nevertheless as hopeless an anachronism as the dream of S. Thomas Aquinas, and even less clairvoyant of the future, for it disregarded altogether the spirit to which the future belonged, the spirit of nationalism. With a mind as theological as S. Thomas's, Dante hated variety not less than he, and rather than tolerate the confusion of the innumerable cities and communes into which Italy was divided, where there was life, he would have thrust the world back into Feudalism and the Middle Age from which it was already emerging, he would have established over all Italy a German king. He was dreaming of the Roman Empire. The end for which we must strive, he would seem to say in the De Monarchia, that epitaph of the Empire, is unity; let that be granted. And since that is the end of all society, how shall we obtain it but by obedience to one head—the Emperor. And this Empire—so easy is it to mistake the past for the future—belongs of right to the Roman people who won it long ago. And what they won Christ sanctioned, for He was born within its confines. And yet again He recognised it, for He received at the hands of a Roman judge the sentence under which He bore our sorrows. Nor does the Empire derive from the Pope or through the Pope, but from God immediately; for the foundation of the Church is Christ, but the Empire was before the Church. Yet let CÆsar be reverent to Peter, as the first-born should be reverent to his father.

So much for the philosophical defence of the reaction. It is rarely, after all, that a rigidly logical conception of society, of the State, has any existence in reality. The future, as we know, lay with quite another theory. Yet which of us to-day but in his secret heart dreams ever more hopefully of a new unity, that is indeed no stranger to the old, but in fact the resurrection of the Empire, of Christendom, in which alone we can be one? After all, is it not now as then, the noblest hope that can inspire our lives?

Already, before the death of Boniface VIII, the last Pope to die in Rome for nearly a hundred years, Philip IV of France had asserted the rights of the State against the claims of the Papal monarchy. The future was his, and his success was to be so great that for more than seventy years the Papacy was altogether under the influence of France, the first of the great nations of the Continent to become self-conscious. Thus when Boniface died broken-hearted in 1303, it was the medieval Papacy which lay in state beside him. Two years later, after the pathetic and ineffectual nine months' reign of Benedict XI, Clement V, Bertrand de Goth, an Aquitanian, was elected, and, like his predecessor, fearful before the turbulent Romans and the confusion of Italy, in 1305 fled away to Avignon, which King Charles II of Naples held as Count of Anjou on the borders of the French kingdom. The Papacy had abandoned the Eternal City and had come under the influence of the French king. Yet in spite of every disaster the Pope and the Emperor remained the opposed centres of European affairs. No one as yet realised the possibility of doing without them, but each power sought rather to use them for its own end. In this political struggle France held the best position; the Pope was a Frenchman and so her son; there remained as spoil, the Empire.

On May 1, 1308, Albert of Hapsburg had been murdered by his nephew; the election of a new King of the Romans, the future Emperor, fell pat to Philip's ambitions. He immediately supported the candidature of his brother, Charles of Valois; but in this he reckoned without the Pope, who with the Angevins in Naples and himself in Avignon had no wish to see the Empire also in the hands of France. His position forbade him openly to oppose Philip, but secretly he gave his support to Henry of Luxemburg, who was elected as Henry VII on 27 November, 1308.

A German educated in France, the lord of a petty state, Henry, in spite of the nobility of his nature, of which we hear so much and see so little, had but feeble Latin sympathies and no real power of his own. He dreamed of the universal empire like a true German, believing that the feudal union of Germany and Italy which had always been impossible was the future of the world. With this mirage before his eyes he raised the imperial flag and set out southward; and for a moment it seemed as though the stars had stopped in their courses.

For he was by no means alone in his dream. Every disappointed ambition in Italy, noble and ignoble, greeted him with a feverish enthusiasm. The Bianchi and the exiled Ghibellines joined hands, enormous hopes were conceived, and in his triumph private vengeance and public hate thought to find achievement. But when Henry entered Italy in September, 1310, he soon found he had reckoned without the Florentines, who had called together the Guelf cities, and, leaguing themselves with King Robert the Wise of Naples, formed what was, in fact, an Italian confederation to defend freedom and their common independence. It is true that in these acts Florence thought only of present safety: she was both right and fortunate; but in allying herself with King Robert and espousing the cause of France and the Pope she contributed to that triumph which was to prove for centuries the most dangerous of all to Italian liberty and independence.

Bitter with loneliness, imprisoned in the adamant of his personality, Dante, amid the rocks of the Casentino, hurled his curses on Florence, and not on Florence alone. Is there, I wonder, anything but hatred and abuse of the cities of his Fatherland in all his work? He has judged his country as God Himself will not judge it, and he kept his anger for ever. In the astonishing and disgraceful letters written in the spring of 1311 he urged Henry to attack his native city. Hailing this German king—and the Florentines would call him nothing else—as the "Lamb of God Who taketh away the sins of the world," he asks him: "What may it profit thee to subdue Cremona? Brescia, Bergamo, and other cities will continue to revolt until thou hast extirpated the root of the evil. Art thou ignorant perhaps where the rank fox lurketh in hiding? The beast drinketh from the Arno, polluting the waters with its jaws. Knowest thou not that Florence is its name?..." Henry, however, took no heed as yet of that terrible voice crying in the wilderness. He entered Rome before attacking Florence, in May, 1312. He easily won the Capitol, but was fiercely opposed by King Robert when he tried to reach S. Peter's to win the imperial crown, and from Castel S. Angelo he was repulsed with heavy loss. The Roman people, however, presently took his part, and by threats and violence compelled the bishops to crown him in the Lateran on June 29.

If Rome greeted him, however, she was alone. Florence remained the head and front of the unbroken League. Those scelestissimi Florentini, as Dante calls them, still refused to hail him as anything but Enemy, German King and Tyrant. The fine political sagacity of Florence, which makes hers the only history worth reading among the cities of Central Italy, was never shown to better advantage or more fully justified in the event than when she dared to send her greatest son into exile and to proclaim his Emperor "German king" and "enemy." "Remember," she wrote to the people of Brescia, "that the safety of all Italy and all the Guelfs depends on your resistance. The Latins must always hold the Germans in enmity, seeing that they are opposed in act and deed, in manners and soul; not only is it impossible to serve, but even to hold any intercourse with that race."

At last the Emperor decided to follow Dante's advice and "slay the new Goliath." This was easier to talk of in the Casentino than to do. From mid-September to the end of October the Imperial army lay about the City of the Lily, never daring to attack. Then the Emperor raised the siege and set out for Poggibonsi, his health ruined by anxiety and hardship, and his army, as was always the case both before and since, broken and spoiled by the Italian summer. He spent the winter and spring between Poggibonsi and Pisa, then with some idea of retrieving all by invading Naples, he set off southward in August to meet his death on S. Bartholomew's Day, poisoned, as some say, at Buonconvento.

And Florence announced to her allies: "Jesus Christ hath procured the death of that most haughty tyrant Henry, late Count of Luxemburg, whom the rebellious persecutors of the Church and the treacherous foes of ourselves and you call King of the Romans and Emperor."

In the very year of Henry's death, as we suppose, Boccaccio was born in Paris. The Middle Age had come to an end. The morning of the Renaissance had already broken on the world.