This piece is part of a longer essay I wrote in June of 2006 about a trip my wife and I took to Florence in July of 2006. I offer it now, in February, 2020, to honor Saint Valentine.
My sticky-notes in the Blue Guide marked the Orsanmichele, a massive, oddly-shaped building built by Florence’s guilds as a grain warehouse in the 14th century atop an ancient shrine to St. Michael, as Sunday morning’s touristic target, but since it’s still a consecrated church, it was closed on Sunday except to the faithful. Not for the first time I thought of posing as a good Papist and sneaking in anyway. But I haven’t attended a Catholic mass since my first wife and I parted ways, and I knew I’d get caught crossing myself at the wrong time, or kneeling when I should have been standing, and what I remembered of the responses were in Latin, not Italian. In any case, Patsy, nominally raised as a Unitarian (“What do you believe in?” “Whaddya got?”), is too honest to pretend to a faith she lacks.
So instead we wandered into Dante’s neighborhood, the warren of medieval streets north of the Piazza della Signoria. On Sunday morning the area was blessedly devoid of motor traffic, and we were able to get pleasantly lost in peace. The houses on both sides of the streets, rebuilt, to be sure, many times over the centuries but still following their original medieval designs, project outward from their first stories, the upper levels supported by sporti, massive triangular brackets, originally wood, replaced by stone in the 16th century when wooden houses destroyed by fire were rebuilt in stone themselves. The streets are narrow enough that the projecting upper stories almost meet halfway across, shadowing the sunlight and creating an effect not so much claustrophobic as cozy- at least today, when the gutters between the stone cart-tracks, which originally ran with raw sewage, have long been paved over. Yet you can still make out, by a difference in the paving-slabs, where the cart-tracks ran, and with the iron sconces projecting from the sporti, designed for torches, with heavy rings depending from them for hitching up horses, contribute to a sense of time-slippage in the old streets. In Dante’s time, and well into the 19th century, the ground floors of the houses were for food storage and livestock- chickens, geese, goats, perhaps a milk-cow or a sheep or two- and the large families crowded into the upper stories. But the city’s building site was severely restricted by the Arno to the south, and by hilly terrain at the other points of the compass, and in addition, from ancient times it had been surrounded by a hefty defensive wall. As Florence’s population grew, there was no place to build but up. So unlike ancient houses in similarly well-preserved medieval precincts elsewhere in Europe, the upper projections of Florence’s can run to three, four or even five additional stories. Hence the invention of sporti, to bear the extra weight.
But cramped conditions weren’t the only reason the medieval Florentines erected their high-rises. Until things more or less settled down by the late sixteenth century, the city was in a state of constant minor warfare. Other city-states, notoriously Siena, attacked from time to time; changing alliances involved Florence in the larger wars of the Papal States, the Holy Roman Empire, the Kingdom of Naples, France and Spain. And of course the prominent families of the city itself, with their adherents and factions, consistently came to blows with one another. So by the time Dante was born, Florence had became a city of towers, tall fortified bastions for the aristocracy interspersed with the only slightly lower houses of the alti borghese.
The Casa di Dante is a fair guess, a reconstruction, based on firm archeological research, erected in 1911, not of the specific house where the poet was born, which is long gone, but of a typical high-bourgeois house of that period. We expected it would be closed on Sunday, but Saint Serendipity smiled on us again. No line, no tour-groups; we bought our tickets and went right in. Or rather, up, since it reflects medieval Florence’s high-rise style, and connects at its top floor with the restored 13th century Torre dei Donati, built by the quarrelsome family of Dante’s wife Gemma. Yikes, more climbing…
The curators of the Dante House have avoided (wisely, I think) trying to turn it into an exact copy of a 14th century Florentine dwelling. Instead, it’s a thoroughly modern little museum, with displays of period furniture, crockery, glassware and other household items displayed judiciously in the small rooms of its three upper stories, and a good many instructional wall-panels in many languages. There’s a quite wonderful aerial view of Florence in its tower days- grattacieli is what the Florentines called them, which, yes, means “sky-scrapers”- and detailed schematics of a typical tower-plan. The ground floor, as in the humbler houses, was a mews and storage area, but it also generally housed a private well or at least a cistern, and served as an armory and mustering area for the tower’s men-at-arms. The great families lived in the tiers above, and the houses of their retainers, clustered about the keep, were connected by upper-story walkways to doors high up in the tower, so that in case of attack everyone could cram into the lofty fortified structure and wait it out, or even fight it off. Originally there were no stairs. Instead, the levels of the tower were reached via broad-runged ladders to trap-doors in the floors of each storey, which could be pulled up successively if the enemy succeeded in breaching the heavy door on the ground floor. And the kitchen, with its open hearth and fire-pit, its spits and vast cauldrons, was on the roof, both to dispel smoke and also, at need, to provide a platform for archers and crossbowmen. In addition to cooking the food, in times of trouble the open-air kitchens heated boiling water and oil which could be poured down on attackers. The Florentine tower was an urban version of a medieval castle, adapted to its compact location. And unlike a castle in the open country, it was immune to siege-engines lobbing massive rocks because there was no room to deploy them in the dense web of cramped streets. Properly supplied, the Donati and other prominent families could more or less ignore the turmoil below them until the crisis passed.
And the crises were certainly numerous in Dante’s time. The Casa di Dante staff has done a good job of clarifying, as much as possible, the brutal struggles of the Guelphs and the Ghibellines over mastery of the city. Even after the Guelph faction prevailed, it promptly split into White and Black Guelphs, the former siding with the Papal States which encouraged the rise of the guilds and the merchant class, the latter allied with the Holy Roman Emperor and the hereditary aristocrats. Dante’s family, the Alighieri, were Bianchi, and the poet supported his faction outspokenly in meetings of the Signoria, for like every other educated Florentine of his era he was committed to politics at least as much as he was devoted to his writing. But the Nero faction, headed by the Donati family, prevailed. And despite the fact that Dante had married into it, he was exiled to Ravenna. I don’t think his wife Gemma accompanied him.
We did get into the church where Dante and Gemma were married. Santa Margherita de Cerchi’s nave is a looming Romanesque space begun in the 11th century, with an exquisite early 15th century altarpiece by Neri di Bicci. But after admiring it, I tried to block it out and imagine the church in its older, starker form, trying to conjure up the young poet-politician formally joining himself by marriage to the powerful Donati clan in front of an altar bare of everything but a gaunt wooden rood and corpus. I wondered what went wrong with the marriage, and how Dante mustered the courage to defy his wife’s family by clinging to his Alighieri family’s Bianco allegiance, knowing it would cost him his comfortable life in Florence after the Neri prevailed. There is the Beatrice factor, to be sure, and her family, the Portinari, were Bianchi. But the scant historical record about that relationship has it that Dante clapped eyes on Beatrice Portinari only once, when she was nine years old, and he got kicked out of Florence before she grew up enough for a love affair. There’s some doubt as to whether he ever saw her again before her untimely death in her teens.
But it’s fair to say, from the evidence of the Purgatorio and the Paradiso, in which the shade of Beatrice serves as Dante’s guide, replacing Virgil in the Inferno, that Dante had a courtly love affair with Beatrice, and a perfect one. In La Vita Nuova, his meditation on unrequited love as a profound inspiration for poets, he never mentions the girl, but it’s clear that Beatrice is the object of his sublimated, sorrowful passion.
Courtly love began as a fad among the nobility of southern France in the 12th century and quickly spread to northern France, England, Germany and Italy. It was a complicated, highly artificial game born of a certain new measure of cultural sophistication among the nobles of Europe, whose grandfathers had set off with Tancred and Bohemund on the First Crusade as so many hairy barbarians (however inspired by religious zeal), and had returned civilized, to some extent, by their encounter with the relatively refined cultures of Byzantium and the Islamic world. The initial horrifically bloody conquest of Jerusalem and the equally brutal establishment of a Latin Christian Kingdom on the eastern shore of the Mediterranean made trade with the Near East stable and highly profitable, and along with musical, medical, architectural, mathematical and even sartorial innovations, new social notions spread to Western Europe. The “Turk” was still an evil servant of the Antichrist, at least according to the Pope, but in person he proved a courteous enemy, certainly no crueler on the battlefield than the Christian knights, and when not out fighting he lived a lot more comfortably and gracefully than they did. In addition, his Qur’an (or at least the gentler Meccan sections of it) enjoined him to honor and respect women, even granting them supreme management of all domestic affairs, the right to retain in her own name all property she had brought to a marriage after her husband’s death (and even to sue for it in court if the right was disputed), and all manner of perquisites and benefits, including the right to divorce if her husband was unfaithful or unduly brutal, which were entirely unknown to women, even the highest-born, in the West at the time.
I have often wondered if the cult of the Virgin Mary which sprang up during the Western European 12th century was in part inspired by the relatively enlightened place women, at least the Senior Wives of a potentate, enjoyed in “Saracen” society. In any case, during the 12th and early 13th centuries the Mother of Christ almost replaced her Son as an object of veneration, regarded as the compassionate, womanly intercessor between sinful man and the unmerciful talons of the Angry God. The glorious Gothic-style churches and cathedrals which began to spring up across Western Europe were almost all dedicated to Mary, their construction made possible by new prosperity owing to the widening of trade with the East. And although high-born Western women were still regarded by their kingly or princely fathers as corporate assets to be traded for advantage in merger deals, at least a few of them began to take some control of their own destinies. Eleanor of Aquitaine parlayed her title to vast holdings in Anjou and the Vexin to make advantageous marriages with two Kings and one Holy Roman Emperor, and she outlived them all. She also set up her own court in France, to which she invited poets, musicians and goliards, the wandering students who ranged all over Europe, dropping in to study with masters of scholastic debate at the fledgling universities of Paris, Wittenberg, Milan and Padua, cultivating their theological debating skills and vast appetites for sex, drinking, secular poetry and music.
Eleanor may have fostered the early notion of courtly love, but it was her daughter, Marie de Champagne, abetted by the poets she attracted to her own court, who developed it fully. It was a highly ambiguous game, played by aristocrats who were still firmly bound by religious orthodoxy and the socio-sexual customs of their time. Marriage was a coldly-arranged financial arrangement which often involved the betrothal of children, even infants. But people always manage to find loopholes in the law, and human sexuality can’t be denied, Courtly love, as set up chez la Duchesse de Champagne and expressed in archly-codified language in the prose reworkings of the Arthurian legend by Chrétien de Troyes, and in the poetry and songs of the troubadours and trovères, was an attempt to formalize, and control, adultery. It was also a way to curb the violence endemic to a society in which the knightly class, trained as warriors since childhood, tended to spend their time between officially-sanctioned wars- the large-scale conflicts between Kings and Princes, and especially the Crusades- in feuding with one another. By the 12th century the population of Western Europe was on a growth spurt, owing to improved agricultural techniques, prosperity brought about by increased trade, and particularly a long lull between deadly epidemics. There was something of a glut of highly-trained noblemen-at-arms with not enough to do. The Knights Hospitalers and Knights Templars, orders of monastic warriors, set up originally to shepherd pilgrims on their way to the Holy Land, siphoned off some of the bored professional killers, but not every young nobleman had a monastic calling.
With perfect synergy, the tournament, highly refined from its 11th-century origins in the mêlée, a brutal war exercise involving mass armored cavalry charges, to something approaching a sport, albeit a very dangerous one, involving single combat with blunted weapons, subject to elaborate rules, appeared at the same time as courtly love became an aristocratic fad. Tournaments rapidly became big business. Great magnates would sponsor the grandest ones, generally as a way of avoiding actual wars between one another. They might last for several weeks, with temporary market-towns springing up around the lists where the knights contended. Goods were circulated, money changed hands, and by the rules of the game, which dictated that a vanquished knight lost his expensive armor and even more expensive destrier, a vast charger bred and trained for combat, one of the growing throng of nobly-born but penniless knights could amass fortunes.
They were also wonderful shows. Identifying friend from foe in large battles had been a problem since William the Bastard had to lift his helmet at Hastings to identify himself to his men in the confused fighting around the Saxon shield-wall, and as closed casques replaced the open helm-with-nose-protector of the 11th century, a knight could only be known by the blazons on his shield and on the surcoat covering his chain-mail hauberk. Heralds, essentially the referees and umpires of the tournaments, soon had to train themselves in the bewildering variety of devices sported by the jousters, and colleges of heraldry were born. Things got even more complicated because there was a lot of high-stakes betting at tournaments from their beginning, and a famous champion like Guillaume le Maréschal, a man from the petty Anglo-Norman nobility who gained enormous wealth not only from the expensive spoils he took from the knights he defeated, but also by betting on himself, would adopt elaborate disguises in the lists, inventing armorial bearings drawn from tales of King Arthur’s Round Table knights and Charlemagne’s Paladins, to attract opponents who otherwise wouldn’t have dared face him.
The brilliant, elaborate costumes of the knights, the emblazoned banners and pennants whipping from poles above the tourney-grounds, the splendid tents and pavilions of the magnates, and the martial flourishes announcing each bout, played on olifants, shawms and tambours only barely evolved from their combat use to signal troop-movements, provided an intoxicating atmosphere even a Super Bowl Game or a World Cup soccer match can’t quite equal today, for of course it was undercut with a plangent cantus firmus of blood-lust. Despite the blunted weapons, a lot of knights died in tournaments, and in fact a special type of song, the “chanson de toile” was invented by the poet-composers of the 12th and 13th centuries, in which a lady, sitting at her spinning wheel, laments the death of her courtly lover, killed in a joust.
Probably wearing her colors. For the ladies were the most novel part of the spectacle. Wearing the new fabrics- silks and samites imported from the East, in colors which rivaled in gaudiness those on the surcoats of the knights, cut to a new, figure-flattering style, and seated in their own cordoned-off area of the grandstand, their mere presence signaled a profound change in the social order, at least among the aristocratic class. In the 11th century when the mêlées were invented to keep young warriors combat-fit between campaigns (and eliminate the weaker ones), women were generally barred from attending. But Eleanor of Aquitaine’s canny rebellion against male domination, even though it failed in the end, cast a long shadow, and the ladies found themselves basically calling the tunes at the tournaments. Courtly love urged young knights to pledge themselves to ladies who were often married to more powerful men. Indeed, the young wife of a knight’s own elderly liege lord was an ideal choice. But the love-pledge, in theory, was strictly abstract. It was supposed to be an amor de lonh, a love-from-a-distance. By pledging his honor, his loyalty, the strength of his arm to defend her against all enemies, and further, by promising her eternal love, eternally unconsummated because he was unworthy of her, in fact the pledge cemented the pledge he’d already made to his liege lord. He was supposed to do prodigious feats of arms in her honor, spend his every waking moment pining after her and composing poetry to her always-remote charms, but he wasn’t supposed to fuck her. At first glance the ritual was the secular equivalent of the monk taking holy orders who devotes himself, passionately but chastely, to the Virgin Mary (or his counterpart, the nun who becomes the bride of Christ).
Okey dokey, so in the tournament the Knight of the Burning Pestle in all his gorgeous panoply approaches the grandstand before facing his opponent and dedicates his lance to the lovely wife of old Baron Cornuto. She leans prettily down, exposing a bit of cleavage, and gives him her scarf, or even one of her garters, which he ties around his arm or mounts on his helm, and rides off to the joust. If he gets unhorsed, well, he wasn’t worthy of her anyway. If he gets killed, what a glorious proof of his love! If he wins, it’s even better for her, because she can set him more challenging tasks involving potential loss of life and limb to prove the sincerity of his dedication. Legend has it that a German knight and minnesinger (Teutonic troubadour), possibly Wolfram von Essenbach himself, whose courtly romance Parzifal inspired Wagner, was given his lady’s polished silver hand-mirror as a token and told to mount it in the center of his shield. She then ordered him to set up his standard at the conflux of the Rhine and the Moselle and challenge all comers to combat- but with the codicil that he’d be dismissed from her favor if he returned the mirror with a single scratch. He gave it back to her unscathed, but being unable to use his shield efficiently, even tyro knights bonked him off his horse and beat him up so badly that he returned to the lady only to expire in her arms. Stuff of a great chanson de toile.
But those were the rules, and the lady at the tournament knows them. And her lordly old husband is just going heh heh heh, these kids today, secure in his conviction that it’s just a game.
Still, Eleanor and Marie, canny women both, must have known how much they’d empowered women (if only aristocratic ones) with their courts of love, and it’s hard to believe they thought anyone would really keep his or her love at a chaste distance. Sure, some of the most heart-piercingly beautiful songs composed by the troubadours, most of whom were knights themselves, lament the agony of unconsummated love a lot more powerfully, though the same in essence, as contemporary pop songs directed at male teenagers about unattainable teen-goddesses. But the chaste lament of the chanson de toile is paralleled by another type of song which clearly indicates that everyone broke the rules. It’s the aubade, or dawn-song, sometimes a duet, in which the young knight has spent the night fucking his lady silly while her husband is away from the castle, and it usually involves her trying to wake him and get him the hell out, because the bribed tower-guard has alerted her that the old fool is crossing the drawbridge. Yup, the origin of the dawn-scene in Romeo and Juliet, written three centuries later, with the Nurse standing in for the 12th century gaité de la tour. What the hell, it’s an immortal story: every culture mocks the old man given the horns by his young wife. And Chrétien de Troyes himself, Marie’s protégé, was open about the adulterous affair between Guinevere and Lancelot. The courtly love artifice never stood a chance, and sometimes I think Eleanor and her daughter knew exactly what they were doing when they set up a system with the seeds of its own destruction built in.
But it should be said that a lot of people, in what was, after all, an age of faith, did take courtly love very seriously, as a semi-religious way to deflect their sexual energies into what seemed to be more productive channels. And I submit that Dante was one of them. He fell profoundly in love (and I do believe it was genuine) with a nine-year-old girl, based on one brief glimpse of her, and because he wasn’t a pederast, and was locked in a joyless marriage with a daughter of the family which tried to destroy him, he sublimated his amor de lonh to fire the creation of the greatest work of medieval literature.