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Ronald L. Martinez
Dante between Hope
and Despair: The Tradition
of Lamentations
in the Divine Comedy
During the interfaith service conducted at the Washington
Cathedral September , , Rabbi Joshua Haberman read verses
from the book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to the
prophet Jeremiah. As the book laments the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar in  b.c., its choice as a text after September  was
highly pertinent; chapter three, from which Rabbi Haberman’s
excerpts were taken, offers some of the few expressions of hope in
a book that primarily expresses grief. In addition to the verses read
on that occasion, book three includes a cluster of sentiments that
have been widely shared in the United States as the nation has grappled with the meaning of the disaster. Americans have felt dismay at
the savage blow inflicted by shadowy enemies, and experienced the
problematic reflex desiring that vindication, even revenge, which a
God involved in history might be entreated to compass on behalf of
those believing in Him; but they have also engaged in anguished
speculation on why such a fell stroke was visited upon the nation,
and in some few cases reflected on where our own responsibilities
might lie in provoking such wrath. The text of Lamentations 
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strikes all these notes: astonishment at the magnitude of the losses
(v. –), penitential sorrow (v. ), a mixture of doubt that God
may have turned away his face (v. –) with confidence that divine
assistance is forthcoming (vv. –, ), that vindication will be
secured (v. ). Such a use of the text of Lamentations to reflect, filter, and assuage catastrophe has of course a long history; in this
paper I will discuss the use made of Lamentations by Dante Alighieri,
poet and citizen of Florence. Of the special fitness of Dante for participating in this history there can be little doubt. Of the major long
poems of the Western traditions Dante’s Comedy is the most immediately and concretely embedded in the historical context that
accompanied its composition; for this reason, Dante is perhaps the
foremost poet in the West of a history that is lived and understood
as a contest in progress, an agon in the Greek sense, through which
a providential order struggles to assert itself.
In Jewish worship, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar and
the Babylonians—as well as the destruction of the city and temple
by the Roman emperor Titus, in  A.D.—are collectively lamented on the th of Ab, corresponding to a date in late July or August
on the Gregorian calendar. This was, according to the Talmud, the
anniversary of both destructions of the Temple and the city.1 In
Dante’s day, Christians also commemorated the fall of Jerusalem: the
th or th Sunday after Pentecost was “Destruction of Jerusalem
Sunday,” but was an occasion of mourning only in a very qualified
sense, as for medieval Christians the destruction of Jerusalem by the
Roman legions was held to be divine vengeance for the crucifixion
of Christ by the Jews of Jerusalem, a view Dante explicitly shared.2
But a liturgy of mourning drawing on Lamentations was prominent
in Catholic liturgy of the late thirteenth century, as it is still: this is
the use of chanted extracts from all five chapters of Lamentations
distributed over the first Nocturns of the Matins office on Thursday,
Friday, and Saturday of Holy week.3 In close association with the
extinguishing of candles, the service of tenebrae, the chanting of
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lamentations in the  
Lamentations during the deliberately truncated liturgies of these
offices testifies to the mourning of the congregation for the death of
Christ;4 as rendered liturgically, the extracts also impart a strong
penitential theme, as each concludes with a refrain (adapted from
Hosea :) calling on Jerusalem to return to her lord. Another
implication of the liturgical use of these extracts is that certain passages, such as Lam. :—“O you who pass by, attend and see, is
there any sorrow like unto my sorrow”—spoken, in the biblical
text, by the personified city of Jerusalem herself—are, when used as
liturgical verses and responses, clearly understood as spoken by
Christ on the cross: and indeed in late medieval devotional texts on
the passion this verse is typically ascribed to the crucified Christ.5
In addition to its prominent liturgical use, the book of Lamentations had a rich tradition of commentary; for my purposes, this tradition begins with the great Carolingian revival in the ninth century
and culminates with commentaries by major scholastics of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries—the Dominicans Albertus
Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Hugh of St. Cher, and the Franciscans
John Pecham and Peter John Olivi.6 In the more elaborate of these
commentaries, the ancient and somewhat daunting practice of
uncovering three and even four distinct levels of meaning in the
text of the Bible is applied to explaining the fall of Jerusalem. The
first level is historical, and this is manifested in Jerusalem twice
besieged and destroyed, by Nebuchadnezzar and by the Roman
Emperor Titus. Another level of meaning, the moral, treats
Jerusalem as the human soul, alienated from God and surrounded by
hostile enemies (such as the vices, or Satan himself). The greatest
interpretive virtuosity is reserved for the allegorical level, by virtue
of which Jerusalem can represent both Christ, the head, and the
Church, the body of the mystical community of the faithful. To give
an example of all the possibilities: a line such as Lam. : might be
taken as spoken by the church besieged by enemies—persecutors or
heretics; or it might be taken as spoken by Christ, suffering on the
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cross; or it might be taken as spoken by the Synagogue, the rejected
faith community in the medieval Christian view. In this case the allegorical and the historical sense would coincide, as the destruction of
the Temple and a diaspora of the Jewish people did in fact ensue
upon the Roman siege of  A.D.
And there is a fourth level of meaning that medieval interpreters
discerned as implied by Lamentations: this is the so-called anagogical meaning, which means that it concerns the transition from this
life to the next. This meaning can be found by expanding the frame
of reference and juxtaposing the sorrowful book of Lamentations to
its opposite number among poetic texts of the Bible: the Canticle of
Canticles. If, these interpreters reasoned, Lamentations furnishes
sorrowful dirges suited to life in this “vale of tears,” the nuptial songs
of Canticles suitably accompany the joy of restoration, after bodily
death, to the homeland of heaven. The implication of this view for
the personified Jerusalem is that however desperate her present
case, she can hope for a future reconciliation with her Spouse—
which, in the standard interpretation of the Song of Songs, was of
course none other than Christ.7 What is suggestive about this dimension of the meaning of Lamentations is that it generalizes the text
into a theory of all mortal life on pilgrimage toward its final destination: and this generality makes it peculiarly suitable for adaptation
to Dante’s poem of a pilgrim on a journey from the sorrows of the
present life to the joys of heaven; or as it is put in the poem, from the
fractious city of Florence, corrupted by pursuit of the almighty
florin, to “a people just and hale” (Paradiso .).
For this and for other reasons that will presently emerge, Dante’s
interest in the text of Lamentations was lifelong. He might well have
wished it otherwise, for his uses of the book mark the profound private and public tragedies of his life. Three examples will graph this
trend. When about thirty years old, Dante wrote the Vita nova, or
“New Life,” a prose narrative, including carefully ordered lyric
poems, about the dramatic effects on his life resulting from his
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lamentations in the  
youthful encounter with Beatrice. When Beatrice died on  June
, Dante marked her death in his book with a citation of Lam.
:, “How doth the city sit solitary, she that was full of people; how
is the mistress of provinces become as a widow.” The announcement is especially dramatic in that it interrupts the composition of
a poem already in progress and reorganizes how the book is put
together from that point forward: in short, the book is subjected to
a shake-up of its arrangement proportional to the impact of Beatrice’s death on the author.8 Not many years later, probably about
, when Dante had been in exile from Florence for several years,
he wrote an ode in which the abstract figure of Justice is personified
as a woman in abject mourning, cast out from the city that had
unjustly condemned the poet and forced him into exile: again the
text of Lamentations nourishes the poet’s inspiration.9 Late in life,
in , Dante again turned to the first line of Lamentations to
begin a letter to a group of six Italian cardinals preparing to elect a
new pope after the death of Clement V. In this letter, Lam. :
announces not the poet’s sorrow for Beatrice, but for the state of the
Church. In  Dante found himself contemplating a Rome deprived of both chief sources of authority, the Holy Roman Emperor—
who had died suddenly in  when attempting to reassert his
authority in northern Italy—and the pope, who in the person of
Clement V had vacated Rome in  and installed himself in Avignon, in southern France, by , sending the Church into what
many felt was a new Babylonian captivity. Such a Rome, deprived of
both her spouses, had thus assumed the role of widowed Jerusalem.
As Dante puts it in his Latin letter, she was “destitute of both her
lights,” and I do not think it forced to see in this phrase the image of
a head—Rome was after all caput mundi, the head of the world—
with both its eyes put out.10
Beyond the relevance of Lamentations to a world where, from
Dante’s perspective, authority had been tragically and unjustly withdrawn from Rome, there are at least two additional reasons why
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Dante—as a poet, as an admirer of ancient Rome, and as a son of the
Church—might have been interested in representing his experience
through the text attributed to Jeremiah. First: as I mentioned earlier, Lamentations is a series of dirges; in fact, from the Glossa ordinaria
of the twelfth-century Renaissance to the Scholastics, the text of
Lamentations was presented not just as a collection of sorrowful canticles, but as an exhaustive treasury of poetic and rhetorical devices
that could be used to move an audience to both pity and furious
indignation. These devices were labeled and listed using terminology straight out of the rhetorical manuals of antiquity, such as
Cicero’s De inventione: in the examples I gave above from the text, the
personification, rather prosopopeia of the widow Jerusalem and her
address, or rather apostrophe of witnesses, are precisely instances of
these devices.11
The second reason Dante had Lamentations in mind when he
began to make his reputation as a writer after Beatrice’s death, is
that with the fall of Acre, the last Christian outpost in Palestine, to
the Mamluk Sultan Al-Ashraf in , public laments for Jerusalem
and the Holy Land, in the form of papal bulls, royal edicts, proposals for crusade, crusade excitatoria, and lyric poetry, returned in
force to European discourse.12 Growing up, Dante would have
heard of the short-lived capture of Damietta, in Egypt, by King
Louis IX of France in , and later of the disastrous Eighth Crusade, led again by Saint Louis, which culminated with his death at
Tunis in . It is even possible that Dante associated the first
anniversary of the death of Beatrice, that is,  June , with the
news of the fall of Acre, besieged in May and June , although
news of its capture could not have reached Italy until some weeks
later, even carried by the quickest of Venetian galleys. At which,
according to the chronicler Ludolph of Suchem, the entire Christian Mediterranean littoral went into deep mourning for decades,13
while the anonymous contemporary chronicle de excidio Acconis,
although sharply critical of the failures of leadership that led to loss
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lamentations in the  
of the city, concluded by lamenting it in terms drawn from Lamentations and Baruch.14 Dante’s personal loss of Beatrice was thus
reflected on a world scale with the loss of the Holy Land: private
and public grief, the sorrows of Florence and those of all Christendom, were part of a continuous fabric.
But if the text of Lamentations marked Dante’s great disappointments—as the devotee of Beatrice, as a citizen of Florence, as a subject of the Empire, and as a son of the Church—it is also clear that
these moments of crisis and near-desperation, when the very design
of Providence seemed to be unintelligible if not absent, also functioned as challenges to ever more ambitious trials of the poet’s art in
order to realize his vision of how the world ought to be governed. I
will now consider three episodes from Dante’s masterwork, the Comedy, in which the text of Lamentations plays a significant role. The first
of these, from the Inferno, is the depiction of Maometto among the
sowers of discord and schism; since he is a defamatory caricature, I
will use Dante’s Italian name for him to distinguish him from the historical Muhammad.15 By speaking words from Lamentations,
Maometto comes to personify the historical Jerusalem as defeated and
enslaved by a rival (and, in medieval Christian terms, spurious) religion, and so consigned to Hell. My second instance is from the Purgatorio, the second part of the Comedy, where in a rhetorically charged
digression, Dante mourns the violence and chaos of contemporary
Italy: here the words of Lamentations characterize the perilous state
of Italy, Rome, and Florence. In my final example, from Dante’s allegorical biography of St. Francis in the last part of the poem, the Paradiso, I will suggest why Francis’s dearly beloved, Lady Poverty, herself
yet another manifestation of the widow of Lamentations, is a key to
Dante’s acceptance of a world changing, as he saw it, dramatically for
the worse—a world in which only the example of Francis’s austere
love of poverty seemed to hold promise for reform and transformation. For Dante, Francis becomes the definitive, though by no means
facile, example of how to sweeten the uses of adversity.
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We need not spend much time demonstrating that Dante’s Hell
can be thought of as built in the image of the reprobate Jerusalem,
guilty of rejecting her Savior’s call to repentance. That Dante may
even have thought of his Hell as, in a sense, captive to the Saracen
enemy is strongly suggested by the fact that, as Virgil, Dante’s guide,
and the pilgrim, Dante’s protagonist, approach the walls of the lower
city of Hell, the pilgrim turns to his guide and comments: “Master,
already I discern its mosques there clearly within the moat”(Inf.
.–). Even before this, the very first impression the reader
receives of the infernal city is provided by the notorious inscription
over Hellgate: “Through me the way into the grieving city”(Inf. .).
In Italian, this text, with its mention of “la città dolente,” is verbally
strongly reminiscent of personified Jerusalem, who asks us in Lam.
: to see if there “is any sorrow like unto my sorrow? [est dolor sicut
dolor meus]”. Even the menacing conclusion of the inscription, “abandon every hope, you who enter,” seems to recall the address, from
that same verse, of “all you who pass by.” With such verbal and architectural framing of Hell in terms of the Lamentations text, it does
not then surprise to find close paraphrases of two verses, Lam. :
and :, in canto  of the Inferno, which Dante reserved for explicit identification of the legal principle determining punishment in his
Hell: the contrapasso, or counter-suffering, sometimes described as
Dante’s principle of poetic justice, by which the punishment is made
to fit the crime.16 It is to that canto that my argument now turns.
Deep in Hell, among the worst of the fraudulent, Dante places
the sowers of discord and schism. After a long opening description
in which the poet renounces his ability to account in prose or verse
for the heaps of lacerated bodies that he sees, Dante enumerates five
specific sowers of discord, beginning with a defamatory portrait of
Maometto:
Surely a barrel, losing centerpiece or half-moon, is
not so broken as one I saw torn open from the chin
to the farting-place.
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lamentations in the  
Between his legs dangled his intestines; the pluck
was visible, and the wretched bag that makes shit
of what is swallowed.
While I was all absorbed in the sight of him, he,
gazing back at me, with his hands opened up his
breast, saying: “Now see how I spread myself!
See how Maometto is torn open! Ahead of me
Alì goes weeping, his face cloven from chin to
forelock.
And all the others you see here were sowers of
scandal and schism while they were alive, and
therefore are they cloven in this way. (Inf. .–)17
The image of a broken container, a barrel, to describe the human
body cut asunder and spilling its contents, are poetic devices for registering religious schism as the division of what should be united and
whole. This view of Maometto as a schismatic arose among Christian polemicists who constructed for Muhammad a fictitious identity as the disciple of a Nestorian Christian monk, thus a heretic; and
as a belligerent seeker for power who exploited religious ideas cynically, thus a fraud. Even well-informed Christians, such as Peter the
Venerable, Abbot of Cluny in the mid-twelfth century, who had
overseen an ambitious project of translating Arabic sources for both
polemical and evangelizing purposes, saw in the expansion of Islam
not merely a military and cultural threat but a schismatic division of
the body of the Christian faithful.18
Dante’s portrait reflects these slanders and misconceptions. It is
however also historically grounded in that it is couched in the language of crusading warfare, after all the chief manner in which
Christian Europe had encountered Islam, from the reconquista in
Spain to the Crusades in Palestine. In Dante’s canto, a number of
details are drawn from the twelfth-century southern French poet
Bertran de Born, the fifth and last of those Dante names. Bertran’s
poetry celebrates the heavy-mounted warfare used by crusading
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knights, including the use of the broadsword, notorious in crusader
epics, such as the Song of Roland, for its ability to cut an opponent in
half from crown to fork.
Maometto—and Alì, his cousin and son-in-law and eventual successor as the fourth of the caliphs—thus bear wounds to body and
head respectively that are meant to remind readers of the crusading
warfare orchestrated by Christendom in response to the reconquest
of Jerusalem by Islam. These wounds, which in Dante’s canto are
dealt by an avenging demon wielding a large sword, represent God’s
own specific punishment, or contrapasso, for the worldwide schism
supposedly introduced by Islam: putting the founder of Islam to the
sword probably also reflects the Christian view that Islam was a religion devoted to conquest with the sword.19 But like so much in
Dante, we can read considerably more in the hideous spectacle of
Maometto’s evisceration. He also recalls the death of Judas, the
archtraitor, whose “bowels gushed forth,” according to the Gospel
text (Acts :), when he hanged himself following the betrayal of
Christ, an important parallel to which I will return. At a deeper
level, Maometto’s body probably also recalls, but in a negative,
inverted form, what for Christians were positive examples of
wounds to the body: those of martyrs, for example, and more centrally the image of the wounded Christ himself. When Maometto
displays his own viscera as if opening an overcoat, crying out
“. . . vedi com’io mi dilacco!
vedi come storpiato è Maometto!”
[Now see how I spread myself
see how Mohammed is torn open]
he acts out a parody of the language of Christian meditations on the
passion, which describe in detail how Christ’s body was dilatatus, distended, by being placed on the cross.20
For my purposes in this essay, what is significant is that the selfostentation of Maometto’s wound is done in words that echo the text
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lamentations in the  
of Lamentations. Nor is this the only use of Lamentations in the
canto. Dante closely paraphrases Lam. : when he has Bertran de
Born—the poet I mentioned just now, and the last of Dante’s five
named sowers of schism—call attention to the spectacular division of
his head from his trunk, which he carries like a lantern. Bertran says:
“. . . Now see my wretched punishment,
you who go still breathing to view the dead: see if
any is great as this.” (Inf. .–)
The echo of Lam. : is perfectly clear: “Attend and see if there is
any sorrow that is like unto my sorrow.” With the invitation to compare degrees of pain, Bertran’s verse also ties the end of the canto to
its beginning, where Dante had said that he could not give an adequate account of the ghastly accumulation of bodies—and this suggests how fundamental Lam. : is for the whole canto.
But to get back to Maometto’s echo of the Biblical text: it is to
the verse that immediately precedes Lam. :, Lam. :, which
is as follows:
Vide, domine, et considera, quia facta sum vilis.
[See, O Lord, and consider, for I am become vile.]
As I already pointed out, Lam. : is among the first verses of
Lamentations that medieval readers thought spoken by the personified figure of widowed Jerusalem. But in fact the very first verse
actually so spoken is the preceding one, Lam. :. Precisely there
the change of voice occurs, from that of the lamenting prophet to
that of the personified lamenting city.21 Dante’s version replaces the
phrase “I am become vile” by the even stronger storpiato, which literally means mangled and deformed, a usage that underscores with
particular force the brutal desecration of Maometto’s image and
memory; in allegory, the abjection of the city enslaved by the enemy.
But if we can say with some confidence that Dante’s Maometto allegorically takes on the voice of a fallen, infernal Jerusalem, this iden-
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tification can be deepened and confirmed with a specific historical
parallel that again embroils us in the violence of the Crusades.
For Dante’s milieu, the most complete and important historical
account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in  A.D. was that of Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War. While Josephus’s account was already tendentious because of its notoriously apologetic treatment of Roman
motives, some Christian retellings of Josephus’s history added a
detail intended to further increase both the suffering and the culpability of the besieged Jewish population.22 This is the assertion that
Jews fleeing the city, which was torn by factions as well as surrounded by the Romans, swallowed their gold in hopes of avoiding
losing their wealth as they escaped. But, the story goes, Syrian troops
among the Romans were on to the trick, and cut open the bellies of
the escapees from the city in order to pluck the gold “even from
among the flowing wastes of their bowels.”23 This lurid, defamatory episode was retained and adapted by Christian Crusade chroniclers describing the fall of Jerusalem to the crusaders in ,
attributed not of course to escaping Jews, but to the Islamic population. The chronicle of the First Crusade written by Fulcher of
Chartres gives the following account, which may also have suggested Dante’s presentation of the gruesome effects of schism as a series
of ghastly spectacles:
And you would have seen something amazing, when some of
our poorer squires and footsoldiers, knowing the tricks of the
Saracens, cut open their bellies when they were dead, so that
they might remove the gold coins from their intestines, which
their loathsome jaws had swallowed when they were alive.24
In terms of the fierce logic of contrapasso, or counter-suffering, the
evisceration of Mahomet closely associates the founder of Islam with
the historical record, such as it was, of the several conquests of
Jerusalem: an emphasis possibly inspired by the presence of the
Lamentations text itself.
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lamentations in the  
The anecdote from the crusading chronicle also adds further
meaning to Dante’s depiction, in that the transformation of what is
swallowed into waste serves as a likely figure for the negative transformation of Christian and Jewish teachings by the heretical
Maometto as claimed in the defamatory biographies. Indeed, a late
fourteenth-century commentator on the Comedy, Benvenuto da
Imola, gives a closely analogous explanation of Dante’s emphasis on
Maometto’s digestion, which presumably absorbed orthodox dogma
and transformed it into heretical error.25 The emphasis on viscera is
given a different but related interpretation by one of the early commentators on Dante’s poem, Fra Guido da Pisa, writing only a few
years after the poet’s death. For Fra Guido, the focus on the ventral
region of Maometto’s body suggests his cutting away of the uterine
function of the Church in generating offspring destined for salvation
through baptism.26 Strikingly, a similar account is given of the death
of Judas in medieval Christian commentary, as Ann Derbes has
recently pointed out, in which the rupture of Judas’s belly (described
as both venter and uter, womb) is designed to contrast with the divine
fertility of Mary’s virginal body—in this way closing the circle of
iconographic suggestions offered by Dante’s grisly portrait.27
In assessing this kind of polemical ingenuity, we must not underestimate the depth of Dante’s loathing for his caricatured Maometto, nor attempt to palliate the extent to which Dante, along with
virtually all Christendom, was prepared to brutally revile the
founder of a religion and a nation that had historically threatened the
Christian West. There is a sense, however, in which the ferocity of
the representation has, for Dante, a local origin: by this I mean that
behind the distorted image of Maometto stands the longstanding and
exquisitely Florentine tradition of the willfully defamatory portrait—and here I use the term literally, rather than figuratively—
which was a kind of visual malediction or curse designed to heap
opprobrium on, indeed literally expel, the designated enemies of the
community. And it comes as perhaps no surprise that the visual logic
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guiding these portraits often followed the principle of “poetic justice,” or contrapasso, that we have already noted above, as is made
explicit precisely in Dante’s canto .28 The application of contrapasso
in Maometto’s case is probably the more ironic in that a version of
the same logic is propounded as characterizing the Islamic hell in the
Kitab Al-miraj, known in its medieval Latin translation by Bonaventura of Siena as the Liber scalae machometi, a text Dante could easily
have read, and which a number of scholars believe influenced the
composition of the Comedy; not only that, one of the groups chosen
for punishment in the Islamic Hell of the Liber scalae are, precisely,
sowers of scandal and schism.29 The technique of defaming either
the local or exotic adversarial Other in a poetically fitting manner
thus had, for Dante, a strictly native origin, just as medieval Christendom found itself constrained to understand Islam through the distorting lenses offered by its own millennial struggles with heresy and
schism—a point made in Dante’s own canto by Maometto’s offer of
strategic advice to Fra Dolcino (Inf. .–), the head of the
apostolic brethren finally reduced to starvation and defeat by crusaders during the winter of  in the mountains north of Novara,
in northern Italy.30 From Dante’s perspective, Maometto’s most
prominent continuing role is as a heresiarch who abets schism in Italy
itself.
For in the final analysis Dante was probably no more than conventionally interested in the military ambitions of the Crusades in
Outremer, beyond the sea. He unquestionably shared the widespread
desire of fourteenth-century Christian Europeans to recuperate the
Holy Land as the legitimate feudal inheritance Christ had won by his
sacrifice, as the contemporary justification for taking up the cross
was wont to put it. But Dante’s constant and pressing concern was
the state of Italy and of Florence, torn by factional warfare between
Guelphs and Ghibellines, that is, between supporters of the papacy
and supporters of Imperial authority, a conflict that, in Dante’s historiography, dated back to the early years of the thirteenth century
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and that had also led to his own painful separation from his native
city. For this reason, Dante also includes in his canto of the schismatics Mosca de’ Lamberti (.–), universally reviled by Florentines as having caused, with a violent murder, the outbreak of
factional strife in the city. In fact, Dante’s chief interest in crusading
was polemical and negative: this was his explicit disapproval of its use
as a papal instrument against Christian political enemies, such as the
followers of the Imperial party, as had been done by Pope Boniface
VIII in prosecuting attempts to regain Sicily, seized in  by the
Aragonese from the Pope’s French allies, the Angevin house of
France. This is why, although the battle imagery and biblical language
of canto  evokes crusading warfare in the Holy Land, all the battles Dante names in the list at the beginning of the canto
(.–)—from those between the Trojans and Latins to those
involving Frederick II, Manfred, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen,
defenders of the Imperial cause during the generation before Dante’s
birth—were fought in Italy: all the blood spilled had been spilled on
Italian soil. So it is to the specifically Italian embodiments of afflicted Jerusalem in the second part of Dante’s poem that I now turn.
The heaping up of the dead in Italian wars so graphically displayed
in Inferno  is recalled in the fifth and sixth cantos of the Purgatorio.
As the first day in Purgatory draws to a close, the pilgrim, Dante’s
protagonist, arrives at an agreeable mountain valley where he will
eventually spend the night. Like the rest of the groups the reader
meets during the first day of the journey up the mountain—including souls who have been excommunicated, or have just been lazy in
pursuing their salvation, or delayed repentance to the last
moment—the inhabitants of the valley are in some way negligent:
in this case, sovereigns who have failed to safeguard the peace and
safety of their subjects. The list of irresponsible rulers begins with
emperors and winds down to marquesses and counts. As Dante’s pilgrim approaches this valley he is surrounded by persons whose vio-
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lent deaths had cut off their chance to repent, thus increasing the
length of their stays in Purgatory but also testifying to how civil violence can retard progress toward salvation (Purg. .–). This
gauntlet of victims also furnishes the occasion for what, if intensity
of language is any indication, is probably the most heartfelt plea
Dante ever made for a providential intervention in Italian affairs, and
his sharpest reproach to the movers and shakers of the world for having refused to become instruments of such intervention. Strolling in
this valley of negligent rulers, Dante and Virgil meet Sordello, an
Italian from Mantua who wrote in the poetic idiom of southern
France known as lingua d’Oc, or old Provençal. When Sordello asks
the wayfarers of their origins, Virgil answers that he is from Mantua,
and Sordello rushes to embrace him merely because both are natives
of the same city. At this demonstration of spontaneous civic fraternity, the narrator is overcome with both admiration and chagrin:
. . . and my sweet
leader began: “Mantua . . .” and the shade, all
gathered in itself,
rose toward him from the place where it had been,
saying, “O Mantuan, I am Sordello from your city!”
and each embraced the other.
Ah, slavish Italy, dwelling of grief, ship without a
pilot in a great storm, not a ruler of provinces, but a
whore!
That noble soul was so quick, merely for the
sweet sound of his city, to make much of his fellowcitizen there;
and now in you the living are not without war,
and of those whom one wall and one moat lock in, each
gnaws at the other. (Purg. .–)
Speaking as the narrator and not as the character, Dante then assigns
responsibility for Italian civil wars directly to the Holy Roman
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Emperors-elect, who had abandoned Italy; he addresses Albert of
Hapsburg, who like his father Rudolf of Hapsburg had been elected Holy Roman Emperor but had never come to Rome to be
crowned, and he further warns the unnamed “successor” of Albert,
who was to be Henry VII of Luxembourg, to take fair warning
from the future deaths of Albert’s son and of Albert himself, who
was murdered by an assassin. Considering the following passage, it
is important to realize that Dante is writing in about , after the
foretold events have taken place, but that the journey narrated in
the poem is fictionally occurring in , before the events have
taken place:
O German Albert, who abandon her, so that she
becomes untamed and wild, while you should mount
between her saddle-bows,
may just judgment fall from the stars onto your
blood, and let it be strange and public, so that your
successor may fear it!
For you and your father, held fast by your greed
for things up there [on earth], have suffered the garden
of the empire to be laid waste. (Purg. .–)
The entire outburst, seventy-six lines long—exactly half the canto,
and beginning exactly at the halfway point—is technically a digression; in terms of medieval literary genres, it mixes satire and lament,
a hybrid lyric form that writers in Old Provençal, like Sordello himself, had brought to a high level of refinement. We know Dante’s outburst is a lament because it begins with a vivid expression of
pain—Ahi; and like the interruption of the Vita nova at Beatrice’s
death, the sudden interruption of the narrative and the narrator’s
indulgence in a long digression alert us to the poet’s special investment in the passage. As the poet laments the state of Italy, he harnesses no less than three times the language of biblical lamentation:
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once to address “slavish Italy, no longer mistress of provinces, but a
whore”—which again echoes the first verse of Lamentations, “the
princess of provinces is made a tributary”; once to address Rome,
whom he compares to an abandoned widow, as again, in Lam. ::
“how the mistress of the Gentiles is become as a widow”; and once
to address Florence, the object of Dante’s withering irony as he concludes the digression (Purg. .–).31
But it is real human agents, not literary figures of speech, who
earn Dante’s most sharply focused scorn: the emperors Rudolf of
Hapsburg and Albert, his son, who lacked the courage to come and
take Italy in hand. Using traditional metaphors of governance
derived from horsemanship and navigation, Dante chastises their
failure to have taken up the reins of the untamed horse that is Italy,
or the tiller of the ship of state. The highest rhetorical pitch, however, is reserved for another borrowing from the Biblical text:
addressing the negligent Emperor Albert, Dante includes yet another apostrophe—giving us apostrophe twice over, one within the
other—this time spoken by Rome personified, who calls out to the
absent Emperor:
Come and see your Rome, which weeps widowed
and alone, and day and night calls out: “My Caesar,
why do you not keep me company?”
Come and see how the people love each other!
And if no pity for us moves you, come to be
ashamed at your reputation.
And if it is permitted me, O highest Jove, who
were crucified on earth for us,
are your just eyes turned elsewhere?
Or is it a preparation that in the abyss of your
counsel you are making, for some good utterly
severed from our perception?
For the cities of Italy are all filled with tyrants . . .
(Purg. . –)
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As many readers will immediately recognize, the language, including the emphatic use of apostrophe and personification, derives in
part from Lamentations, where the city is she who “sits solitary. . . .
she is become a widow” and in part from the Song of Songs, where
the bride calls out to her bridegroom in desire: “arise, my love, my
beautiful one, and come” (Canticles :). As I noted earlier, the two
books were coordinated in Lamentations commentary; they were
also coordinated, as it happens, in Imperial propaganda, including
Dante’s own examples of it, in which the Emperor was thought to
be the ideal bridegroom of Rome, the bride.32 This idea of the relationship of the sovereign to his state or city went back to the time of
Charlemagne and was to persist through the Renaissance.33 In
Dante’s use, however, the pathos of Rome’s appeal is raised yet
another power, however: Rome’s words upbraiding Caesar for his
absence,
“My Caesar, why do you not keep me company?”
[Cesare mio, perchè non m’accompagni?]
also echo the voice of Christ calling out from the cross; note especially the persistence of the pronoun, which in these passages marks
not possession, but dispossession:
“My God, why have you abandoned me?”
[Deus meus, ut quid dereliquisti me?] (Matt. :)
A few lines later Dante makes so bold as to wonder if Christ, who
was willing to be crucified for mankind, is any longer paying attention; perhaps he has turned away, Dante wonders aloud, or perhaps
his purposes are so inscrutable that a mere mortal cannot see into the
abyss of his providential design.
Although Dante’s language here is in part conventional, we
should not for that reason minimize its importance. In addition to
the uniquely charged rhetoric of this passage, and the fact that it is
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the longest single outburst in the poem spoken in the poet’s narrative voice, there are other reasons for thinking that the anguish suggested here is uniquely heartfelt. The writing, or possibly the
revision, of these cantos was probably contemporary with the aftermath of the failed expedition of Henry VII to Italy in –.
This expedition, the first since the days of Frederick II—the empire
had been technically vacant for over half a century—had been
Dante’s great last hope for the political reform of Italy; and we
know, from letters he wrote heralding the Emperor’s advent, that
Dante’s enthusiasm had been literally unbounded. But the Emperor,
after encountering bitter resistance from Northern cities such as
Brescia, subsequently found himself checked by Guelph Florence and
the forces of Robert of Anjou: both were doing the bidding of Pope
Clement V, who although having originally sanctioned Henry’s expedition, turned coat and conspired to compass Henry’s ruin once he
was on Italian soil.34 When Henry died suddenly of fever at Buonconvento, near Siena, in , Dante’s disappointment, not to mention his fury at the papal betrayal, were, to put it mildly, very great.
An important reader of this canto, Maurizio Perugi, suggests that the
entire outburst, in its genre of satire-lament and its tone of desolation, represents Dante’s personal funeral plaint for Henry.35 Be that
as it may, it is interesting that when Dante’s son Pietro sat down to
write a political poem in the late s, when the struggle between
Pope John XXII and Emperor Ludwig of Bavaria suggested this same
sad history might be repeating itself, he quoted liberally from
Dante’s lines in canto six, wondering if God had ceased to discipline
popes and prelates who usurped the temporal authority; as if to
mark that he lacked any sympathetic human auditor, Pietro
addressed his poem at the outset to God; by the end, he fears the
mockery of unbelievers who witness God’s abandonment of Italy:
“Where is your God, o Christian people? (cf. Ps. :).36 It was
lines from Dante’s great digression, too, that Renaissance Italians
quoted when complaining of the French and Spanish invasions of
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Italy in the sixteenth century,37 and that Italian patriots—looking
forward to independence from a position of political servitude—
intoned to themselves like a mantra during the Italian risorgimento of
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The digression in Purgatorio canto six thus constitutes the nadir of
Dante’s political despair. There is an implicit equation of the mourning over the absent Emperor Henry VII with a profound anxiety over
an absent or unresponsive Providence, and of the voice of desolate
Rome with the voice of the poet himself. That Dante’s voice simultaneously adopts the voice of the Bridegroom during his moment of
human weakness on the cross, and the voice of the bride of Canticles consumed with desire for her spouse—who does not yet
come—is what perhaps gives this line its great suggestiveness as an
expression of desolation and dispossession.
After the failure of Henry VII’s expedition no comparable opportunity presented itself during the poet’s lifetime that could reasonably
promise a positive transformation of Italian politics. Dante did not of
course cease to take an interest in politics, however; we now know
that his great political tract in defense of secular world-government,
the Monarchia, was written as late as  or , after the Paradiso,
the last part of the Comedy, was well underway, and probably written to buttress the claims of Can Grande della Scala, the lord of
Verona and Dante’s then patron, to the imperial vicarage, an office
that Pope John XXII had forbidden him from taking up. It was in all
likelihood this political function of the treatise that some ten years
later, in , earned Dante’s Monarchia a refutation by the Dominican Fra Guido Vernani, and that motivated the burning of all discoverable copies; the treatise remained on the Index of Forbidden
Books until .38
Nevertheless, after the failure of the Imperial option Dante’s
conception of how the world was to be reformed was bound to shift
somewhat. It is very striking that Dante’s last evocation of the book
of Lamentations in his career is found in the third and last part of the
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Comedy, the Paradiso, in the poet’s account of the life of Francis of
Assisi. Traveling through the planetary spheres, Dante and Beatrice
encounter Thomas Aquinas among the theologians and wise men
Dante places in the heaven of the Sun, and it is this famous Dominican Scholastic who relates the life of Francis of Assisi as part of a
more extensive critique of the decay of both mendicant orders. In
looking to Francis and the mendicant orders for significant reform
of the Church and of Christendom more generally, Dante, of course,
had plenty of company. By Dante’s day, however, the controversy
between the relaxed and the rigorist factions—the zelanti or spirituals—was bidding fair to get out of hand. The spirituals held increasingly uncompromising views regarding Francis’s original
intentions concerning absolute poverty; views that included, at the
extreme, defiance of the authority of the papacy to modify the Rule.
These were positions with which Dante was probably sympathetic:
after all, Dante identified avarice, acquisitiveness of temporal possessions, as the besetting evil of both early modern mercantile citystates like Florence and of the medieval Church and papacy to boot.
According to Niccolò Mineo, the period when Dante was writing
the cantos of the Paradiso (–) where Francis is discussed may
well have coincided with the crisis that led, in , to the burning
at the stake of a group of Franciscan spirituals who had refused to
submit to papal authority. From this perspective, despite a likely solidarity with the rigorists regarding the centrality of poverty, Dante’s
account of the founder of the order appears to be a counsel of moderation to the two factions, which Dante characterizes by chastising
both Matthew of Acquasparta, general of the order until  and
a conventual, and Ubertino da Casale, the zelante and biographer of
Francis who eventually went so far as to abandon the order entirely.39 But there is also reason to think that with his biography of Francis Dante was once again reconstructing his own imaginative grounds
for hope during a crisis that threatened to place the reforming potential of Franciscanism itself in jeopardy. Dante begins his account of
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the two lives of mendicant founders by recalling that their coming
to earth was ordained by divine Providence, as if answering his question regarding God’s level of attention to earthly affairs in the sixth
canto of the Purgatorio; and it is implicit in the very project of the Paradiso itself that the heavens, driven by celestial intelligences as they
circle above the earth, influence and even direct, even if they do not
determine, what happens here below. In fact, the sense in which
Franciscan ideals replace the hopes for Imperial reform is quite specific: when Henry VII had entered Italy in , Dante had written
letters in Latin heralding his advent and comparing him to a rising
Sun that would bring comfort to Italy; here in the heaven of the Sun
it is with the image of Francis as the sun rising from Assisi that
Thomas’s eulogistic narrative begins (Par. .–).40
Dante casts the life of Francis in terms of an allegorical narrative
of the courtship between Francis and “the one whom his soul loved,”
Lady Poverty. To summarize Francis’s whole life in relation to a personified Lady Poverty was traditional, at least since the Sacrum commercium Sancti Francisci cum domina paupertate [Sacred commerce of Saint
Francis with lady Poverty]. The Sacred commerce—English translators
have avoided the direct transposition, but it seems to me exactly
right—is a text of uncertain date and authorship, but clearly influential; parts of it were also incorporated into the biographies of
Francis written by Thomas of Celano and Bonaventure during the
middle and later thirteenth century.41 The text relates how Poverty, who had lived with Adam in the garden and kept close company
with Christ even to the point of ascending the cross with him, had
lived in neglect and exile since the days of Constantine the Great,
when the war between the Church and the secular power had
ceased; until Francis and his brothers seek her out and coax her
away from her high mountain back to the world of men. The narrative is thus a figurative way of speaking of how for Francis the quest
for absolute poverty, the “queen of virtues,” is the chief vector of his
imitation of Christ and so the dominant motive of his life; and in this
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strong emphasis the Sacrum commercium is, despite some scholarly
skepticism, arguably a direct influence on Dante’s equally singleminded account.
As I noted earlier, Thomas begins the biography proper by speaking of Francis as a sun, rising from Assisi, that has come to give
comfort to the world:
He was not yet far from his rising, when he began to
make the earth feel some strengthening from his great
virtue;
he incurred the enmity of his father, still a youth, for
a certain lady, to whom no one unlocks the gate of
pleasure, any more than to death;
and before the spiritual court et coram patre [in his father’s
presence] he was
joined with her; and then from day to day he loved her
more.
She, deprived of her first husband, [Christ] had waited a
thousand years and more, despised and dark, without
invitation, until this man;
. . . nor had it availed her to have been constant and
fierce in her love, so that, when Mary stayed below, she
wept with Christ upon the cross.
But so that I proceed not too obscurely, take Francis
and Poverty for these two lovers now in my further
speech.
Their love and admiration and sweet glances caused
their harmony and their cheerful look to be the
occasion of holy thoughts;
so much that the venerable Bernard took off his
shoes first, and ran after such great peace, and, running,
thought himself slow.
Oh unrecognized riches! oh fruitful possession!
Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the
bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride. (Par. .–, –)
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And at the end of the biography:
When he who chose him for such good pleased to
draw him up to the reward he merited by making
himself lowly,
to his brothers, as to just heirs, he handed over his
dearest lady, and commanded them to love her
faithfully;
and from her bosom his soul chose to set forth,
returning to its kingdom, and for his body he wished no
other bier. (Par. .–)
Dante writes that before her union with Francis, Lady Poverty had
been “despised and dark, without invitation” and “deprived of her
first husband,” Christ (though he is not named)—and this echoes the
language of the Sacrum commercium (or of the subsequent biographies drawing from it) where Francis is recommending to his brothers an attachment with the long-despised Lady. With startling, even
disturbing rhetorical effect, Francis presents the prospect of finding
and enjoying Lady Poverty in terms more in keeping with a medieval
brigand promising his troops the spoils of war:
Brothers, the espousal with poverty is wonderful, and we may
easily enjoy her embraces, for “the mistress of peoples is
become as a widow” and the queen of virtues “is become contemptible” before all. None in these parts will dare to cry out,
none will oppose us, no one will by right forbid us to have
commerce with her. “All her friends have despised her and
have become her enemies.” And when he had spoken this way,
all began to walk after Holy Francis. (Habig, ).
We immediately recognize the language of widowed Jerusalem in
Lam. : and .: three times quoted in the passage I just cited: “the
mistress of peoples is become as a widow”; “she is made vile”; and “all
her friends have despised here, they have all become her enemies.”
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That, in Dante’s account, she has been deprived of her first husband
also reminds us of Lamentations commentary, which identify the
widow as deprived of Christ, but with expectations of a future
return of the bridegroom. So it is that in Dante’s allegory, as in the
Sacrum commercium, Francis and his brothers restore the widow’s status as a spouse: and so the second part of the allegorical biography
ends with a flurry of evocations of Canticles, which, allegorically
speaking, are songs of nuptial love exchanged between the Soul and
Christ, or Christ and the Church.
Egidio goes barefoot, Silvestro, too, following the
bridegroom, so pleasing was the bride.
Which leads to the observation that—with the exception of Dante’s
fictional reunification with Beatrice at the end of the Purgatorio—it
is in the biography of Francis, and only there in Dante’s poem, that
we find completed the sequence of sorrow leading to joy that
Lamentations commentators posit as the universal context of the
book. In an Italy where both pope and emperor have abandoned their
Roman bride, only in the life of Francis does a widowed spouse find
again her bridegroom, only in following the poverello are nuptial
rites actually celebrated. Only in Dante’s life of Francis are sandals
kicked off in pursuit of the embraces of the bride, in a verse which
Erich Auerbach, in his pathfinding reading of the canto, recognized
as scandalous and which approaches the implications of the passage
from the Sacrum commercium I cited above.42
In a way we sometimes come to expect with Dante, then, the use
of the widow of Lamentations is in part governed by the part of the
poem where we find her. In Hell, she is the city conquered by the
adversary—Satan, Dante’s Maometto, take your pick—given over
to God’s wrath; in Purgatorio, where penitential and redemptive
functions of the poem overlap, she is, as widowed Rome and Italy
enslaved, the civic community that desires union with the emperor
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for the sake of universal peace, but which feelingly suffers the
absence of legitimate authority; in the Paradiso, she becomes the rigorous, ascetic ideal of absolute poverty, overwhelmingly desirable
precisely because of her outcast and abject status. She is the loathly
lady for whom Francis sacrifices wealth, family, and when his rigorous imitation of Christ is crowned by the quasi martyrdom of the
stigmata, even bodily health. Indeed, to my knowledge hitherto
unremarked in discussion of Dante’s version is the repeated equivalence between devotion to Lady Poverty and the embrace of death:
some six instances in ninety lines. Francis comes to succour a Church
originally espoused to Christ in the death of the cross; Poverty herself, Dante’s text points out, is about as popular as death itself, to
whom none willingly opens the door of pleasure; and when Francis
is about to die, he has himself placed on the ground, identified in the
text again with the bosom of Lady Poverty, but also, metaphorically, as his bier. If Bernardo and Egidio and Silvestro run after her
embraces, shedding their sandals all the while, Francis himself finds
the quietus of his courtship only when he receives the third seal, that
of the wounds of Christ, and makes of his own body the embodied
Rule of Poverty, the Rule made flesh, sealed with the red seals of
blood.43 Repeatedly then, in Dante’s account the place of Poverty is
the place of bodily death; from this viewpoint, Lady Poverty is sister to “Sora nostra morte corporale,” “sister bodily death” of Francis’s
famous Canticle of the Sun. We would be justified in concluding that
this emphasis in Dante’s account registers Francis’s known thirst for
martyrdom and for the imitation of Christ, which is only fulfilled
with the stigmata signifying death on the cross. But from the point
of view of the poet’s biography, commerce with a Lady Poverty whose
alter ego is the widow of Lamentations might appear to be something slightly different: as an espousal of loss, of mourning. Surveying his life from the vantage point of , Dante might well have
concluded that his own espousal of mourning had been lifelong.
There are of course many reasons to see a strong identification
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between Dante and Francis. Some are biographical: in Florence,
Dante had probably studied with the Franciscans of Santa Croce; he
may have been a member of the tertiary, lay order of Franciscans; his
daughter Antonia became the Franciscan nun Suor Beatrice; and
when he died in Ravenna in , he was buried in the church of San
Francesco. It certainly suggests a bias. What is probably more important, as Ronald Herzman has argued, Dante would have seen in the
Franciscan virtue of humility the exemplary remedy for the pride
that beset the whole Alighieri clan, as we are reminded several times
in the poem (e.g., Purg. ; Par. ).44 An appreciation of Franciscan
poverty, on the other hand, might have helped him better endure the
indigence of exile; if Dante did know the Sacrum commercium, he
probably read with great interest the surprising description of Lady
Poverty herself as an exile, couched in the biblical language describing none other than wandering Cain: “vaga et profuga super terram”
[“a fugitive and a vagabond . . . upon the earth”] (Gen. :).45
Francis’s legacy to Dante thus includes Lady Poverty as a persistent
companion of the poet’s exile, and, in her guise as the widow of
Lamentations, his acquaintance with the vocation of mourning.
To be sure, where Francis zealously sought out Lady Poverty,
Dante’s poverty was involuntary and much regretted: his vocation of
mourning was not elected, but thrust upon him by circumstances—
by the death of Beatrice, by his exile, by the death of the Emperor,
by the Babylonian captivity of the church. Still, making virtue of
necessity did become one of Dante’s chief strategies for confronting
his deep disappointments. Implicit throughout my essay is the
assumption that the chief virtue Dante made of necessity was his
great poem: for if his private and public life kept coming up as
tragedy, he nevertheless had his Comedy to write, and to use to try
and set things right.
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Notes
1. See the Encyclopaedia Judaica (New York: Macmillan, ): “Av, th of,” vol. I, cols.
–.
2. For “Destruction of Jerusalem Sunday,” see Amnon Linder, “Jews and Judaism in the
eyes of Christian Thinkers of the Middle Ages: The Destruction of Jerusalem in
Medieval Christian Liturgy,” in From Witness to Witchcraft, Jews and Judaism in Medieval
Christian Thought, ed. Jeremy Cohen (Wiesbaden: Harassowitz, ), –.
Dante points to the providentiality of the destruction of Jerusalem at Purg. .–
and .– and Paradiso .– and .–; it is clearly a cardinal moment in
the poem’s historiographical vision.
3. For the shape of this liturgy in Dante’s day, see, most usefully, Sources of the Modern
Roman Liturgy:The Ordinals by Haymo of Faversham and Related Documents (1243–1307),
ed. S. J. P. Van Dijk,  vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, ), , –.
4. This is brought out by Dante’s contemporary Durandus of Mendes, in his Rationale
divinorum officiorum (Naples: Dura, ); see .. (), where the truncation of
the offices is identified as signifying the “widowing” of the community (viduati) by the
death of Christ.
5. See, for example, such uses in St. Bernard of Clairvaux [attr.], Meditatio in Passionem
et Resurrectionem Domini (PL .) and the Vitis mystica (PL .) attributed
to St. Bonaventura. For this literature, see Thomas Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin
Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, ).
6. For full bibliography, see R. L. Martinez, “Lament and Lamentations in Purgatorio and
the Case of Dante’s Statius,” Dante Studies  (): –, esp. .
7. All four of the levels are distinguished throughout the tradition, from Rabanus Maurus and Paschasius in the ninth century through Hugh of St. Cher and John Pecham
in the mid- and late thirteenth century. See Martinez, “Lament and Lamentations,”
–, –.
8. This passage, beginning chapter  of the book, has been demonstrated to be the
principal articulation of the work in the manuscript tradition; see Guglielmo Gorni
in his recent edition of the Vita nova (Florence: Einaudi, ), xxi–xxvii, –.
9. For the text and commentary, see Dante’s Lyric Poetry, ed. Kenelm Foster and Patrick
Boyde,  vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), :– and :–.
10. The text of Dante’s Epistle XI. reads, “utroque lumine destitutam.” See Dantis
Alagherii Epistolae:The Letters of Dante, ed. Paget Toynbee (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
), – (including text and English translation; in Toybee’s numbering and
paragraphing, it is Epistle .).
11. For the inclusion of Ciceronian rhetoric in the Glossa ordinaria commentary on
Lamentations by Gilbert the Universal, see Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the
Middle Ages, nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, ), –.
The Ciceronian prefaces were retained in many of the later commentaries, including that of Hugh of St. Cher and John Pecham.

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12. For the proliferation of this literature, see Maurizio Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante e
la tradizione mediolatina dell’invettiva,” Studi danteschi  (): –, esp.
–; Crusade preaching is discussed by Christoph T. Maier, Preaching the Crusade:
Mendicant friars and the cross in the thirteenth century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ) and illustrated in his Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons
for the Preaching of the Cross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); see also
Sylvia Schein, Fideles Crucis: The Papacy, the West, and the Recovery of the Holy Land,
1274–1314 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ), esp. – and –.
13. For an extract from Ludolph of Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land, see The Crusades:
A Documentary Survey, ed. James A. Brundage (Milwaukee, Wisc.: Marquette University Press, ), –.
14. The de excidio Acconis is discussed by Sylvia Schein, “Babylon and Jerusalem: The Fall
of Acre –,” in From Clermont to Jerusalem:The Crusades and Crusader Societies
1095–1500, ed. Alan V. Murray (Turnout: Brepols, ), –.
15. To this day, translations of Dante into Arabic and other languages used in the Islamic
world suppress canto  as intolerably offensive in its representation of Muhammad.
See the entry “Islam” in the Enciclopedia dantesca,  vols. (Rome: UTET, ), .
16. For the Aristotelian and Thomistic background to this idea in Dante, see Inferno
. and notes.
17. Texts and translations of Dante’s Comedy are from Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. by
Robert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert
M. Durling (New York: Oxford, ); from Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. by
Robert M. Durling, with Introduction and Notes by Ronald L. Martinez and Robert
M. Durling (New York: Oxford, forthcoming October ); and from Dante
Alighieri, Paradiso, trans. by Robert M. Durling, forthcoming.
18. The Christian treatment of Islam in the Middle Ages is outlined by Norman Daniel,
Islam and the West: The Making of an Image (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
). Representative texts by Peter the Venerable are edited and discussed by
James Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable and Islam (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, ).
19. See Kritzeck, Peter the Venerable, , as well as a widely known account like that of
Giovanni Villani’s Chronicle (.); Peter the Venerable’s own writing against Islam was
described by contemporaries as attacks with the “sword of the Word,” see Kritzeck,
, . That Alì became the titular head of the Shia, or schismatic branch of
Islam, in distinction to the Sunni branch, was in all likelihood known to Dante; the
division is carefully spelled out in Book , chap.  of William of Tyre’s late twelfthcentury account of the First Crusade, A History of Deeds Done Beyond the Sea, ed. E.
A. Babcock and A. C. Krey (New York: Columbia University Press, ),
:–, as well as in subsequent accounts such as Villani’s Chronicle.
20. For Christ’s body as distensus, see the Vitis mystica, PL . and ; for dilatatus
(said of Christ’s offer of charity, as if opening his breast or arms) see the Sermon on
the Seven Last Words of Ernoldus Bonaevallis, PL ..
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21. See for example the laconic commentary of Pecham, Expositio threnorum, : “Cum
hactenus Propheta planxerit civitatem, hic, mutata persona, introducit ipsam civitatem se ipsam plangentem.” [Whereas up to this point the Prophet bewailed the city,
here, with a change of person, the city itself is introduced, lamenting for itself. (translation mine)]
22. I refer chiefly to the text known as Hegesippus, edited in Migne among the works
of St. Ambrose (PL ) but in fact an anonymous work; there is a modern edition
by V. Ussani, Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V (CSEL ,  vols). For discussion of
this and other Christian versions of Josephus, see Amnon Linder and Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
).
23. See Hegesippus . (PL .), my translation.
24. See Fulcher of Chartres, A History of the Expedition to Jerusalem, trans. F. R. Ryan
(Knoxville, Tenn., ), . The anecdote was widespread; it is found also in the
twelfth-century Old French epic on the fall of Jerusalem, La venjance nostre seigneur,
vv. –, –. See Loyal A. T. Gryting, The Oldest Version of the Twelfth Century Poem ‘La venjánce Nostre Seigneur’ (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan
Press, ).
25. Benvenuto’s comment is translated in Daniels, Islam and the West, : “all the doctrine which entered [Muhammad’s] mind produced horrible error with which he
soiled and infected nearly all the world.”
26. “And because he violated the womb of the Church, he is represented by the author
divided in his belly from his chin to his anus . . .” [my translation]. See Guido da Pisa,
Commentary on Dante’s ‘Inferno’, ed. Vincenzo Cioffari (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, ), .
27. The text attributed to Bernard is as follows: “suspensus crepuit medius: plenus erat
venter, et ruptus est uter.” [“and, being hanged, split open in the middle: his belly was
filled, and his bowel burst” (my trans.)], PL .. Uter also denotes the womb,
however. See Ann Derbes and Mark Sandona, “Barren Metal and Fruitful Womb: The
Program of Giotto’s Arena Chapel in Padua,” Art Bulletin  (): –, esp.
–, .
28. The defamatory portrait in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscany and its contrapasso-like logic are discussed in Samuel Y. Edgerton, Pictures as Punishment (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ), –.
29. For the Islamic form of contrapasso, see the Libro della scala e La questione delle fonti
arabo-spagnole, ed. Enrico Cerulli (Città del Vaticano: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana,
), . Parallels with Dante’s Inferno, including that with the sowers of schism,
are discussed by Cerulli, – and by Maria Corti, “La ‘Commedia’ di Dante e
l’oltretomba islamico,” Belfagor  (): –.
30. The historical evidence on Fra Dolcino is surveyed by Rainieri Orioli, Venit perfidus
heresiarcha: Il movimento apostolico dolciniano dal 1260 al 1303 (Rome: Istituto storico
per il medioevo, ).

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31. Purg. ., which I do not discuss here, is “finds no rest,” from Lam. :, “nec invenit requiem.”
32. See Dante’s Epistles  and , which can be found with English translation in Toynbee,
Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, – and –.
33. For its late medieval and early Renaissance uses, see Gordon Kipling, Enter the King:
Theatre, Liturgy, and Ritual in the Medieval Civic Triumph (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
).
34. For Henry’s expedition, see William S. Bowsky, Henry VII in Italy: The Conflict of
Empire and City-State, 1310–1313 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press,
).
35. Perugi, “Il Sordello di Dante,” –.
36. For Pietro’s poem, see Giovanni Crocioni, Le rime di Piero Alighieri (Città di Castello: Lapi, ), –.
37. Testimonials can be found in André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, trans. Beth Archer
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ).
38. See Anthony K. Cassell’s entry, Monarchia, in the Dante Encyclopedia, ed. Richard
Lansing (New York: Garland, ), –.
39. The best and fullest account of Dante’s treatment of Francis and Franciscanism are
Niccolò Mineo’s two essays,“Il canto XI del ‘Paradiso’: La ‘vita’ di San Francesco nella
‘festa di paradiso,’” in Lectura dantis metelliana: I primi undici canti del ‘Paradiso,’ ed.
Attilio Mellone, O.F.M. (Rome: Bulzoni, ), –, and “Ancora su ‘Paradiso’
XII, –,” in Miscellanea di studi in memoria di Silvio Pasquazi, ed. A. Paolella et
al,  vols. (Naples: Federico & Ardia, ), :–. For the history of the Order
during this period, see John Moorman, A History of the Franciscan Order from its Origins to the Year 1517 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), esp. – and –.
40. For the Emperor as sun, see Epistle :–, in Toynbee, Dantis Alagherii Epistolae, .
41. There is a recent critical text, Sacrum commercium sancti Francisci cum domina Paupertate, ed. Stefano Brufani (Assisi: Porziuncola, ). For English translation of this
text and the lives of Francis see St. Francis of Assisi: Writings and Early Biographies; English Omnibus of the Sources for the Life of St.Francis, ed. Marion A. Habig (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, ), including Sacrum Commercium, or Francis and his Lady
Poverty, trans. with introduction and notes by Placid Hermann O.F.M. (–).
42. See Erich Auerbach, “St. Francis of Assisi in Dante’s ‘Commedia’” in Six Scenes from
the Drama of European Literature (New York: Meridian, ), –, esp. .
43. For this image, see Ronald Herzman, “Dante and Francis,” in Franciscan Studies 
(): –, esp. , .
44. For Dante’s self-reflexive emphases on a “Franciscan” humility, see ibid., ,
–.
45. For the text, see Habig, Omnibus, –.