The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

back door near the kitchen of her palace at Verona. And as there was in the street a dirty slough in which the swine wallowed, and puddles of filthy water, so that the place would seem in no way suspicious, he caused himself to be carried by her servant to the door where Cunizza stood ready to receive him. Ezzelino having heard of this, one evening, disguised as a servant, carried Sordello, and brought him bacli. Which done, he discovered himself to Sordello., and said, ‘Enough; abstain in future from doing so foul a deed in so foul a place.’ Sordello, terrified, humbly besought pardon; promising never more to return to his sister. But the accursed Cunizza again enticed him into his former error. Wherefore, fearing Ezzelino, the most formidable man of his time, he left the city. But Ezzelino, as some say, afterwards had him put to death.”

He says, moreover, that Dante places Sordello alone and separate from the others, like Saladin in Inferno IV 129, on account of his superiority, or because he wrote a book entitled “The Treasure of Treasures”; and that Sordello was a Mantuan of the village of Goïto⁠—“beautiful of person, valiant of spirit, gentle of manner.”

Finally, Quadrio, Storia d’ogni Poesia, II 130, easily cuts the knot which no one can untie; but unfortunately he does not give his authorities. He writes:⁠—

“Sordello, native of Goïto, (Sordel de Goi,) a village in the Mantuan territory, was born in 1184, and was the son of a poor knight named Elcort.” He then repeats the story of Count Saint Boniface, and of Sordello’s reception by Count Raymond in Provence, and adds: “Having afterwards returned to Italy, he governed Mantua with the title of Regent and Captain-General; and was opposed to the tyrant Ezzelino, being a great lover of justice, as Agnelli writes. Finally he died, very old and full of honor, about 1280. He wrote not only in Provençal, but also in our own common Italian tongue; and he was one ot those poets who avoided the dialect of his own province, and used the good, choice language, as Dante affirms in his book of Volgar Eloquenza.”

If the reader is not already sufficiently confused, he can easily become so by turning to Tiraboschi, Storia della Lett. Ital., IV 360, where he will find the matter thoroughly discussed, in sixteen solid pages, by the patient librarian of Modena, who finally gives up in despair and calls on the Royal Academy for help;

“But that were overbold;⁠—
Who would has heard Sordello’s story told.”

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Before Dante’s time Fra Guittone had said, in his famous Letter to the Florentines:⁠—

“O queen of cities, court of justice, school of wisdom, mirror of life, and mould of manners, whose sons were kings, reigning in every land, or were above all others, who art no longer queen but servant, oppressed and subject to tribute! no longer court of justice, but cave of robbers, and school of all folly and madness, mirror of death and mould of felony, whose great strength is stripped and broken, whose beautiful face is covered with foulness and shame; whose sons are no longer kings but vile and wretched servants, held, wherever they go, in opprobrium and derision by others.”

See also Petrarca, Canzone XVI, Lady Dacre’s Tr., beginning:⁠—

“O my own Italy! though words are vain
The mortal wounds to close,
Unnumbered, that thy beauteous bosom stain,
Yet may it soothe my pain
To sigh for the Tiber’s woes,
And Arno’s wrongs, as on Po’s saddened shore
Sorrowing I wander and my numbers pour.”

And Filicaja’s sonnet:⁠—

“Italy! Italy! thou who ‘rt doomed to wear
The fatal gift of beauty, and possess
The dower funest of infinite wretchedness,
Written upon thy forehead by despair;
Ah! would that thou wert stronger, or less fair,
That they might fear thee more, or love thee less,
Who in the splendor of thy loveliness
Seem wasting, yet to mortal combat dare!
Then from the Alps I should not see descending
Such torrents of armed men, nor Gallic horde
Drinking the wave of Po, distained with gore,
Nor should I see thee girded with a sword
Not thine, and with the stranger’s arm contending,
Victor or vanquished, slave forevermore.”

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Gibbon, Decline and Fall, Ch. XLIV, says:⁠—

“The vain titles of the victories of Justinian are crumbled into dust; but the name of the legislator is inscribed on a fair and everlasting monument. Under his reign, and by his care, the civil jurisprudence was digested in the immortal works of the Code, the Pandects, and the Institutes; the public reason of the Romans has been silently or studiously transfused into the domestic institutions of Europe, and the laws of Justinian still command the respect or obedience of independent nations. Wise or fortunate is the prince who connects his own reputation with the honor and interest of a perpetual order of men.”

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Luke 12:17:⁠—

“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

And in the Vision of Piers Ploughman, 563:⁠—

“Reddite Caesari, quod God,
That Caesari bifalleth,
Et quae sunt Dei Deo,
Or ellis ye don ille.”

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Albert, son of the Emperor Rudolph, was the second of the house of Hapsburg who bore the title oi King of the Romans. He was elected in 1298, but never went to Italy to be crowned. He came to an untimely and violent death, by the hand of his nephew John, in 1308. This is the judgment of Heaven to which Dante alludes.

His successor was Henry of Luxembourg, Dante’s “divine and triumphant Henry,” who, in 1311, was crowned at Milan with the Iron Crown of Lombardy, Il Sacro Chiodo, as it is sometimes called, from the plate of iron with which the crown is lined, being, according to tradition, made from a nail of the Cross. In 1312, he was again crowned with the Golden