28

For Dante’s disclaimer of the ability to describe the blood and wounds that surpass both words and memory (even were he to revert to prose to do so), see Virgil’s similar disclaimer in Aeneid VI.625–627: “And if I had a hundred tongues and as many mouths, along with a voice of iron, I could not put together all the shapes of crime nor run through all the catalogue of torments.” The passage was first cited by Pietro di Dante and is now a commonplace in the commentaries.

 

This elliptical version of a simile, so rich in its catalog of the horrors of war, involves four battles (or series of battles), two of them ancient, two modern, roughly as follows:

1150 B.C. ca.	Aeneas’s Trojans triumph in south and central Italy;
216 B.C.	Romans are defeated by the Carthaginians at Cannae;
1070 ca.	Robert Guiscard’s Normans defeat the Saracens;
1266 & 1268	Manfred, then Conradin, defeated by Charles of Anjou.

In this series of military actions the Roman and/or imperial side first wins, then loses disastrously. The intrinsic view of history here is more chaotic than directed. Absent is Dante’s more optimistic view of history unfolding as a Roman and Christian manifestation of the spirit moving through time to its appointed goal. And we might further reflect that winning and losing battles had little to do with one’s final destination in God’s plan: Aeneas wins, but is in Limbo (Inf.IV.122), Robert Guiscard wins and is in heaven (Par. XVIII.48), Manfred loses and is on his way to heaven (Purg.III.112).

For Dante’s relation to martial epic, a genre surely drawn to our attention by these scenes of war, see Hollander (Holl.1989.1). While Dante’s position here would also seem to look down on “mere” martial epic, with all its pointless slaughter, he nonetheless reveals an aptitude for the genre.

 

Puglia (Apulia) here, most commentators agree, is meant in its wider sense, i.e., not only the southeast portion of the Italian peninsula, but the region including Lazio. The Trojans are then Aeneas and his men (some believe the reference is to the later Romans). The “long war” is the second Punic War (218-201 B.C.), during which the Romans suffered a terrible defeat at the hands of Hannibal’s Carthaginian forces at Cannae (216 B.C.) in Apulia. Historians relate that after the battle a Carthaginian envoy showed the Roman senate the vast number of gold rings taken from the fingers of noble Romans killed in the battle.

 

The problem of the extent of Dante’s knowledge of Livy remains a vexed one. Commentators point out that Dante here would rather seem to be following Orosius (or Augustine) than Livy, but still appeals to Livy as the most authoritative historian on Rome. His vast compendium, Ab urbe condita, did not come through the ages intact; precisely which parts of it were known to Dante is not known to us.

 

Robert Guiscard, a Norman, won many victories in Puglia ca. 1060–80 to consolidate his power as duke of the region, including what for Dante was the most important one, that over the Saracens, which apparently helped to gain him his place in Paradiso (XVIII.48).

 

The text alludes to Manfred’s disastrous loss, occasioned, in Dante’s view, by the betrayal of his Apulian allies, at the battle near Ceperano that was prologue to his final defeat and death at the hands of the forces of the French king Charles of Valois at the battle of Benevento (1266). Manfred is the first saved soul found once Dante begins his ascent of the mount of purgatory (Purg.III.112).

 

Two years after the defeat at Benevento, the Ghibelline forces, now under Conradin, grandson of the emperor Frederick II, suffered their final defeat near Tagliacozzo, in the Abruzzi, again at the hands of the forces of Charles of Anjou, who, after the battle, had Conradin put to death, thus ending the Hohenstaufen succession in Italy. Alardo was the French knight Érard de Valéry, who gave Charles the strategic advice that gained him military advantage on the field.

 

This image, suggesting layers of excavated battlefields, each containing vast areas of wounded soldiers holding out their mutilated limbs, gives us some sense of Dante’s view of the end result of war, sheer human butchery. Bosco/Reggio suggest that this bolgia bring into mind the image of a huge slaughterhouse.

For the Virgilian resonance (Aen.II.361–362) of these lines, see Tommaseo’s comment: this is Aeneas’s response when he must tell the terrible carnage during the night of the fall of Troy.

 

This disgusting image of Mohammed derives from Dante’s conviction that the prophet was in fact a Christian whose schismatic behavior took the form of founding (in 630) what Dante considered a rival sect rather than a new religion, Islam. Thus Mohammed reveals himself as divided in two.

 

Alì, disciple, cousin, and son-in-law of Mohammed, became the fourth leader of the Muslims. But the issues surrounding his succession in 656 divided them into two factions, Sunni and Shiite, that continue to this day.

 

All punished here are described by this verse. “Scandal,” in this sense, means a promulgated doctrine that leads others to stumble and lose their way to the truth. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II–II, q. 43, a. 1, resp., on the Greek word σκάνδαλον, or “stumbling block.” Thus all here either caused schism in others of themselves lead schismatic groups, the first three religious (Mohammed, Alì, Fra Dolcino), the last five political (Pier da Medicina, Malatestino, Curio, Mosca, Bertran de Born).

 

The unseen devil of this ditch joins the cast of devils of the Malebolge, the whippers of the first bolgia and the hookers of the fifth. In this case there seems to be one devil alone, perhaps intended to remind the reader of the solitary Cherub, with flaming sword, sent to guard the Garden after Adam and Eve had been ejected from it (Gen.3.24). (See Purgatorio VIII.25–27, where this passage is more clearly alluded to.) It is only in Malebolge that we find such creatures.

 

Mohammed evidently believes that Dante is one of the dead sinners. But how or why he thinks that such as they can loiter in hell, doing a bit of sightseeing before they go to judgement, is not easily explained. Virgil’s response (v. 49) makes it clear that only he, in this pair of visitors, is a dead soul.

 

Disabused of his erring view, Mohammed uses the occasion to send a message to his fellow in religious schism, Fra Dolcino. A northerner, from Novara (balancing the southern setting of the opening of the canto), Dolcino Tornielli was the head, from ca. 1300, of a group known as the Apostolic Brethren (gli Apostolici). This “order” had as its aim the restoration of the simplicity of apostolic times to the Christian religion. Its enemies accused Dolcino of holding heretical ideas, such as the community of goods and women. It did not help Dolcino’s case that he was accompanied by a beautiful woman, Margaret of Trent, reputed to be his mistress. Pope Clement V preached a crusade against the Brethren in 1305. In 1307, starved out by their enemies in the high country to which they had retreated, the Brethren were captured. Margaret and Dolcino were burned at the stake.

 

Mohammed’s placement of his suspended foot is read by some as a mere “realistic detail.” Rasha Al-Sabah (Alsa.1977.1) argues for an iconographic reading, based in a passage in St. Thomas on Proverbs 6:12–19, in which “a wicked man with lying mouth, sowing discord,” has “feet that are swift in running to mischief.” His posture, one foot suspended, may also refer to the Greek term “σκάνδαλον,” for “stumbling block,” found at v.35.

 

This blooded figure, thus sliced by the sword-wielding devil, will be revealed as Pier da Medicina at v. 73. For the reminiscence of Virgil’s description of the disfigured visage of Deiphobus (Aen. VI.494–497), similarly deprived of his nose, see Scartazzini’s commentary and many later ones as well.

 

Pier opens his windpipe to speak, since the devil’s cut had wounded him there, thus preventing his breath from reaching his mouth.

 

The early commentators are not sure exactly who Pier of Medicina (a town between Bologna and Imola) was, but Dante and he apparently knew one another. While the nature of his schismatic behavior thus lies in shadow, the fact that his ensuing remarks refer to political intrigue would seem to mark him also as a political, rather than a religious, schismatic.

 

Pier refers, in his prophecy, which parallels that given by Mohammed, initially to two victims of “schism,” Guido del Cassero and Angiolello di Carignano, first identified by Guiniforto in 1440, and then to the victimizer, Malatestino Malatesta, lord of Rimini. (He is referred to as “the younger mastiff” in the last canto at v. 46.) The details are not known to any commentators, but apparently Dante knew that these two leaders of the city of Fano were tricked by Malatestino into coming to confer with him at the town of La Cattolica. His men caught them in their ship on their way (or after they left) and drowned them.

 

Unriddled, the passage means that the entire Mediterranean Sea never witnessed so great a crime. For the phrase “gente argolica,” meaning “Greeks,” a synecdoche based on the part (the denizens of Argos) for the whole (Greece), see Aeneid II.78, as was noted in Torraca’s commentary (1905).

 

Malatestino, one-eyed, holds Rimini, the city that Curio (v. 102) wishes he had never seen (because it was there that he offered the advice that condemns him to this punishment).

 

The two men of Fano (v. 76) will have no need of prayer for help against the tricky winds off Focara’s point because they will be dead.

 

Dante, his appetite whetted by Pier’s elliptical phrasing at v. 87, wants him to expand.

 

Pier opens the tongueless mouth of Curio, seen as a schismatic for his advice to Caesar to march on Rome, thus destroying the republic and causing the civil wars. For Curio in Lucan and Dante see Stul.1991.1, pp. 27–28.

 

The description of Mosca dei Lamberti is one of the most affecting in this canto filled with affective moments. Mosca was among those Florentine citizens mentioned by Dante (Inf. VI.80) as having attempted to do good in the divided city; for his crime, of those mentioned he is the farthest down in hell. A fervent Ghibelline, in 1216 he urged the murder of Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, who, engaged to a girl of the Amidei family, married a Donati instead. The result of this killing was the origin of the bitter rivalry between the Amidei and the Donati, Ghibellines and Guelphs respectively, and of the civil discord that tore Florence apart. Mosca is thus seen as a modern-day Curio, urging the powerful to do what in their hearts they must have known was not to be done.

His words, “a done deed finds its purpose,” so mercilessly laconic, now cause him enough by way of regret that we can sense some justification in Dante’s original characterization of him.

 

The unseen devil of this ditch joins the cast of devils of the Malebolge, the whippers of the first bolgia and the hookers of the fifth. In this case there seems to be one devil alone, perhaps intended to remind the reader of the solitary Cherub, with flaming sword, sent to guard the Garden after Adam and Eve had been ejected from it (Gen.3.24). (See Purgatorio VIII.25–27, where this passage is more clearly alluded to.) It is only in Malebolge that we find such creatures.

 

The poet’s self-assurance, playful though it certainly is, may offend some readers. He can narrate what is to follow because he knows he actually saw the next scene, a shade carrying his severed head.

 

Bertran de Born, one of the great poets of war of his or any time (and thus greatly admired by Ezra Pound in the last century) loved to see destruction of towns and men. One thinks of Robert Duvall’s character in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, who loved the smell of napalm in the morning. It is often pointed out that v. 132 is a reprise of a passage in the Lamentations of Jeremiah (Lament. 1:12), already cited by Dante in the opening verses of an “exploded” sonnet in his Vita nuova (VII.1–3) to express his own solitary sadness in love. In a sense, they are part of Bertran’s punishment, the “tough guy” portrayed as self-pitying.

Bertran was a Gascon nobleman of the second half of the twelfth century. His poetry, written in Provençal, which is reflected in several passages in this canto, is not the subject of his discourse. Rather, he condemns himself for his implacable schismatic actions at the English court, where he supported and encouraged the rebellious plotting of Prince Henry against his own father, Henry II, king of the realm. For a text that encapsulates the problem presented in Bertran and all the other political schismatics, see Luke 11:17: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (cited by Marianne Shapiro [Shap.1974.1], p. 114).

For the reference to Ahitophel’s similar support and encouragement of Absalom’s rebellion against his father, King David, see II Samuel 15:7—18:15.

 

The word contrapasso is generally understood to be based on an Aristotelian term in its Latin translation, contrapassum, used in the same sense that the biblical concept of retribution, expressed in the Latin lex talionis (the taking of an eye for an eye, etc.), is understood to have. That is, one does something wrong and receives the appropriate punishment for doing it. Out of the Hebrew and Aristotelian concept (the latter refined by Thomas’s commentary on Aristotle), Dante supposedly developed this idea, which is given a name here, but had been operative since we saw the first sinners in hell, the neutrals, in Canto III. For a lengthy and helpful gloss, see Singleton on this verse. Valerio Lucchesi (Lucc.1991.1) has mounted a complex argument attempting to deny this positive understanding of the term by Dante on the basis of its instability as a concept that St. Thomas actually embraces.