The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic

Images of Hostility from Dante to Tasso

Andrea Moudarres

• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781644530016, 9781644530009
• eBook ISBN: 9781644530023
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Italian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In The Enemy in Italian Renaissance Epic, Andrea Moudarres examines influential works from the literary canon of the Italian Renaissance, arguing that hostility consistently arises from within political or religious entities. In Dante's Divina Commedia, Luigi Pulci's Morgante, Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata, enmity is portrayed as internal, taking the form of tyranny, betrayal, and civil discord. Moudarres reads these works in the context of historical and political patterns, demonstrating that there was little distinction between public and private spheres in Renaissance Italy and, thus, little differentiation between personal and political enemies.Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide byRutgers University Press.

CHAPTER 1

Between Fathers and Sons

Sowers of Enmity in Inferno 28

IN A CRUCIAL PASSAGE of the Monarchia, Dante formulates a political analogy between the individual and humankind that encapsulates “the guiding principle” [“principium inquisitionis directivum”] (1.3.2) of his quest for the ideal world government:

And in order to understand the subject of our inquiry clearly, we should be aware that nature produces the thumb for a definite end, that it makes the whole hand for another end, which is different from this, and the arm for yet another end, which is different from both of the others, and the whole man for still another end, which differs from all of the others. In just the same way, nature directs the individual man to one end, and the household to another, the neighborhood to another, and the city to another, and the kingdom to another. And, lastly, God eternal by his art, which is nature, brings into being the human race for an end, which is what is best for the whole (ibid.).¹

In Dante’s corporeal analogy, the differing purpose of each limb and organ, as compared to the role of the human body in its entirety, corresponds in turn to the end or goal of each political entity. Similarly different in purpose, these political entities (individual, household, neighborhood, city, kingdom) further combine to comprise the global empire. Thus, as the thumb is to the individual body, so the individual is to all humankind.

Aristotle outlined a similar progression from family to polis in book 1 of the Politics, where he asserts that “the first thing to arise is family” and the city-state “is the highest of all communities” (1252a).² But Dante expands Aristotle’s perspective to include the individual and the human race in its entirety. Although he begins with the traditional topos of the body politic developed by such authors as the Roman historian Livy and twelfth-century proto-humanist John of Salisbury as a starting point,³ Dante extends the image possibly by incorporating the microcosm–macrocosm parallel set forth, among others, by two contemporaries of John of Salisbury, the Platonist philosophers Bernardus Silvestris and Alan of Lille.⁴ Dante might have also thought of Thomas Aquinas’s reworking of similar ideas in the Summa Theologiae, where he states that “all men born of Adam may be considered as one man” and that “all who are members of one community are reputed as one body, and the whole community as one man” [“omnes homines qui nascuntur ex Adam, possunt considerari ut unus homo [. . .] omnes qui sunt unius communitatis, reputantur quasi unum corpus, et tota communitas quasi unus homo”] (S. T. I-II, q. 81, a. 1).⁵ As Dante knew well (and as I have noted in the Introduction), the idea of a “political community of the human race” [“universalis civilitatis humani generis”] (Mn. 1.2.8) ultimately traces its conceptual roots to the Stoic notion of cosmopolitanism and to early Christian theology, particularly Saint Paul’s letters. Here, it suffices to mention an example Dante certainly knew: Cicero’s use of the phrases “human society” and “common body of humanity” [“hominum communitate” and “humanitatis corpore”] (De officiis III, vi, 32).⁶

As he displays the analogy of disparate members operating in pursuit of their discrete goals, in Monarchia Dante further asserts that the human community should be governed by a single ruler, who would be called “monarch” or “emperor” (Mn. 1.5.4–10).⁷ The emperor’s uncontested authority and his commitment to the virtues of justice and charity (charitas) would create the necessary conditions for universal peace.⁸ And only under monarchical rule could humanity resemble God, model of the unity principle that underlies Dante’s politico-theological vision: “the human race is most like God when it is most nearly one. This is so because the true principle of unity exists only in him, for it is written, ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord thy God is one.’” [“genus humanum maxime Deo assimilatur quando maxime est unum: vera enim ratio unius in solo illo est; propter quod scriptum est: ‘Audi, Israel, Dominus Deus tuus unus est.’”] (1.8.3).⁹ Until unified under a monarch or an emperor, however, humankind will find itself perpetually at war.

Dante offers the most vivid account of this state of affairs in Inferno 28, a canto in which, as Jane Chance has suggested, the sowers of discord, reduced to their dismembered bodies, represent an inversion of the unity principle theorized in the Monarchia.¹⁰ These sinners (and their horrific punishments) exemplify how enmity can destroy any political or religious community. That Inferno 28 is not centered around one single protagonist, but rather portrays a series of variously famous figures with whom Virgil and the pilgrim interact, has led most scholars to neglect the overall structure of this canto and to focus on its individual characters, especially the Prophet Muhammad and the Provençal poet Bertran de Born. In this chapter, I will instead argue that the canto’s cohesiveness resides precisely in its movement from macro- to micro-political structures. It is also noteworthy that most, if not all, of the characters depicted in Inferno 28 incited father-son conflicts. In particular, I will show that Muslim rejection of the dogma of the Trinity—the central source of doctrinal dissent between Islam and Christianity throughout the Middle Ages—allows us to establish a connection that runs through the whole canto, linking Muhammad to de Born. Both sinners, in Dante’s presentation, broke the tie between father and son: in so doing, the former breached the principle on which the unity of the Catholic Church was founded, while the latter violated the norm of inheritance that undergirded the dynastic legitimacy of a temporal kingdom.

Notwithstanding the martial images in Inferno 28 and in several other cantos of the Commedia,¹¹ Giuseppe Mazzotta and, in his footsteps, Vittorio Montemaggi have eloquently described Dante as a poet of peace.¹² I hope to push their arguments one step further to address the following question: how does this understanding of Dante connect to his emphasis on the father-son relationship in Inferno 28? This chapter will argue that Dante’s conception of war and peace revolves around the nexus of this central relationship. Indeed, Dante hints in book 1 of the Convivio that the bond between father and son epitomizes the most intimate form of human love: “Tanto è la cosa più prossima quanto, di tutte le cose del suo genere, altrui è più unita: onde di tutti li uomini lo figlio è più prossimo al padre [. . .] La sopra detta cagione, cioè d’essere più unito quello ch’è solo prima in tutta la mente, mosse la consuetudine della gente, che fanno li primogeniti succedere solamente, sì come [più] propinqui, e perché più propinqui più amati” [“A thing is nearest to the extent that of all things of its kind it is most closely related to another thing; thus of all men the son is nearest to the father (. . .) The cause mentioned above, namely that that is more closely related which first exists alone in all the mind, induced people to adopt the custom of making the firstborn sole heirs, since they are the closest, and, because the closest, the most loved”] (1.12.4–7).¹³

I should like to add that I do not intend to undertake a general discussion of the Trinity or of the father figures in Dante’s works, nor to reconstruct the poet’s relationships with his own father or his children.¹⁴ I specifically want to address the issue of father-son hostility in Inferno 28, as well as the larger intellectual framework underlying this canto. In my conclusion, I will briefly turn to the last chapter of the Monarchia—where Dante recommends that the emperor demonstrate toward the pope the same reverence a firstborn son should show toward his father (3.15)—to suggest that Dante saw himself as the poet and prophet of peace who could heal the rift between secular and spiritual authorities, a rift that he considered the main cause of the world’s disorder. My analysis of Inferno 28 is comprised of three main sections reflecting the telescopic perspective that, as noted in the Introduction, helps inform the structure of this book. The first section addresses global conflict through Dante’s depiction of Muhammad as a religious schismatic; the second focuses on strife within a commonwealth by analyzing Dante’s portrait of Curio, one of Caesar’s lieutenants in the Roman civil war; and the third revisits Dante’s depiction of Bertran de Born and his dismembering punishment as an opportunity to probe the metaphorical political unit formed by a king and his firstborn son. In each of these sections we shall see that, as I argue throughout the book, enmity arises from within the body politic. In Inferno 28, enmity is mirrored in the dismemberment of each sinner’s body.

Muhammad’s Universal Schism

After leaving Guido da Montefeltro among the counselors of fraud in Inferno 27, Dante and Virgil move on to the ninth bolgia (ditch). Here, they come upon the sowers of discord, sinners whose words and deeds caused divisions within their political or religious institutions. The sowers of discord are punished by a sword-wielding devil who attacks them repeatedly, slashing their “bodies” whenever they near him. As the sinners roam through the bolgia, their injuries heal, preparing them for further sword attacks in an eternal cycle of carnage.¹⁵ The sight of their punishment is so gruesome that the poet professes his inability to narrate adequately the horror of this bolgia, which more than any other resembles a chaotic battlefield. Not even the litany of wars evoked in the canto’s opening tercets, Dante claims, could fully represent the wounds and mutilated limbs he witnessed among these sinners:

Chi poria mai pur con parole sciolte

dicer del sangue e de le piaghe a pieno

ch’i’ ora vidi, per narrar più volte?

Ogne lingua per certo verria meno

per lo nostro sermone e per la mente

c’hanno a tanto comprender poco seno.

S’el s’aunasse ancor tutta la gente

che già, in su la fortunata terra

di Puglia, fu del suo sangue dolente

per li Troiani e per la lunga guerra

che de l’anella fé sì alte spoglie,

come Livïo scrive che non erra,

con quella che sentio di colpi doglie

per contrastare a Ruberto Guiscardo;

e l’altra il cui ossame ancor s’accoglie

a Ceperan, là dove fu bugiardo

ciascun Pugliese, e là da Tagliacozzo,

dove sanz’arme vinse il vecchio Alardo;

e qual forato suo membro e qual mozzo

mostrasse, d’aequar sarebbe nulla

il modo de la nona bolgia sozzo. (28.1–21)

[Who could ever, even with unbound words, tell in full of the blood and wounds that I now saw, though he should narrate them many times? Every tongue would surely fail, because our language and our memory have little capacity to comprehend so much. If one gathered together all the people who ever, on the travailed earth of Apulia, groaning poured forth their blood on account of the Trojans, and in the long war that took such heaped spoils of rings, as Livy writes, who does not err, and the people who suffered wounds when resisting Robert Guiscard, and the others whose bones are still being collected at Ceperano, where every Apulian was a liar, and at Tagliacozzo where old Elard won without arms; and this one showed his perforated, this one his truncated member, it would be nothing to equal the wretched mode of the ninth pocket.]

To reinforce his assertion that no author could successfully describe in words the violence of the ninth ditch, Dante fills his initial disclaimer (in rhetorical terms, the praeteritio) with literary allusions. He mirrors the accumulation of battles and body parts that characterizes the whole canto in a corresponding buildup of textual fragments from classical and medieval sources, including Ovid’s Tristia, Virgil’s Aeneid, Livy’s Ab urbe condita, Dante’s own Convivio, and—most significantly, in light of the canto’s conclusion—Bertran de Born’s poem “Si tuit li dol.”¹⁶

The pilgrim’s first encounter in this bolgia is with the Prophet Muhammad, founder of Islam. The disturbing portrait of Muhammad in Inferno 28 has drawn increased scholarly attention in recent years for its resonance with the current political interest in the relationship between Islam and the West. The 2007 issue of Dante Studies, for example, was entirely dedicated to the topic of Dante and Islam. This recent scholarship has effectively highlighted important aspects of Dante’s representation of the Prophet and has examined some of the sources that Dante might have considered in crafting the episode.¹⁷ Yet Dante’s scatological description of Muhammad has not been fully probed in relation to its theological background, particularly the Muslim rejection of the Trinitarian dogma. As I examine Dante’s Muhammad in relation to this key point of dichotomy between Islam and Christian doctrine, I will focus especially on Peter the Venerable and Riccoldo da Montecroce, two leading anti-Islamic polemicists of the Middle Ages. Both writers adopted excremental imagery to describe Islam as a collection of ancient heresies. But before delving into the relevant passages of Inferno 28, let us first outline the doctrinal framework that underlies Dante’s representation of Muhammad as a sower of discord.

As I have noted elsewhere,¹⁸ Church Fathers such as Saint Jerome and Saint Augustine, and medieval encyclopedists such as Isidore of Seville, saw only a subtle difference between heresy and schism. While heresy is traditionally described as a sin against faith (a sin that pervert...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Between Fathers and Sons: Sowers of Enmity in Inferno 28
• 2. The Enemy within the Walls: Treachery, Pride, and Civil Strife in Pulci’s Morgante
• 3. The Enemy as the Self: Madness and Tyranny in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso
• 4. The Geography of the Enemy: Christian and Islamic Empires from the Fall of Constantinople to Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata
• Epilogue: The Mirror of the Friend?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index