September 29, 2010 • 23 mins
When Dante wrote The Divine Comedy, he consigned several of his real-life enemies to hell. In this podcast, Katie and Sarah examine Dante's habit of putting his enemies in his fiction, focusing on five people the average Florentine would have known.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Katie, I've
noticed it's getting a little bit cooler yet, just not
(00:22):
in our office, but everywhere else, a little bit of
fall in the year. When when fall comes to Georgia,
it's so lovely because it's normally so humid and hot here.
And when fall comes to Georgia, I start to think
about Halloween, and I know you do too, because, as
most of our listeners know, Katie and I love Halloween,
we love costumes and just getting in the seasonal spirit
(00:43):
of it all. I'm still trying to decide on mine
because I'm torn between the Cannibal Queen or poly Chrome
from the Wizard of Oz series. But no one would
know what I loved that was a dragon con inspired costume.
I mention that, um, so you are in luck if
you like how Queen too, because we're gonna spend October
filling our slate with lots of fun, spooky, scary episode
(01:06):
so we'll cover all sorts of basses. And since Halloween
is after all, all Hallow's Eve, we thought it would
be only right to start our series with a visit
to the underworld. Yeah, we're gonna be taking a literary
angle with this episode, though, and a historical angle of course,
And we're gonna be visiting the underworld with Dante, who
(01:28):
of course began his epic poem The Divine Comedy with
a jaunt through the Inferno. And we're gonna look at
five people who Dante cast into help and try to
figure out how they ended up there, why he put
them there, what the whole story is. And we have
to give a preemptive thanks to Molly who helped us
with a lot of the Italian pronunciations to me who
(01:51):
suggested this very town true from the stuff Mom Never
Told You podcast. So thanks Molly. Let's give you a
little background. A fourteenth century Italian would recognize not only
the allegories in the Inferno, but the real people, and
you would recognize some of them Cleopatra, Alexander, the Great, Saladine, Cassius,
and you'd also recognize biblical figures like Judas who's famously
(02:15):
writhing in Satan's mouth, and mythological figures like Jason. But
the fourteenth century Italian would also recognize people that they
knew or that their families knew. Like you know, if
you picked up the latest bestseller and saw celebrities, politicians,
and perhaps your own neighbors consigned to hell. Pretty serious stuff.
So this is what makes the Divine Comedy not just
(02:38):
a brilliant piece of literature and not just a powerful
universal allegory that still appeals to us today, still can
make sense to us today. It makes it because it's
so timely in local the inferno becomes a powerful weapon too,
and consigning your enemies to the worst possible torments imaginable.
(02:59):
If you do out, you can taint their reputations for
a literary eternity. So yeah, five points were done to podcast.
So for this list, we've picked five people who your
average Florentine would have known, but who you may not know. Um.
People like Cleopatri and Alexander of course get their own
episodes after all, but these do not. So to understand
(03:23):
who they are and why Dante cast them and how,
we have to understand of course, where he's coming from
and when he wrote the comedy, he was in exile,
which was a very serious issue for a man in
the early. Yeah, something to think about here would be
Romeo and Juliet. It's such a big deal when Romeo
is exiled from Verona. It's not like you can just
(03:43):
go move and settle down in the town next door.
Your city is also your state, and without citizenship, you
just become a wanderer. You have no family, you have
no income, you're you're reliant on anybody who will help
you out. So during his decades of exile, Dante lives
as a guest in people's houses, he travels perhaps all
(04:06):
the way to paris Um, and he's separated from his family.
So writing this master work of literature in exile is
a pretty awesome act of revenge well, and it's also
a declaration of love for a city that he eventually
realizes he's never going to be able to come back to.
So why is Dante exiled? And you're gonna have to
(04:26):
bear with us for a little bit because this story
starts long before Dante is even born. Comes out of
a power struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope,
and everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie. And
as we've seen over and over in our podcast, Northern
Italy is where it's at. It's where everyone is trying
(04:47):
to expand his territories and expand his powers. And this
starts back in the late eleven hundreds, by the way,
and our city states, these places like Genoa, Pizza and
eventually Florence change hands over and over have about a
million wars. But this division has two broad sides. We
have the Ghibbillings, who are the emperor's men and they're
(05:09):
generally considered more aristocratic as a group. And we have
the Guealths, the Pope's men, who don't really want to
be part of the empire, and they're generally more middle
class or wealthy merchants. Dante is a Guelf and the
Guealth Ghibbiling conflict in Florence actually starts over a jilted bride. Seriously,
in twelve fifteen, the daughter of one noble family is
(05:32):
jilted for the daughter of another noble family. The groom
is stabbed in the street, because that seems to be
a pretty common fate for a lot of these guys,
and all the aristocratic families take sides, and we get
years of this back and forth. The Guealth in power,
the Ghibillings in power, and every time power changes hands,
(05:53):
let's trash the city, exile our enemies. You can see
how this is a terribly unhealthy way for state, for
a city to function. And Dante is born right in
the middle of it in twelve sixty five, and as
soon as he's of age, he throws himself into politics,
as any good citizen does. And things are going well
for a little bit. His party, the Guelphs, are actually
(06:15):
in charge and he's elected to the priory and the
Ghibbilings are banished. So you would think that there might
be a piece at last, but we know better, obviously not.
The Guelths start to fight among themselves and they split
into two subgroups. We have the blacks who still support
the papacy and the whites, who think papal influence is
(06:36):
getting to be a bit more than they bargain for.
They're hoping for a little more independence. And this is
where it's a little confusing, because they are still technically
they're all gal well, they just have different ideas than
they used to. And you know, this, this division between
the blacks and the white starts over a weird family
conflict to there's I think the children of a man
(06:57):
who was married twice fight among themselves and the children
of the first wife, whose name was Bianca. There the
whites and the blacks to set themselves up against their
older siblings take on. Yeah, it's a bit much to cup.
It's pretty crazy. So just think of like broad political
conflicts combined with family drama. So finally, in thirteen oh one,
(07:20):
we get a white guelf delegation sent to Realm. Dante
may have been part of that group to determine what
the Pope's intentions towards this city are. And while they're gone,
it becomes very clear. Indeed, because the Pope's quote unquote
peacemaker Sarah says, Charles of Valois enters the city, allows
(07:41):
the blacks to take power and also allows them to
nearly destroy Florence. So they're in power now, the blacks
are in control. Dante is a white. He is a
prominent member of politics in Florence, so you can guess
what happens. His political career is over. He's sentenced to
death in absentia and he never sees Florence again. His
(08:04):
family still lives there. They're safe enough. His wife, after all,
is a black um. But we've got Dante in exile,
and that's where all alone, that's where we can start
our story. So with this background, let's enter Dante's literary
creation and see who's in hell. So we're going to
skip past all the babies because it makes its sad,
(08:25):
and the nice folks in Limbo and uh, we're even
going to cruise through a few of the earlier circles
to start. And since the Guelph ghibbling stuff is all
fresh in your minds, we're going to start with one
of their leaders who's now resting in a burning tomb,
and his name is Farnada de Uberti, who's in the
sixth circle with the heretics. So Virgil has escorted Dante
(08:49):
through the gates of the city into another hell, and
they enter a plane that's covered in fiery tombs for
every heretic, and Dante is hauled over by one shade
in particular, who recognizes his Tuscan accent. And as he's
chatting with Virgil, and here's a quote, and all these
quotes are going to be from the Dorothy Sayers translation.
(09:10):
By the way, the native accent proves the manifestly born
of the land. I vexed with so great harm a
noble land and too much vexed maybe why it's Farignada,
of course, and he's popping out of his tomb, and
he's kind of snobby y, asking Dante's name and his
family name. And when he finds out who Dante is,
(09:32):
and of course would recognize the family name is that
of a famous Guealth family, he reacts pretty snobbylly too,
because it's his enemy. Well, because in life he was
leader of the Ghibilline faction in Florence. He would have
been the enemy of Dante's ancestors long before this Black
Guelves and White Guelves conflict began. And when the Ghibillins
(09:55):
were exiled from Florence in twelve fifty, Farignada allied with
the Sillian claimant and trounced the Guelphs at Montepeti, followed
by Florence and tossed out the party of Dante's family,
and Dante at least gives him credit for convincing the
Gibilings not to destroy Florence. But he's still in the inferno.
(10:15):
So why is that, Sarah, Because nearly twenty years after
he died, the inquisition found Farinata and his wife guilty
of heresy, and specifically heresy not believing that the soul
lives on after death. So you can see that these
political vendetta's, this back and forth stuff, it lasts beyond death,
(10:38):
lasts into the grave. And I mean literally, because this
guy and his wife are dug up and then burned
because of their heresy twenty years almost twenty years after
That doesn't quite seem fair. So we're going to move on.
And now Dante and Virgil approached the Seventh Circle, where
the violent suffer eternal torment, and soon they come to
(11:01):
this dead forest. Each tree in cases the soul of
a suicide, and there they find Pietro del Vina. And
this is the seventh Circle and the wood of the suicides,
and Dante approaches a trunk pretty kindly and convinces him
to speak. It's kind of a more tender scene in
the Inferno um. And this is what the shade says
(11:23):
to him. I am he that held both keys of
Frederick's heart to lock and to unlock, And well I
knew to turn them with so exquisite an art. I
helped his counsel, and I let few men through loyal
to my glorious charge. Did I remain and sacrifice my
sleep and strength too? So he goes on to say that,
(11:43):
you know, he was Frederick's right hand man, but hearts
turned against him, and in an attempt to escape scorn
and to attempt the charges that are leveled at him,
he takes his own life, quote to my just self,
I made myself unjust. So who was this guy? He
was the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick the seconds chief Minister. Yes,
(12:07):
that holy Roman Emperor, the one who the Ghibblings support.
And he's a very likable, tragic figure in the inferno.
He's a man who rose from poverty to study law
and eventually gained this important position at Frederick's court. He
served as a judge, He wrote legal documents and codes
in a very elegant form. He wrote poetry in Latin
(12:28):
and Italian, and as we mentioned, he eventually became Frederick's
right hand man. He negotiated his marriage, he met with
popes on his behalf. But you know what happens to
the number two of a powerful man. People start hating
on Medica. Yeah, in twelve forty nine, he's accused of
plotting to poison the emperor, and he's done in with
(12:50):
pretty quickly. He's arrested, blinded, and then he either dies
from the wounds or because he commits suicide. Um, it's
it's a point that these medieval folks thought about quite
a bit. What really happened to this guy? So Dante
and Virgil continue on their journey and they meet lots
of people along the way. They meet Dante's teacher, they
(13:12):
meet a bunch of Florentine bankers. You can imagine Dante
is going to put quite a few of them in hell.
So finally they pass into a new realm. It's the
eighth Circle of Hell. And there you'll find flatterers and
those who practice simony, and sorcerers and thieves. And we
get one of our most famous meetings in the inferno,
(13:32):
and it's actually one of the most cutting scenes in
all of the comedy. And you'll find out why next.
And as Dante approaches the place where all of those
who committed simony are, he sees them stuck feet up
in these rock holes with flames dancing at their feet,
which is how assassins were executed. And he approaches one
(13:55):
that's this wriggling shade, and the shade cried aloud, already
stay ending there, art thou standing there already, Boniface? Why
then the writ has lied by many a year, and
it's a mix up, a mix up, hitting mix up,
very cutting mix up. So this guy who Dante is
talking to is the pope, specifically Pope Nicholas the third.
(14:16):
And it's bold enough to cast a pope in hell,
but Dante makes it like ten times worse by implicating
not just Pope Nicholas the Third, but Boniface the eighth.
And it's like he's not in hell yet, but he's
going to be. It's a pretty pretty dangerous and bold
(14:37):
thing to do. Well. The popes share one hole in
Nicholas thinks his replacement is already there, to drive him
deeper into the pit earlier than he was predicted. Dante
has to explain, you don't know, I'm not the next pope,
Dante um. In fact, Nicholas goes on to mention that
not just one pope is coming up, but two will
(14:59):
be following him into his whole eventually, Boniface the eighth
and Clement the fifth. And it's important here if if
we're going to be really considering why Dante is putting
these particular people in hell bonifice his role in Dante's exile,
we mentioned him. Dante is not a fan of this pope,
(15:19):
but Nicholas is actually a pretty impressive guy. He's born
Giovanni Gitano or Cini, and he really helped calm down
tensions among the Franciscans. He also heads the Inquisition, and
when he's pope he helps reform the administration of the
papal states. But he wasn't all pope all the time.
He was definitely very political and he worked to fill
(15:42):
up pretty much every slot there was with his own family.
He made his family into cardinals, three of them, um
he put others into high offices. He got quite a
reputation for nepotism, a deserved reputation, and thus ends up
in Dante's Inferno for simony, which could be this selling
of ecclesiastical offices. So there we go, But we're gonna
(16:04):
linger in this eighth circle a little bit longer because,
to be honest, things get kind of depressing and very
cold the further down we go. So after leaving behind
Nicholas with this vision about his successors coming along Dante
enters the Fourth Bows and comes to the sorcerers, and
(16:25):
because their site was twisted by distorting God, now their
heads are twisted and they're forced to walk backwards. And
he sees augers, magicians, astrologers, and alchemists and Michael Scott.
Not that Michael Scott, although he would love to be
a magician, or the guy turns out to be the
(16:46):
ultimate magician. It's a little jarring in the text. It
kind of reminded me of reading Bleak House. And suddenly
there's this very minor character named Michael Jackson in the
middle of thing. We were not expecting you here. But
this Michael Scott, who is in the eighth Circle of Hell,
is a wizard, or at least he gets a pretty
big reputation as being a wizard. In reality he sounds
(17:09):
more like a translator and a scholar. But um, this
is how Dante spots him. That other there who looks
so lean and small in the flanks was Michael Scott,
who verily knew every trick of the art magical. That
does sound like the office. Michael so Scott was born
in eleven seventy five. He was Scottish and he helped
(17:30):
repopularize Aristotle in Western Europe by translating his work into Latin.
But he was also an astrologer or you know who
knows a magician and um. From what Sarah was reading,
it seems like astrologers were actually in pretty high demand
in the thirteenth century. Just from our general experience on
this podcast, it seems like every court needs an astrologer
(17:53):
to an alchemist. Think you have Catherine de Medici, I mean,
how many how many did she have? Mony? So regardless,
Scott worked in Spain for a little bit and then
in Italy, and he maybe even entered the pope service
for a time, and later in life he spent some
time in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
the Second. Again. So yeah, there's our guealth ghibbling connection
(18:15):
which has to pop up in in almost all of
these um and that's Michael Scott for you, a new
Michael Scott to add to your repertoire. So Dante and
Virgil keep on going, and they moved past the hypocrites
and their leaden cloaks, past the fees. We've got plenty
of familiar faces there, past the sewers of discord, and
(18:37):
finally they reached the ninth circle, which holds the souls
of traders, and we know who's at the very bottom.
But before we get to that, there's one particularly gory meeting,
and that's with Ugolino de la Gherardesca. So up until now,
if you've read The Inferno, it's been pretty rollicking place.
I mean, it's certainly not a nice place, but it's
(18:59):
been loud, it's been crazy. There have been all the party,
we've been all these wild sites, and now it's dead silent,
And it's this very disturbing shift in the story. And
that's because in this next level everything is frozen in ice,
because these are the traders, and they've so alienated themselves
(19:21):
from everything that they can't even move anymore. So Dante
obviously sees a lot of familiar faces here. He's he
runs into two feuding brothers, one who's a Guelf and
one of Gibelin, who killed each other of their property.
He runs into a member of the Consiliary family, and
that's the family that starts the feud between the Whites
(19:41):
and the Blacks. He sees a gibling turned Guelph who
cut off the hand of a Florentine standard bearer in
the middle of a battle, which threw the troops into panic.
Dante actually grabs this guy by the neck and calls
him a filthy trader. This is Dante's biggest reactions come
in this part of Hell, because everything is so emotionally charged.
(20:02):
And then he comes on two shades who are frozen
in the same hole, and one is gnawing the head
of the other. And a quote from the text, it
was two frozen together in one hole, so that the
one head capped the other head, and a starved men
tear bread this toward the pole of the one beneath,
chewing with ravenous jaw where brain meets marrow, just beneath
(20:24):
the skull. That's pretty gross, and we're gonna have to
figure out why Dante chose to depict this scene. So
the tour is Ugolino Adela Garadesca, and he's an Italian
noble who led the Guelfs and Pizza, which was largely
a Ghibillen city. So when he becomes the chief magistrate
(20:45):
of the city in twelve eighty four, he tries to
consolidate his power, and an important thing he does here
trying to do this, he gives away a couple of
castles in Pizza to Florence into another city to help
build and establish alliances, and this causes trouble between him
and his grandson, who's also a prominent political party in Pizza,
(21:10):
and it causes trouble among the city's guelf So he
doesn't want to lose his power to his grandson, so
Ugolino conspires with the Gibeline These are these are the enemies,
and he does this to drive his grandson out of Pizza. Specifically,
he's working with an archbishop Ruggieri, who, surprised, is the
(21:35):
head he's now gnawing on in Hell, and Ruggieri betrays
him in turn, as traitors often do, um and reminds
everyone how Ugolino gave those castles away, and he's locked
up in a tower with two sons and two grandsons
and left to starve. But Dante insinuates that he resorts
to cannibalism before death, but recently he was exhumed where
(22:00):
it was determined he probably couldn't have eaten meat if
he wanted to because his teeth were so bad. So
that's where we're gonna leave Dante in Virgil behind unless
we end up doing the Julius Caesar episode at some
point because we know a couple of the guys that
leads to are a little further down and out, but
that that kind of sets the tone for our Halloween
(22:23):
series of specials right exactly. And since we can't always
get our podcast ideas from our coworkers, feel free to
email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We've also got any Facebook fan page, come and find us,
and you can follow us on Twitter at missed in History.
And they also have a very fabulous website where you
(22:45):
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in History class flogged on the house staff works dot
com home page. H
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy. And Katie, I've
noticed it's getting a little bit cooler yet, just not
(00:22):
in our office, but everywhere else, a little bit of
fall in the year. When when fall comes to Georgia,
it's so lovely because it's normally so humid and hot here.
And when fall comes to Georgia, I start to think
about Halloween, and I know you do too, because, as
most of our listeners know, Katie and I love Halloween,
we love costumes and just getting in the seasonal spirit
(00:43):
of it all. I'm still trying to decide on mine
because I'm torn between the Cannibal Queen or poly Chrome
from the Wizard of Oz series. But no one would
know what I loved that was a dragon con inspired costume.
I mention that, um, so you are in luck if
you like how Queen too, because we're gonna spend October
filling our slate with lots of fun, spooky, scary episode
(01:06):
so we'll cover all sorts of basses. And since Halloween
is after all, all Hallow's Eve, we thought it would
be only right to start our series with a visit
to the underworld. Yeah, we're gonna be taking a literary
angle with this episode, though, and a historical angle of course,
And we're gonna be visiting the underworld with Dante, who
(01:28):
of course began his epic poem The Divine Comedy with
a jaunt through the Inferno. And we're gonna look at
five people who Dante cast into help and try to
figure out how they ended up there, why he put
them there, what the whole story is. And we have
to give a preemptive thanks to Molly who helped us
with a lot of the Italian pronunciations to me who
(01:51):
suggested this very town true from the stuff Mom Never
Told You podcast. So thanks Molly. Let's give you a
little background. A fourteenth century Italian would recognize not only
the allegories in the Inferno, but the real people, and
you would recognize some of them Cleopatra, Alexander, the Great, Saladine, Cassius,
and you'd also recognize biblical figures like Judas who's famously
(02:15):
writhing in Satan's mouth, and mythological figures like Jason. But
the fourteenth century Italian would also recognize people that they
knew or that their families knew. Like you know, if
you picked up the latest bestseller and saw celebrities, politicians,
and perhaps your own neighbors consigned to hell. Pretty serious stuff.
So this is what makes the Divine Comedy not just
(02:38):
a brilliant piece of literature and not just a powerful
universal allegory that still appeals to us today, still can
make sense to us today. It makes it because it's
so timely in local the inferno becomes a powerful weapon too,
and consigning your enemies to the worst possible torments imaginable.
(02:59):
If you do out, you can taint their reputations for
a literary eternity. So yeah, five points were done to podcast.
So for this list, we've picked five people who your
average Florentine would have known, but who you may not know. Um.
People like Cleopatri and Alexander of course get their own
episodes after all, but these do not. So to understand
(03:23):
who they are and why Dante cast them and how,
we have to understand of course, where he's coming from
and when he wrote the comedy, he was in exile,
which was a very serious issue for a man in
the early. Yeah, something to think about here would be
Romeo and Juliet. It's such a big deal when Romeo
is exiled from Verona. It's not like you can just
(03:43):
go move and settle down in the town next door.
Your city is also your state, and without citizenship, you
just become a wanderer. You have no family, you have
no income, you're you're reliant on anybody who will help
you out. So during his decades of exile, Dante lives
as a guest in people's houses, he travels perhaps all
(04:06):
the way to paris Um, and he's separated from his family.
So writing this master work of literature in exile is
a pretty awesome act of revenge well, and it's also
a declaration of love for a city that he eventually
realizes he's never going to be able to come back to.
So why is Dante exiled? And you're gonna have to
(04:26):
bear with us for a little bit because this story
starts long before Dante is even born. Comes out of
a power struggle between the Holy Roman Empire and the Pope,
and everyone wants a bigger piece of the pie. And
as we've seen over and over in our podcast, Northern
Italy is where it's at. It's where everyone is trying
(04:47):
to expand his territories and expand his powers. And this
starts back in the late eleven hundreds, by the way,
and our city states, these places like Genoa, Pizza and
eventually Florence change hands over and over have about a
million wars. But this division has two broad sides. We
have the Ghibbillings, who are the emperor's men and they're
(05:09):
generally considered more aristocratic as a group. And we have
the Guealths, the Pope's men, who don't really want to
be part of the empire, and they're generally more middle
class or wealthy merchants. Dante is a Guelf and the
Guealth Ghibbiling conflict in Florence actually starts over a jilted bride. Seriously,
in twelve fifteen, the daughter of one noble family is
(05:32):
jilted for the daughter of another noble family. The groom
is stabbed in the street, because that seems to be
a pretty common fate for a lot of these guys,
and all the aristocratic families take sides, and we get
years of this back and forth. The Guealth in power,
the Ghibillings in power, and every time power changes hands,
(05:53):
let's trash the city, exile our enemies. You can see
how this is a terribly unhealthy way for state, for
a city to function. And Dante is born right in
the middle of it in twelve sixty five, and as
soon as he's of age, he throws himself into politics,
as any good citizen does. And things are going well
for a little bit. His party, the Guelphs, are actually
(06:15):
in charge and he's elected to the priory and the
Ghibbilings are banished. So you would think that there might
be a piece at last, but we know better, obviously not.
The Guelths start to fight among themselves and they split
into two subgroups. We have the blacks who still support
the papacy and the whites, who think papal influence is
(06:36):
getting to be a bit more than they bargain for.
They're hoping for a little more independence. And this is
where it's a little confusing, because they are still technically
they're all gal well, they just have different ideas than
they used to. And you know, this, this division between
the blacks and the white starts over a weird family
conflict to there's I think the children of a man
(06:57):
who was married twice fight among themselves and the children
of the first wife, whose name was Bianca. There the
whites and the blacks to set themselves up against their
older siblings take on. Yeah, it's a bit much to cup.
It's pretty crazy. So just think of like broad political
conflicts combined with family drama. So finally, in thirteen oh one,
(07:20):
we get a white guelf delegation sent to Realm. Dante
may have been part of that group to determine what
the Pope's intentions towards this city are. And while they're gone,
it becomes very clear. Indeed, because the Pope's quote unquote
peacemaker Sarah says, Charles of Valois enters the city, allows
(07:41):
the blacks to take power and also allows them to
nearly destroy Florence. So they're in power now, the blacks
are in control. Dante is a white. He is a
prominent member of politics in Florence, so you can guess
what happens. His political career is over. He's sentenced to
death in absentia and he never sees Florence again. His
(08:04):
family still lives there. They're safe enough. His wife, after all,
is a black um. But we've got Dante in exile,
and that's where all alone, that's where we can start
our story. So with this background, let's enter Dante's literary
creation and see who's in hell. So we're going to
skip past all the babies because it makes its sad,
(08:25):
and the nice folks in Limbo and uh, we're even
going to cruise through a few of the earlier circles
to start. And since the Guelph ghibbling stuff is all
fresh in your minds, we're going to start with one
of their leaders who's now resting in a burning tomb,
and his name is Farnada de Uberti, who's in the
sixth circle with the heretics. So Virgil has escorted Dante
(08:49):
through the gates of the city into another hell, and
they enter a plane that's covered in fiery tombs for
every heretic, and Dante is hauled over by one shade
in particular, who recognizes his Tuscan accent. And as he's
chatting with Virgil, and here's a quote, and all these
quotes are going to be from the Dorothy Sayers translation.
(09:10):
By the way, the native accent proves the manifestly born
of the land. I vexed with so great harm a
noble land and too much vexed maybe why it's Farignada,
of course, and he's popping out of his tomb, and
he's kind of snobby y, asking Dante's name and his
family name. And when he finds out who Dante is,
(09:32):
and of course would recognize the family name is that
of a famous Guealth family, he reacts pretty snobbylly too,
because it's his enemy. Well, because in life he was
leader of the Ghibilline faction in Florence. He would have
been the enemy of Dante's ancestors long before this Black
Guelves and White Guelves conflict began. And when the Ghibillins
(09:55):
were exiled from Florence in twelve fifty, Farignada allied with
the Sillian claimant and trounced the Guelphs at Montepeti, followed
by Florence and tossed out the party of Dante's family,
and Dante at least gives him credit for convincing the
Gibilings not to destroy Florence. But he's still in the inferno.
(10:15):
So why is that, Sarah, Because nearly twenty years after
he died, the inquisition found Farinata and his wife guilty
of heresy, and specifically heresy not believing that the soul
lives on after death. So you can see that these
political vendetta's, this back and forth stuff, it lasts beyond death,
(10:38):
lasts into the grave. And I mean literally, because this
guy and his wife are dug up and then burned
because of their heresy twenty years almost twenty years after
That doesn't quite seem fair. So we're going to move on.
And now Dante and Virgil approached the Seventh Circle, where
the violent suffer eternal torment, and soon they come to
(11:01):
this dead forest. Each tree in cases the soul of
a suicide, and there they find Pietro del Vina. And
this is the seventh Circle and the wood of the suicides,
and Dante approaches a trunk pretty kindly and convinces him
to speak. It's kind of a more tender scene in
the Inferno um. And this is what the shade says
(11:23):
to him. I am he that held both keys of
Frederick's heart to lock and to unlock, And well I
knew to turn them with so exquisite an art. I
helped his counsel, and I let few men through loyal
to my glorious charge. Did I remain and sacrifice my
sleep and strength too? So he goes on to say that,
(11:43):
you know, he was Frederick's right hand man, but hearts
turned against him, and in an attempt to escape scorn
and to attempt the charges that are leveled at him,
he takes his own life, quote to my just self,
I made myself unjust. So who was this guy? He
was the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick the seconds chief Minister. Yes,
(12:07):
that holy Roman Emperor, the one who the Ghibblings support.
And he's a very likable, tragic figure in the inferno.
He's a man who rose from poverty to study law
and eventually gained this important position at Frederick's court. He
served as a judge, He wrote legal documents and codes
in a very elegant form. He wrote poetry in Latin
(12:28):
and Italian, and as we mentioned, he eventually became Frederick's
right hand man. He negotiated his marriage, he met with
popes on his behalf. But you know what happens to
the number two of a powerful man. People start hating
on Medica. Yeah, in twelve forty nine, he's accused of
plotting to poison the emperor, and he's done in with
(12:50):
pretty quickly. He's arrested, blinded, and then he either dies
from the wounds or because he commits suicide. Um, it's
it's a point that these medieval folks thought about quite
a bit. What really happened to this guy? So Dante
and Virgil continue on their journey and they meet lots
of people along the way. They meet Dante's teacher, they
(13:12):
meet a bunch of Florentine bankers. You can imagine Dante
is going to put quite a few of them in hell.
So finally they pass into a new realm. It's the
eighth Circle of Hell. And there you'll find flatterers and
those who practice simony, and sorcerers and thieves. And we
get one of our most famous meetings in the inferno,
(13:32):
and it's actually one of the most cutting scenes in
all of the comedy. And you'll find out why next.
And as Dante approaches the place where all of those
who committed simony are, he sees them stuck feet up
in these rock holes with flames dancing at their feet,
which is how assassins were executed. And he approaches one
(13:55):
that's this wriggling shade, and the shade cried aloud, already
stay ending there, art thou standing there already, Boniface? Why
then the writ has lied by many a year, and
it's a mix up, a mix up, hitting mix up,
very cutting mix up. So this guy who Dante is
talking to is the pope, specifically Pope Nicholas the third.
(14:16):
And it's bold enough to cast a pope in hell,
but Dante makes it like ten times worse by implicating
not just Pope Nicholas the Third, but Boniface the eighth.
And it's like he's not in hell yet, but he's
going to be. It's a pretty pretty dangerous and bold
(14:37):
thing to do. Well. The popes share one hole in
Nicholas thinks his replacement is already there, to drive him
deeper into the pit earlier than he was predicted. Dante
has to explain, you don't know, I'm not the next pope,
Dante um. In fact, Nicholas goes on to mention that
not just one pope is coming up, but two will
(14:59):
be following him into his whole eventually, Boniface the eighth
and Clement the fifth. And it's important here if if
we're going to be really considering why Dante is putting
these particular people in hell bonifice his role in Dante's exile,
we mentioned him. Dante is not a fan of this pope,
(15:19):
but Nicholas is actually a pretty impressive guy. He's born
Giovanni Gitano or Cini, and he really helped calm down
tensions among the Franciscans. He also heads the Inquisition, and
when he's pope he helps reform the administration of the
papal states. But he wasn't all pope all the time.
He was definitely very political and he worked to fill
(15:42):
up pretty much every slot there was with his own family.
He made his family into cardinals, three of them, um
he put others into high offices. He got quite a
reputation for nepotism, a deserved reputation, and thus ends up
in Dante's Inferno for simony, which could be this selling
of ecclesiastical offices. So there we go, But we're gonna
(16:04):
linger in this eighth circle a little bit longer because,
to be honest, things get kind of depressing and very
cold the further down we go. So after leaving behind
Nicholas with this vision about his successors coming along Dante
enters the Fourth Bows and comes to the sorcerers, and
(16:25):
because their site was twisted by distorting God, now their
heads are twisted and they're forced to walk backwards. And
he sees augers, magicians, astrologers, and alchemists and Michael Scott.
Not that Michael Scott, although he would love to be
a magician, or the guy turns out to be the
(16:46):
ultimate magician. It's a little jarring in the text. It
kind of reminded me of reading Bleak House. And suddenly
there's this very minor character named Michael Jackson in the
middle of thing. We were not expecting you here. But
this Michael Scott, who is in the eighth Circle of Hell,
is a wizard, or at least he gets a pretty
big reputation as being a wizard. In reality he sounds
(17:09):
more like a translator and a scholar. But um, this
is how Dante spots him. That other there who looks
so lean and small in the flanks was Michael Scott,
who verily knew every trick of the art magical. That
does sound like the office. Michael so Scott was born
in eleven seventy five. He was Scottish and he helped
(17:30):
repopularize Aristotle in Western Europe by translating his work into Latin.
But he was also an astrologer or you know who
knows a magician and um. From what Sarah was reading,
it seems like astrologers were actually in pretty high demand
in the thirteenth century. Just from our general experience on
this podcast, it seems like every court needs an astrologer
(17:53):
to an alchemist. Think you have Catherine de Medici, I mean,
how many how many did she have? Mony? So regardless,
Scott worked in Spain for a little bit and then
in Italy, and he maybe even entered the pope service
for a time, and later in life he spent some
time in the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick
the Second. Again. So yeah, there's our guealth ghibbling connection
(18:15):
which has to pop up in in almost all of
these um and that's Michael Scott for you, a new
Michael Scott to add to your repertoire. So Dante and
Virgil keep on going, and they moved past the hypocrites
and their leaden cloaks, past the fees. We've got plenty
of familiar faces there, past the sewers of discord, and
(18:37):
finally they reached the ninth circle, which holds the souls
of traders, and we know who's at the very bottom.
But before we get to that, there's one particularly gory meeting,
and that's with Ugolino de la Gherardesca. So up until now,
if you've read The Inferno, it's been pretty rollicking place.
I mean, it's certainly not a nice place, but it's
(18:59):
been loud, it's been crazy. There have been all the party,
we've been all these wild sites, and now it's dead silent,
And it's this very disturbing shift in the story. And
that's because in this next level everything is frozen in ice,
because these are the traders, and they've so alienated themselves
(19:21):
from everything that they can't even move anymore. So Dante
obviously sees a lot of familiar faces here. He's he
runs into two feuding brothers, one who's a Guelf and
one of Gibelin, who killed each other of their property.
He runs into a member of the Consiliary family, and
that's the family that starts the feud between the Whites
(19:41):
and the Blacks. He sees a gibling turned Guelph who
cut off the hand of a Florentine standard bearer in
the middle of a battle, which threw the troops into panic.
Dante actually grabs this guy by the neck and calls
him a filthy trader. This is Dante's biggest reactions come
in this part of Hell, because everything is so emotionally charged.
(20:02):
And then he comes on two shades who are frozen
in the same hole, and one is gnawing the head
of the other. And a quote from the text, it
was two frozen together in one hole, so that the
one head capped the other head, and a starved men
tear bread this toward the pole of the one beneath,
chewing with ravenous jaw where brain meets marrow, just beneath
(20:24):
the skull. That's pretty gross, and we're gonna have to
figure out why Dante chose to depict this scene. So
the tour is Ugolino Adela Garadesca, and he's an Italian
noble who led the Guelfs and Pizza, which was largely
a Ghibillen city. So when he becomes the chief magistrate
(20:45):
of the city in twelve eighty four, he tries to
consolidate his power, and an important thing he does here
trying to do this, he gives away a couple of
castles in Pizza to Florence into another city to help
build and establish alliances, and this causes trouble between him
and his grandson, who's also a prominent political party in Pizza,
(21:10):
and it causes trouble among the city's guelf So he
doesn't want to lose his power to his grandson, so
Ugolino conspires with the Gibeline These are these are the enemies,
and he does this to drive his grandson out of Pizza. Specifically,
he's working with an archbishop Ruggieri, who, surprised, is the
(21:35):
head he's now gnawing on in Hell, and Ruggieri betrays
him in turn, as traitors often do, um and reminds
everyone how Ugolino gave those castles away, and he's locked
up in a tower with two sons and two grandsons
and left to starve. But Dante insinuates that he resorts
to cannibalism before death, but recently he was exhumed where
(22:00):
it was determined he probably couldn't have eaten meat if
he wanted to because his teeth were so bad. So
that's where we're gonna leave Dante in Virgil behind unless
we end up doing the Julius Caesar episode at some
point because we know a couple of the guys that
leads to are a little further down and out, but
that that kind of sets the tone for our Halloween
(22:23):
series of specials right exactly. And since we can't always
get our podcast ideas from our coworkers, feel free to
email us at History Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
We've also got any Facebook fan page, come and find us,
and you can follow us on Twitter at missed in History.
And they also have a very fabulous website where you
(22:45):
can find out everything you wanted to know about cannibalism.
If you search on the home page at www dot
how stuff works dot com for more on this and
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