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 SORDELLO AND CUNIZZA
 
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 SORDELLO & CUNIZZA 
 
 FACT, LEGEND, POETRY CONCERNING DANTE*S FORE-RUNNER 
 
 SORDELLO, AND THE STORY OF THAT * RESPLENDENT 
 
 SPIRIT' OF THE 'SWOONING SPHERE,' CUNIZZA 
 
 OF ROMANO J ALSO A BRIEF ACCOUNT 
 
 OF SORDELLo's POETRY 
 
 BY 
 
 EUGENE BENSON 
 
 EU 
 
 LONDON 
 
 J. M. DENT & CO. 
 
 29 AND 30 BEDFORD STREET, W.C. 
 
 1903
 
 Ay, agei long ago 
 Then loven fed KEATS. 
 
 Mi pare eke intorno a questo granifuamo che rAIighieri 
 ei ha depinto con colori tanto forti e che ci e coii ignoto 
 tia mai detto bastanxa. GALVANI. 
 
 Sorael etait devcnu illuttre avjnt d'etre bien cennu. Peu 
 de troubadours ont tuicite autant de recerchet et de con- 
 travenes. ROMANIA.
 
 Sordello 
 
 Of Legend, of History, of Poetry 
 
 To understand Sordello in his youth, amidst the 
 audacities and treacheries of his Italian days : 
 Sordello the Proven9al poet, in the shelter of 
 a brilliant court ; Sordello, Poet, Scholar and 
 Castellan, we must traverse the greater part of 
 the thirteenth century. Of his life we have an 
 extravagant legend, a romantic episode, a few 
 facts and a brilliant tradition ; and we have his 
 Provencal poetry to give a certain reality to 
 his being. Of the splendid and portentous 
 historical situation, the very background of 
 his days, we have the most varied material. 
 Drawing near to Sordello, we see figures 
 admirable for their energy, terrific in their viol- 
 ence, and merciless in their wrath ; great lords 
 triumphing by force and treachery, moved by 
 demoniacal passions, mad for mastership, tolerat- 
 ing no rival ; strangely enough, even in their 
 
 9
 
 io SORDELLO 
 
 deeds of cruelty and villainy, regarded as the 
 agents of the wrath of God, and in one way or 
 another carrying forward the purpose of that 
 mysterious Providence which builds up and 
 casts down, and out of the ruins of families, 
 cities, states, forms a people, and gives us that 
 great fact, Italy, of the Middle Ages. Look 
 back, see these men in action at the momentous 
 awakening of the life of the thirteenth century. 
 What a drama it was ! They put in play all 
 the forces of human nature ; they stir it to its 
 depths ; they give solemn historic proof of the 
 end of ambition and egotism ; they show the 
 distressing consequences of the complete sacri- 
 fice or ignorance of what is, in a measure, the 
 professed aim of our modern life the greatest 
 good of the greatest number. 
 
 What Italy has paid for this truth, her 
 tragic history tells us. We profit by what 
 was enacted by the Italian Communes and the 
 Italian nobles, in the struggle between Pope 
 and Emperor, during the thirteenth century. 
 Now we can look back at the tremendous and 
 varied life of Italy at that time, at her poets, 
 artists, monks and nobles, as we look at the 
 personages of a play ; interested in them, ab- 
 sorbed by their dramatic action, we turn from 
 them all, glad to know such life now belongs 
 but to history, not actuality. But whether we
 
 AND CUNIZZA II 
 
 consider Italy's prominent individualities, her 
 fierce municipalities try to share joyously in her 
 Pagan and natural life, restfully contemplate her 
 ideal life, wishful to follow the Monk of Assisi 
 in sweetness and light, or are forced to take 
 the more strenuous and bitter way of Dante, 
 we learn from each to measure the heights 
 and depths of our own nature j we see the 
 heaven and hell of Man's own making. We 
 look back and see that the sentiment of love, 
 and the passion of it, in the hearts of women 
 and poets, mitigate the brutal forces, the in- 
 exorable forces of Medieval Italy, bringing a 
 new spring, a very blossoming time as it has 
 been called, amidst the sterilities of asceticism 
 and the cruelties of warring families. Stories 
 of it refresh and delight us, as they celebrate 
 men and women of other days. Many of the 
 persons mentioned are seen but as the dim 
 figures of old tapestry, in one action, at a 
 given moment of life. Yet there they are in 
 their quaint strong racy characters : what they 
 lack in variety they gain in positive force, in 
 emphatic outline. They show no hesitation 
 or tameness of purpose ; persistent, sometimes 
 heroic figures, they represent the elementary 
 forces of humanity. 
 
 Two things redeemed this time of rampant 
 individualism. One was the chivalric ideal of
 
 12 SORDELLO 
 
 love, and all it implied of devotion to women ; 
 the other was the renunciation of the law of the 
 rich and the strong, and the celebration of 
 Poverty and Peace illustrated by the Monk of 
 Assisi. 
 
 Sordello in his youth had not chosen the 
 monk's but the knight's part.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 13 
 
 II 
 
 GOITO, to-day, is a poor village by the Mincio, 
 with nothing of mediaeval interest but a part 
 of the ancient walls of a structure, of which 
 too little remains to enable one to judge its 
 original character and dimensions. The walls 
 are, however, impressively thick, and rise close 
 to a smooth and limpid stream. There a miller's 
 boy unlocked for me the door of a low roofed 
 enclosure the last vestiges of the castle of 
 Goito. Within, I looked through the narrow 
 windows of what was once a place of great 
 interest and of intense life. From the invasion 
 of the Goths to the latest rumour of its name as 
 a field of battle, Goito has often been linked to 
 the fortunes of its greater neighbour, Mantua, 
 only six miles away. But it gets nothing of 
 romantic charm from its situation or its aspect. 
 Yet as the reputed birth-place of Sordello, and 
 invested as it is by the fiction of a modern poet 
 with all the features of a hill country cut by 
 ravines and streams and rocky path-ways, its 
 name, at least to the readers of Mr Browning's 
 Sordello, sounds most alluring ; but it does not
 
 14 SORDELLO 
 
 reward a lover of nature like a woody and hilly 
 country ; it has no varied vistas and wild paths, 
 no delightful pebbly brooks, no leafy ravines. 
 Goito near Mantua is not like the Goito so 
 richly described by Browning. Six hundred 
 years ago, as now, the land about it was level 
 for many a league, and the nearest hills miles 
 away. It was a wilder country then than now ; 
 great swamps, wide and shallow sheets of 
 water, were then more frequent ; and vast and 
 solemn woods clothed much of the Lombard 
 plain from the Castle of Goito to the hills of 
 Volta and Mount Baldo in the North. I speak 
 of it only because it has been described as the 
 most romantic birth-place of the most mysterious 
 of poets. Little as it now satisfies one's sense of 
 picturesque beauty, it has still less of antiquity 
 to satisfy one's historic sense. Imagination 
 must go to other fields for the stuff of Sor- 
 dello's life ; to famous cities and castles of 
 Northern Italy and Provence. 
 
 Many a league away from Goito, and near to 
 Verona, is the village of San Bonifazio, where 
 stood the castle of that name. All vestiges of 
 its ancient importance have likewise been de- 
 stroyed, and there is but the site upon which 
 it stood to assure one of its place. From it, 
 six hundred years ago, Sordello fled with the 
 lady of the castle. This episode of the poet's
 
 AND CUNIZZA 15 
 
 youth has been often alluded to since ; it 
 made a great stir at the time. Rolandino, a 
 contemporary chronicler, mentions it. It gives 
 to Sordello another interest than that of a 
 patriot of legendary character and dubious 
 historic importance. 
 
 Yet two great poets have added to the celebrity 
 of Sordello's name without referring to what, 
 in the phrase of our day, would be called the 
 scandalous adventures of his youth. First Dante 
 made his name immortal. Over half a century 
 ago Robert Browning wrote his Sordello, a 
 book of some perplexing, and more beautiful, 
 verse, purporting to tell Sordello's " Story." At 
 first it baffled most readers, and indeed it is 
 not altogether in accordance with the facts of 
 Sordello's life j nor was it designed to be so. 
 
 Dante's noble and vivid impression of the 
 illustrious Mantuan, given in words of terse 
 and sudden eloquence, is famous. He sees 
 Sordello in the Ante Purgatorio, and exclaims at 
 sight of him, alone, silent, watchful, " like a 
 lion in repose " : " O Lombard soul, how proud 
 and disdainful thou art there ! " And when 
 Virgil, in reply to Sordello's abrupt question 
 as to his country, but says Mantua, Sordello 
 springs forward, exclaiming, " O Mantuan, I 
 am Sordello, of thy country." And they em- 
 brace each other. Dante depicts Sordello
 
 1 6 SORDELLO 
 
 glowing with patriotic sympathy for Virgil. 
 Most readers of Dante have been thrilled by 
 the rush of irresistible emotion, the sweetness 
 of honoured and honouring fellowship ex- 
 pressed in Sordello's reply. In the solemn 
 vision of the Florentine, the mediaeval Mantuan 
 poet is represented as one who remembers his 
 native land with love ; sure of the known 
 distinction of his own great name, he simply 
 says, "I am Sordello." And Sordello guides 
 Virgil and Dante through a delectable valley, 
 showing them the spirits of great kings and 
 princes. 
 
 Dante, with a quick sense of Sordello's 
 own life, which had been spent amongst the 
 masters of his century, represents him as their 
 calm and unswerving judge, when, with frank 
 and courteous speech, with brief, rapid, illumi- 
 nating words, he tells who they are, and why 
 they are in the green and flowery vale of the 
 Ante Purgatorio the place of expiation, yet also 
 of hope. Dante calls him " the good Sor- 
 dello," the "courteous Sordello"; but he also 
 portrays him as impetuous and passionate. 
 Haughty and unaccustomed to decline before 
 other personalities, Sordello lowers his lion-like 
 glance, and steps towards Virgil in humility, 
 and again embraces him. The three poets walk- 
 ing in the twilight, holding pleasant discourse,
 
 AND CUNIZZA 17 
 
 draw suddenly closer to each other at sight 
 of the great snake gliding near, for they are 
 iced by terror ; but they are protected by two 
 guardian angels, " green-vested, green-winged," 
 who come to their aid. Reaching the limits of 
 his own set place of expiation, beyond which 
 he cannot pass, even to accompany Virgil and 
 Dante, Sordello abruptly draws back, and 
 vanishes. 
 
 Dante has revealed him as a great personage, 
 high-natured, watchful, retrospective. But he 
 does not evoke him as a poet, nor does he con- 
 nect him with the glory of the Provencal, but 
 with the glory of the Latin tongue. Showing 
 him to us as a patriot, he makes him speak of 
 "our language" to Virgil, and gives him the 
 dignity of a public personage. Very different 
 is this figure of the patriot from the Sordello 
 of Provengal story ; very different from the 
 Proven9al poet Arnaldo Danielle, whom Dante 
 also depicts, but depicts as a poet expiating in 
 tears the follies of his days of love, yet not 
 without hope of attaining Paradise. 
 
 Why did Dante ignore Sordello's youth, given 
 not less to the " gay science," and represent him 
 as a heroic and impressive personage among 
 kings and great men, yet solitary, peerless, and 
 more like their judge than their companion? 
 The answer to this may be found in following
 
 i8 SORDELLO 
 
 Sordello's life. Turning from the Sordello 
 of the Florentine poet to the Sordello of 
 Story, we find proof that he was alive six years 
 after Dante was born. It is even probable that 
 he was alive during Dante's youth. Perhaps it 
 was because of his nearness, and under the 
 influence of his splendid name, that Dante 
 depicted him as a heroic figure, a lover of 
 Italy ; and at sight of him in his vision of the 
 Under World, he was reminded anew of the 
 merciless dissensions of his mother-land, and, 
 like Sordello himself, gave vent to that " im- 
 mortal cry of scorn and indignation," for which 
 the episode of Sordello in the Divina Commedia 
 is remarkable. 
 
 Then, from the nobility of the great Floren- 
 tine's conception of Sordello, we must go to the 
 Sordello of Chronicle, the unscrupulous gallant 
 and troubadour, whose adventures and poetry 
 reveal a gallard life, a satirical mind, and his 
 notorious love for several great ladies of his 
 day. We must, with Diez, see in him a 
 thirteenth century Don Juan, like many of his 
 gay contemporaries, only more brilliant and 
 adventurous, more splendid in his fame as a 
 poet, yet not a type of the constant, passionate 
 lover, like Rudel, who loved the lady of Tripoli. 
 
 His adventures up to the time he went to 
 Provence are significant of a wandering and
 
 AND CUNIZZA 19 
 
 brilliant life at the courts and castles and cities 
 of Northern Italy, which then had reached its 
 most joyous and refined expression. For Italy 
 was rich, and even marvellous, with every 
 kind of mediaeval art, and it was fete-like most 
 of the time, before the climax of the Guelph 
 and Ghibellin struggle between the Pope and 
 Frederick II. 
 
 Since Browning wrote and re-considered his 
 Sordello (to leave it for the most part as he first 
 wrote it), some facts concerning its hero have 
 been brought to light by later research. The new 
 material is slight, but significant of a long and 
 varied career throughout the thirteenth century. 
 We get glimpses of Sordello in the tumult of 
 tremendous days and see that he endured to 
 the end, a type to last. We can follow him 
 beyond the fatal hour of Browning's Sordello, 
 who shrinks from the life of action, rejects 
 Salinguerra's gift of power, is still less stayed by 
 Palma's kiss. All this is beautiful poetry, yet 
 the fiction of it cuts Sordello off from the 
 destiny implied by the grand personage evoked 
 by Dante, the Sordello of the Divina Commedia, 
 confirmed by what we learn elsewhere of his 
 long career. 
 
 Browning's Sordello is based on the brief and 
 ancient Provengal record of Sordello's youth, to 
 which he confines his story, limiting it even
 
 20 SORDELLO 
 
 more than the older life, to his Italian days, and 
 to the north of Italy ; whereas Sordello crossed 
 and re-crossed the Alps and appeared last at 
 Naples. He was an octogenarian, when Charles 
 of Anjou, King of Naples, gave him five castles 
 in the Abruzzi. Sordello old, in the service of 
 the French King in 1269, blindly lost in the con- 
 fusion of a great century, is hardly less interesting 
 than Browning's representation of the youthful 
 poet as the suddenly avowed son of Salinguerra, 
 shrinking from his new responsibility, and in 
 sudden death proving himself no hero. 
 
 We must not stop with the pathetic figure of 
 the later poet's fiction, but attempt to realize the 
 grand and gifted Sordello of Dante, the Sordello 
 of Story. We must picture Sordello old and 
 disdainful of his time ; his part reduced to silence 
 and isolation after half a century of brilliant 
 being. All the pageantry of secular and religious 
 life were about him in his youth ; castle courts re- 
 sounding to the jongleur's music, and the trouba- 
 dour's song ; citizens in wild agitation drawing 
 forth the carrocclo to the sound of hammer and 
 bell ; fierce battle ; the burning of heretics ; the 
 preaching of monks ; the revival of peace and 
 the reconciling zeal of great saints. Sordello 
 saw it all. He was of it. He not only saw 
 but was intimately associated with the greatest 
 personages of his century in his early days
 
 AND CUNIZZA 21 
 
 with Ezzelino, in his later years with Charles of 
 Anjou. He saw them making division, and 
 spreading death, while Italy in one form or 
 another was seeking expression in immortal 
 works of art, and enduring an unending conflict. 
 It was one thing for Sordello to follow the 
 bent of his gay and passionate youth, going 
 from court to court, from Italy to Provence ; 
 it must have been with quite another spirit, 
 with the responsibility of a graver mind, that 
 he saw the French invasion of Italy, that he was 
 forced to take part in it, while the Italian cities, 
 once so fierce against each other, strident and 
 quick with war-like temper, tamely let pass, 
 unmolested, Anjou's thirty-seven thousand men 
 of arms. It is then that we get a glimpse of 
 Sordello, out of favour ; his sudden arrest and 
 illness at Novara, 1 where he languished ; old, 
 and mocked by his master Charles, who only 
 relented towards him at Pope Clement's most 
 earnest and indignant appeal in his behalf. 
 Sordello appears in the midst of one of the 
 most appalling upheavals of human passions 
 that the world has ever seen. Gorged prisons, 
 the quick sword, these were the result of the 
 measureless passions of revenge and ambition of 
 Italian life ; and these made the land a place of 
 lamentation and terror, a very Inferno. Yet even 
 1 See Appendix i.
 
 22 SORDELLO 
 
 in this amazing thirteenth century there were 
 blessed lulls of the storm ; and all hatred and 
 rivalry were held in abeyance when Ezzelino, 
 and the Count of San Bonifazio, gave each 
 other the kiss of peace in the presence of 
 thousands of people. All the Republican cities 
 of Northern Italy were represented at this 
 happy reconciliation of bitter enemies, and 
 the whole land seemed again to deserve its 
 delightful reputation as the joyous country of 
 love. Out of this fermenting time Sordello 
 comes to us as a lover ; a poet ; a fearless satirist; 
 a serious and honoured man ; keeping his own 
 personal life wedded to all that is most civil- 
 izing and engaging. He was a modern man, 
 not infected with the monk's zeal, nor with the 
 restless greed of the Barons. He seems to 
 have given up action for contemplation, the 
 knight's for the scholar's part, at the proper 
 moment of his ripest years. We have the 
 report of his translations from the Latin ; of his 
 works on the Art of Military Defence ; his 
 history of the family of Aragon ; works long 
 since lost. This is the Sordello celebrated by 
 Dante in his work, De Folgari Eloquio, wherein 
 he says Sordello was so remarkable not only 
 in poetry but in every way in which he 
 expressed himself. 
 
 Of the later writings of Sordello mentioned
 
 AND CUNIZZA 23 
 
 by the earliest commentators of Dante, and 
 later by Equicola, who speaks of his Thesaurus 
 Thesaurum, though he seems never to have seen 
 it, we have the titles only. This last, which 
 is a dissertation on the Conduct of Life, is 
 in the Ambrosiana at Milan. It contains 
 the Precepts of Honour : its express title is, 
 Documentum honoris. It is highly honourable 
 to Sordello ; a didactic piece of verse some 
 thirteen hundred lines relating to the conduct 
 of life. It is a wise and terse expression of ex- 
 perience, of good sense, of elevated sentiment. 
 
 Nostredamus, the earliest French writer of 
 the lives of the Provencal poets, says Sordello 
 translated Casar and Quintus Curtius, and he 
 declared that the two books were in the library 
 of the monastery of the island of Lerins near 
 Antibes. Although the authority of Jean de 
 Nostredamus was impugned by the laborious 
 Sainte-Pelaye, he probably read documents con- 
 cerning the Provencal poets which have been 
 since lost. His nephew, Caesar de Nostredamus, 
 author of a History of Provence, mentions 
 Sordello several times in describing the events 
 of the reign of Charles of Anjou, King of 
 Naples. He mentions him among Prelates, 
 Barons and Cavaliers, " Sordello the Mantuan 
 Cavalier and Provencal poet." He again 
 mentions him when he takes pains to name
 
 24 SORDELLO 
 
 the most distinguished persons who accompanied 
 Charles of Anjou to the conquest of Naples. 
 In that crowd of ambitious knights and greedy 
 Churchmen, masters of men and of cities, lured 
 by the promised spoils of a rich kingdom, 
 Sordello, Dominus Sordellus, is not last in the 
 list of great names. 
 
 Many attempts have been made to tell 
 Bordello's story. The fuller and earlier narra- 
 tives concerning him, Aliprandi's Chronicle in 
 terza rima, and Platina's History of Mantua, 
 were first critically examined and set aside by 
 Tiraboschi. Aliprandi's legend had afforded 
 much for the graver and uncritical Papal 
 historian who accepted as fact the extravagant 
 fiction of the rough versifier. Without this 
 amusing stuff there is enough of Sordello's 
 story to give reality to him at a stupendous 
 time of Italian life. What is authentic about 
 it is highly interesting. It may be taken in the 
 beginning as merely of a piece with the usual 
 adventures of a gallant of the thirteenth century; 
 followed to the end it must be taken as ex- 
 pressive of a living soul during the struggle 
 between the rival leaders and factions of the 
 cities of Northern Italy. And it is as a living 
 soul that Browning has understood and presented 
 Sordello. Like Dante he, too, has made him 
 express what was closest to his own life. His
 
 AND CUNIZZA 25 
 
 poem is a romantic psychological study, full 
 of delightful bits of nature, stirring and vivid 
 in its glimpses of mediaeval life : and it holds 
 a portrait of an illustrious warrior, crafty 
 Salinguerra, which is magnificently true. Our 
 English poet's rendering of Sordello's life is 
 profound and suggestive, but it is also arbitrary, 
 and in some respects, independent of historic 
 fact, though in a totally different way from the 
 unhesitating inventions of the old Mantuan 
 rhymster, who goes simply and bravely on 
 with his story, telling the adventures of 
 Sordello, a marvellous man, a peerless knight 
 and troubadour. Aliprandi's inventions at 
 first too readily accepted by uncritical historians, 
 remain as amusing fiction for a child, but in- 
 admissible for serious readers. The legend 
 has been rejected, but Sordello's name is left 
 in the high heaven of poetry, ' a morning Star,' 
 in the early dawn of Italian Literature. Nothing 
 remains of his Italian poetry except a conjectural 
 piece attributed to him. But there are forty of 
 his Provencal poems formerly to be seen only 
 in the rare codici, jealously kept from the 
 profane, most of them in the Vatican library ; 
 one piece in the Ambrosiana discovered but 
 a few years ago ; others at Paris and Florence, 
 and several pieces in the Estense library, at 
 Modena. We are indebted to St Pelaye,
 
 26 SORDELLO 
 
 Fauriel, Reyounard, Diez, and Mahn, for our 
 first knowledge of Sordello's verse, but the 
 final collection with critical notes is the work 
 of Prof. Caesar de Lollis, published in 1896.* 
 
 The text of Sordello's verse as it exists in 
 several codici, varies ; it is wholly intelligible 
 only to the most accomplished Provencal 
 scholars. The Estense library, as we have 
 said, possesses one of the most precious Pro- 
 ven$al MSS. Only personal inspection can 
 give one an adequate idea of its beauty. The 
 initial letter of each stanza is painted blue or 
 red, and adorned with fine, sure, fanciful 
 decorative lines, in the shape of some grotesque 
 bird or beast ; each verse is written in black 
 letters : the whole page and, in fact, every 
 page of the greater part of the volume, was 
 evidently done by the most patient and accom- 
 plished hand ; it is only less splendid than the 
 Vatican Prove^al MSS. What modern poet 
 ever had his work made visible in so beautiful a 
 form ? 
 
 The Provencal poets were read only by the 
 higher classes. Kings, great nobles, and famous 
 scholars alone, could own su'ch volumes. One, 
 if not the most celebrated, is in the Vatican, 
 and it is probably the original, which was made 
 by the Monk of the island of Gold. The exist- 
 1 See Appendix z.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 27 
 
 ence of the " Monk of the Island of Gold " has 
 been disputed, and several critics have declared 
 him to be a fabulous personage. The monk is 
 no myth. Nostredamus tells us that he was of 
 the house of Cibo of Genoa. Entering, after a 
 worldly life, into the Monastery of Saint Honorat 
 de Lerins, Cibo was charged with the care of 
 the rich and beautiful library of the Convent. 
 Amongst its MSS. he found one of the Pro- 
 ven9al poets and their biographies. The col- 
 lection had originally been made at the command 
 of Alphonso II., King of Aragon and Count of 
 Provence 1198-1207. Cibo admirably trans- 
 cribed this MS. and sent it to Louis II., nine- 
 teenth Count of Provence ; and many copies of 
 it were said to have been made for the great 
 Barons of the country. The monk Cibo excelled 
 in copying and illuminating manuscripts. Several 
 of his works are mentioned, and amongst others a 
 Book of Prayers, which he presented to Yolande, 
 the mother of good King Rene. The MS. of 
 the Provengal poets illuminated by the Monk 
 of the Island of Gold, who died in 1407, was 
 continued by Hugues de Saint Caesar, who after 
 an agitated life became a monk of Montmajour 
 d' Aries. Hugues was himself a troubadour, and 
 he revised the work of Cibo, completed it, and 
 sent his copy to King Rene, who again had it 
 transcribed and increased with the lives of several
 
 28 SORDELLO 
 
 more Prover^al poets. The historian Caesar de 
 Nostredamus quaintly tells us of the colours 
 used by the Monk of the Isle of Gold gold of 
 Venice, blue from Acre, and ultramarine and 
 lake from India and Florence. 
 
 The Vatican Prove^al parchments contain 
 the lives of the Prove^al poets, " a-uec leur por- 
 traits, devises, et atitres ornemens en miniature" as 
 Ste. Pelaye's correspondent wrote in the last 
 century. 1 The "portraits" 2 are not likenesses, 
 but illustrations in character, charmingly and 
 exquisitely done. A later collection of the lives 
 and poetry of some of the Prove^al poets is at 
 Cheltenham, and was formerly in the library of 
 Sir Thomas Philipps. A collection, written on 
 paper, of about the same date, 1594, ' IS tne 
 Rime Provenzali, in the Riccardi Library at 
 Florence. The preface to this interesting 
 volume is delightful, and to the following 
 effect : 
 
 " This book I had copied on parchment and 
 in very old characters by a certain Marcello 
 Adriani. Revised and corrected by me with 
 
 1 ",Nous avons leurs vies ecrite en proven$al ; elles sont 
 dans la Bibliotheque du Roy ; elles sont aussi dans celle du 
 Vatican, avec leurs portraits, devise et autres ornemens en 
 miniature." Revue des Langues Romanes. 
 
 2 MS. du Vatican No. 5232 format grand in folio. Les 
 lettres initials des pieces offrent des miniatures representant 
 des troubadours. Raynouard, vol. ii. p. cliv.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 29 
 
 much care, I pray every one in whose hands 
 it may fall, after me, to hold it dear, because, 
 to-day, Books of old Proven9al Poetry have 
 almost vanished from Provence. Let whoever 
 does not take delight in Poetry, or does not 
 wish to weary himself in the study of the 
 language, still value the book for the sake of 
 his heirs, as it will acquire more consideration 
 in proportion as it is more cared for. At first, 
 the idiom will appear obscure, but let no one 
 despair ; with practice it will soon become easy, 
 so that much will be made intelligible, as it 
 happened to me, Piero di Simoni del Hero ; if 
 for nothing else, for many terms which are in 
 Dante, and in other good authors of that time ; 
 and my greatest reward has been to find the 
 book and to correct it." 
 
 The volume begins with a poem from Sor- 
 dello, and this perhaps indicates the value set 
 upon his verse, even at that time, by one most 
 solicitous to preserve the relics of a neglected 
 literature. Sordello's verse has won admiration 
 from many scholars. Diez alone has spoken of 
 it slightingly. He does not find so much to 
 praise in it as others have found in it ; and he 
 remarks that when Sordello says his lady 
 possesses in a young body the judgment of old 
 age, it is perhaps the only thought of all his 
 songs which has not been used elsewhere.
 
 go SORDELLO 
 
 For several centuries the Proverujal language 
 was the language of the highest civilization of 
 Europe. Its last and most brilliant period in 
 Italy was during Sordello's lifetime, when both 
 Provence and Lombardy were the two countries 
 in which poets were most welcomed, honoured, 
 and cultivated. He must have left a noble 
 record of himself, now in great part lost to us, 
 to have won Dante's admiration. But Rolan- 
 dino, who was his contemporary, gives him no 
 place of honour but invests his name with the 
 scandalous interest to which we have alluded. 
 It is in Rolandino's Chronicle that we get a 
 glimpse of him when, in his youth, he inspired a 
 perilous and a compromising love in Cunizza of 
 Romano, the young wife of Count Rizzardo of 
 San Bonifazio. At the instigation or command 
 of Ezzelino, Sordello fled with her to Verona. 
 The old Provencal biography says, he took her 
 from Sari Bonifazio at the instigation of her two 
 brothers, Alberic and Ezzelino. Browning, in 
 his poem, gives to Cunizza the name of Palma. 
 Telling us of Palma, he says " Cunizza, Dante 
 called her," The Palma of Browning's Sordello, 
 is a most alluring and lovely creation, a presence 
 of rich beauty, of seductive charm. She is 
 conceived in the very spirit of the remarkable 
 Cunizza " passion's votaress," as he calls her. 
 But why name her Palma ? Palma and Cunizza
 
 AND CUNIZZA 31 
 
 were sisters. Cunizza was the youngest, Palma 
 the eldest, of Ezzelino's daughters. Representing 
 Sordello as the son of Salinguerra, Browning 
 puts a novel graft upon the genealogical tree 
 of the most celebrated Salinguerra of Ferrara. 
 Salinguerra was a name borne by several potent 
 families there : the Goramonte, Taurelli, Torelli, 
 Boiardi and Giustinelli. The famous head of 
 the Ghibellini at Ferrara, Salinguerra Goramonti 
 was allied by marriage with the house of 
 Romano : he was in fact the brother-in-law of 
 the last Ezzelino. We find no mention of him 
 in the chronicles and documents of the time in 
 connection with Sordello. And yet the climax of 
 Browning's story of Sordello is a brilliant dramatic 
 incident wherein Sordello is suddenly revealed 
 both to himself and to Salinguerra as Salinguerra's 
 son ! It gives great pathos to the situation when 
 the grand old Captain throws his mailed weight 
 suddenly and completely upon the refining poet 
 and moralized man espousing the people's cause. 
 It is tragic, it is superb but it is not the 
 Sordello of history, for the Sordello of history 
 did not give up the ghost then and there, but 
 survived Salinguerra, who ended his days at the 
 age of eighty-four in 1244 a prisoner of the 
 Republic of Venice. Vigorous old warrior, he 
 was not only the father of seven children, but 
 during his captivity his wife bore him twins.
 
 32 SORDELLO 
 
 Of ancient and illustrious lineage, he was yet 
 the most celebrated person of his family, which 
 for a long time had been potent in Central Italy. 
 His family had received from Innocent III. a 
 great part of the possessions of Countess 
 Matilda, and Salinguerra himself, in spite of 
 all the Guelphs of the Marca, had maintained 
 himself master of Ferrara for years. He was 
 famed for many fights and sieges ; not less 
 for craft than bravery. Captured finally, by 
 fraud, and under cover of an agreement 
 for peace, at a banquet to celebrate it, and 
 betrayed by his host, he was carried to 
 Venice on a Venetian ship ; and at Venice he 
 died. If you go to the Lido, to the Church 
 of Saint Nicholas, think of him, for there he 
 was buried, and there I sought his sepulchral 
 stone. 
 
 The Republic not only consented to respect 
 the last wishes of its illustrious prisoner, who 
 dying, requested to be buried at San Niccolo del 
 Lido, but it decreed that his funeral should 
 be solemnly and splendidly celebrated, and his 
 last resting-place adorned with a sumptuous 
 monument. The monument no longer exists, 
 but a fragment, inscribed with letters of 
 the thirteenth century, is to be seen over the 
 door of the corridor that leads to the fourth 
 chapel. There is an error in the copy of the
 
 AND CUNIZZA 33 
 
 inscription as given in Musatti's Fenezia e sua 
 conquista nel Media Evo. Splendour of old life, 
 and stir and power of great days ! All ves- 
 tige of Salinguerra's part in both is reduced 
 to a worn and barely legible funeral stone, 
 which has yet lasted six hundred years, giving 
 interest to the cold corridor of a poor church. 
 
 What is true in Browning's Sordello is his 
 expression of the growth of a poet's mind, of 
 his relation to life, of his effort to comprehend 
 himself, and to reconcile himself with his time ; 
 of his baffled purpose ; his radical incompetence 
 to deal with the actual, precisely because he is 
 too far in advance of its spirit ; so far, that he 
 cannot let himself be used by it in order to use 
 it. What remains inexplicable in our English 
 poet's fiction is, that while he follows the old 
 chronicles for the minor personages and events 
 of his story, and gives them in the truest local 
 colour, he so far ignores Bordello's known 
 relations to the masters of his time. Browning 
 ignores the Italian's long and varied career, so 
 full of splendid material for a scholar and a 
 poet, and gives us but the fragmentary fiction 
 of a few brief years from Bordello's boyhood 
 at Goito ; gives a glimpse of him at Verona, 
 and resorts to the tragic issue of his problematic 
 journey to Ferrara, his audience with Salinguerra 
 and sudden death, as if wishing there and 
 c
 
 34 SORDELLO 
 
 then to have done with a hero whom he 
 has used but for his own purpose. Yet 
 Browning's genius is great enough to make us 
 accept his fiction, and we study it, rewarded by 
 his unworn diction, his surprising expression of 
 the opulence of nature, his sense of character 
 and passion and beauty ; and, at last reconciled 
 with what is arbitrary, or forgetting it, we 
 surrender ourselves again to his magnificent 
 leading.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 35 
 
 III 
 
 AT the best the most studious seeker of the 
 facts of Sordello's life can only have glimpses of 
 him. But we have enough to give reality to his 
 being, and to appreciate his rich nature. The 
 few dates, the few facts, which are the result 
 of Italian, German, and French research, afford 
 at least the frame-work for a biography. But 
 nothing less than the imagination of a great poet 
 can make a moving and glowing figure out of 
 bits of a life of such remote interest. Yet 
 something of the expression of the man remains, 
 and the land he lived in, the art he saw, help us to 
 see something of the aspect of the world wherein 
 he had his being. And it is worth while in this 
 connection to consider the character of Verona, 
 where a part of the drama of his life was enacted. 
 Medieval Verona was in every way interesting. 
 Though it was largly built of wood, its churches 
 and palaces of brick and marble won for it the 
 name of the marble city. Yet grim of aspect 
 and fortress -like were its great houses. An 
 early chronicle records that at the beginning 
 of the thirteenth century seven hundred towers
 
 36 SORDELLO 
 
 were built as adjuncts for their defence. These 
 towers set strangely close together gave a 
 dark majesty to the town. The Roman amphi- 
 theatre was then much as it is now, though at 
 the beginning of the twelfth century an earth- 
 quake shattered it, and brought down part of 
 its wall. Yet its well-proportioned grandeur 
 must have been none the less imposing next to 
 the mediaeval structures, chief of which was 
 the Rocca, 1 a great fortress built by the first 
 Italian kings. Of the later mediaeval work 
 some idea may be formed in looking at the 
 Basilica of San Zenone. The more princely 
 splendour of Verona was the later creation of 
 the Scaligers, though, before they became 
 masters of Verona it was a matter of pride with 
 Guelph and Ghibellin to rebuild their ruined 
 edifices with more magnificence than ever. 
 Verona was in part protected by her most 
 ancient walls 2 which were some three hundred 
 years old, and intact 3 even as late as the twelfth 
 century and in part by the Adige. These 
 
 1 La Rocca di San Pietro fu da Berengario Lenore Re 
 d'ltalia ampliata e ridotta a maggior furtezza, essendosi 
 valso per questa opera pietra dell'antichissima Teatro 
 ruinato a quella vicino circa 1'anno 870, Cronica della Citta 
 di Verona. Zagetta. 
 
 2 Can Grande avidissimo di fabbriche e molto studioso 
 deU'ornamento della citta. 
 
 3 Fabbricata da Teodrico. Zagetta.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 37 
 
 walls were pierced with 'great gates dominated 
 by as many towers of defence, and these gate- 
 ways were adorned with rude, but vivid paint- 
 ings of the Virgin and Child, St Peter, St 
 Zenone, and St Christopher. The palaces, or 
 rather castellated houses of the Crecenzi, the 
 Monticoli, the Bonifazi, with their towers 
 lifted above the swift Adige, the great Rocca, 
 the great Amphitheatre, must have given strange 
 majesty and picturesqueness to old Verona. 
 Within its walls the darkness of moonless nights 
 was broken by the infrequent light of lantern 
 or torch ; for whoever came out after the third 
 bell of the evening was required to carry a 
 light. After the stroke of the bell, the door of 
 every house was bolted aud barred. There 
 was something of the religious severity of 
 the Puritan about the Veronese of Mediaeval 
 Verona. They compelled Jews to go about 
 with a great O upon the breast. Blasphemers 
 against God were fined fifty lire ; against the 
 Virgin twenty-five lire ; against the saints fifteen 
 lire ; and if the blasphemer could not pay the 
 fine he was, in winter, ducked in water three 
 times ; and in summer, he was whipped three 
 times in the public square. 
 
 1 Non ho trovato che la mura della citta fabbricata da 
 Teodrico siano mutate fino al tempo dei Signori della Scala. 
 Zagetta.
 
 38 SORDELLO 
 
 Within this grim but rich city with its splen- 
 dour of figured plates of bronze upon the doors 
 of its, even then, old Basilica, with its wrought 
 iron gates and the screens to its tombs, its trium- 
 phal arches of marble all the ordered majesty of 
 Roman masonry and all the variety of the mediaeval 
 brick-work of its towers life was rampant with 
 every passion, furnished with every industry, 
 enriched with every art. , And notwithstanding 
 the wise provisions of its government its eighty 
 counsellors l of the first men of the city, who 
 elected the Captain-General or Podesta of the 
 town, the most pestiferous enmities and ambi- 
 tions made Verona a place of sudden tumult and 
 sudden death. Frequent homicides of impor- 
 tant citizens led to merciless hostilities between 
 the factions, and not infrequently whole quarters 
 of the town were burned to the ground. The 
 great bell called the Marangona z gave voice to 
 danger in the fierce city j the Carroccio 3 was 
 
 1 Furono eletti per la Universita de' Nobili et Popoli 
 Ottimati, coi gentil'huomini, quali in quel tempo diman- 
 darono i quattroventi consiglieri, e governatori della Re- 
 publica Veronese ; a quali diedro ogni autorita di eleggeri 
 gli Ufficiali, cosi per il reggimento del Stato, come per 
 essercitar la giustitia civile, e criminale. Saraina, p. 2. 
 
 2 Campana grossa a martella della Torre maggiore. 
 Zagetta, p. 211. 
 
 8 The Carroccio was a great red battle car with four wheels, 
 bearing the cross and standard of the Commune, picked men 
 to defend it, and it was drawn by white oxen. It served as
 
 AND CUNIZZA 39 
 
 dragged out, and the Podesta full armed sallied 
 forth to put down " the plague of both houses " 
 the Monticoli, and the Bonifazi, that is to say 
 the Capuletti. For fifty years the city was 
 convulsed by these families and often the whole 
 town followed the fortunes of one, or the other, 
 resisting the aggressions of Paduans, Mantuans 
 or Vincentines, and as often invading their terri- 
 tory and laying siege to their castles. Guelph 
 and Ghibelline were reconciled many times and 
 as often attacked each other with more rancorous 
 violence. But the enmities of half a century 
 had again been quieted, and peace was cele- 
 brated by the marriage of the sisters of the two 
 foremost men of Verona. These espousals were 
 celebrated at Verona when Count Richard of 
 Saint Boniface was Podesta ; and the alliance of 
 Guelph and Ghibelline families by the marriage 
 of their respective daughters to their former 
 foes, was to have put an end to ruinous dissen- 
 sions. The chronicler 1 who first mentions 
 Sordello lived at the very time of the events 
 he records, and his testimony is confirmed by 
 the Provengal fragment about Sordello. They 
 all agree as to Sordello's residence at the court 
 of the Count of San Bonifazio, who had been 
 
 a centre of defence and rallying point on the open field of 
 battle, and was invented by the Archbishop of Milan. 
 1 Rolandino.
 
 40 SORDELLO 
 
 frequently Podesta of Mantua where the Guelphs 
 were strongest. 
 
 Whether Sordello came from the Castle of 
 Goito, whether Goito was then, as it was later, 
 in possession of Ezzelino ; whether he was of 
 the same family, or merely resided there, as 
 fautore of Ezzelino as the Visconti were said to 
 be Jautore of the family of Romano and came 
 to Verona in the suite of Ezzelino, or, whether, 
 independent of the master of Onara and Romano, 
 he came with the Count of San Bonifazio with 
 whom he is first associated by the Provencal 
 biography and the Latin chronicle of the time 
 can be but matter of conjecture. Authentic 
 record fixes his first public appearance at 
 the court of the Count of San Bonifazio who 
 had not been long married two years only 
 when he went with Azzo of Este to drive 
 Salinguerra from Ferrara. 
 
 It is probable that Cunizza was left at the 
 Castle of San Bonifazio. Was it there that 
 Sordello sang his first song to the Lady Cun- 
 izza ? And what was the song he sang? His 
 "Goito Lay" or rather the fragment of it, 
 " Sordello's one piece of lovely verse" as Pater 
 called it, given in Browning's Sordello would 
 no doubt have surprised and charmed Sordello 
 himself, could he have heard it. It is a bit of 
 our own English poet's own characteristic inven-
 
 AND CQNIZZA 41 
 
 .tion. Sordello's " Goito lay," whatever it may 
 have been, has gone with long forgotten things. 
 But we are not to stay at the Castle of San 
 Bonifazio, nor at Verona, but follow Sordello 
 beyond, to where the nearer Alps break down 
 to the Venetian plain, and you may yet see 
 grim castle-walls of Sordello's time, and the 
 ever renewed beauty of nature. It is now 
 very much as it was, save that the roadways 
 were then often dusty with the tramp of mail- 
 clad men, and gay with the splendour of armed 
 knights. Go to the hills between the Brenta 
 and the Piave, over which Ezzelino of Onara and 
 Romano held sway, and see what a land he 
 could call his own. Among those hills the 
 peasants retain ancient habits. Lady Cunizza 
 was born on one of the hills of this favoured 
 land. She herself says it ; and in Dante's 
 language how tersely and vividly. Dante, who 
 saw everything in Italy worth seeing, mentions 
 the little hill crested by the famous castle of 
 Romano. It lifts itself, but not very high, he 
 says, between the Brenta and the Piave. Away 
 to the east of it, within sight, is the strange 
 and ancient rocca or fortress of Asolo. From 
 Romano's grassy knoll and old church one sees 
 the towers of Bassano, and the gleaming Brenta 
 stretching away till lost in the distance. What 
 a landscape ! The very hills here have rhythmic
 
 42 SORDELLO 
 
 contours, they repeat each other, and fall in 
 gracious lines of beauty to the level land. 
 Dense woods, of which now there is scant sign, 
 covered it in the middle ages ; no pine forests, 
 only a few oak trees now remain. But with the 
 chestnut every tree of Southern Italy flourishes 
 there still ; the olive, the myrtle, the magnola, 
 the pomegranate, and the lemon, all find the 
 place warm enough to resist the winter. The 
 last time I traversed it everything seemed lulled 
 to delicious rest. The "felon winds" were 
 asleep, or rose but to winnow the air, to 
 give it a finer quality. I reached Asolo, one of 
 the places of refuge, as of strength, of the family 
 of Romano, and it was even there that Sordello 
 and Cunizza may have come. In fact we can 
 trace him beyond, to the Castle of Onigo, where 
 he stayed with the Lords of Strasso, whose 
 sister he clandestinely married after his enforced 
 rupture with Cunizza. The richest verse of 
 Browning's Sordello seems to have grown out 
 of the very land that lies around and below the 
 Rocca of Asolo. In describing Goito he in 
 truth seems to describe the castle and fortress 
 of Asolo, and the screened and intricate and 
 stony and woody ways that lead to the secure 
 and open site of both. Here, rather than at 
 Goito, is the very scenery to make a lover 
 of nature alert and impassioned in his youth.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 43 
 
 No poet could wish or dream of a more beautiful 
 land, none with a richer historic interest. No 
 man proud of his possessions could be better 
 placed to see them than upon one of these hills, 
 like multitudinous earth waves now stilled, 
 leading the glance to the infinite horizon of 
 the restful and sea-like plain, or back to the 
 mountains which give limitation and grandeur 
 to a vast and alluring landscape.
 
 44 SORDELLO 
 
 IV 
 
 THE Venetian mainland was first inhabited by 
 a people of Pelasgic-Greek origin. From the 
 remotest time it was known as Venetian, and 
 their name has survived all the vicissitudes of 
 Italian story. Nothing has changed the original 
 character of the race which has always shown 
 a marked predilection for a rich and joyous life, 
 favoured both by the climate and the position 
 of the land. Significant of the origin of the 
 race is the Venetian dialect which, it is affirmed, 
 retains Greek words, not derived from later 
 intercourse with the East ; but vestiges of the 
 first Greek settlers upon the soil ; " true 
 Homeric words," as they have been called, and, 
 according to modern philologues, due to the 
 Pelasgi-illirico, or Greco-illtrico element. Be that 
 as it may, the descendants of this very ancient 
 race, most happily endowed physically and in- 
 tellectually, were not heavy and sensual like the 
 Romans, nor superstitious and sacerdotal like 
 the Etruscans. Yet they received from various 
 sources diverse and potent elements. German 
 weight and energy, Lombard voluptuousness,
 
 AND CUNIZZA 45 
 
 and whatever the East had to give through 
 commerce with Venice or yield to conquest, 
 were lodged in the Venetian country. Its 
 greatest tyrant was of German origin. Of 
 his impetuous, dominating blood, mixed with 
 Tuscan, came the famous Cunizza, born of a 
 Florentine mother, who was the wife of the third 
 Ezzelin. The family was founded in Italy by the 
 Bavarian Ezzelo, son of Arpo whose whole 
 fortune was represented by the horse which he 
 rode, and who came down the Alps about 1126, 
 with the Emperor Conrad II. to be invested 
 by him with feudal rights over the domains of 
 Onara and Romano. Onara near Citadella 
 Romano near Bassano. The great-grandson of 
 this knight was Ezzelin the Stutterer, who went 
 to the Crusade, and at Ascalon distinguished him- 
 self in single combat with a Saracen warrior, 
 whom he slew. He came back to Italy vassal 
 of the Emperor, Captain in his army, devoted 
 not less to his cause than to the aggrandisement of 
 his own family. His stirring life led him over 
 Italy to many sieges, battles, festivals, from Milan 
 to Rome, and he returned to end his days among 
 his native hills at the foot of the Venetian Alps. 
 He came back to a country more beautiful than 
 the Holy Land to a country sheltered from 
 northern winds, kept green by unfailing streams, 
 crested with strong castles; his own overlook-
 
 46 SORDELLO 
 
 ing the vast Venetian plain, then populous with 
 walled and towered cities; a country cut by 
 swift rivers and washed and fretted on its 
 southern shore by the waters of the lagoons 
 and the Adriatic. It was a country for the 
 most part densely wooded. It was virgin soil 
 when the Eneti from Paphlagonia first settled 
 upon it, long before Rome was founded. It 
 was dedicated to Hercules and to Venus, the 
 two representatives of the elder religion of the 
 race, whose ancient worship of force and beauty 
 was but slowly displaced, in later times, by 
 a Paganised Christianity. This country had 
 become, at the beginning of the thirteenth 
 century, celebrated for its delightful, its pros- 
 perous, its courteous life, and it won the im- 
 mortal praise of Dante. True to the Greek 
 origin of its people, it kept the brightness and 
 joy of the Hellenic ideal. Save when its life 
 was broken up by mediaeval fanaticism and 
 ambition, it was sound and it was beautiful. 
 All its elements flowered when Europe was 
 sending her most precious blood to the Crusades. 
 Not only the Crusaders brought back to it some 
 of the best gifts of the East, the land also 
 became the last refuge of Provencal ideals. Out 
 of its hospitable, splendid and refined life has 
 come the story of certain celebrated women, and 
 the general reputation of joyousness and charm
 
 AND CUNIZZA 47 
 
 of the women of the Marca Treviziana. These 
 women appear as the finest feminine types, like 
 the tenderest Homeric women, like the gentlest 
 women of our own Shakespeare's imagination. 
 Not women of ambitious character, of political 
 aptitudes like the great Matilda of Canossa a 
 Tuscan type nor like the immaculate and 
 celestial Saint of Siena ; but closer to everyday 
 humanity ; peaceful in all the retirement of 
 domestic life, or fatally led to find in the most 
 impassioned personal life, the purpose and 
 satisfaction of their being ; or finding the reason 
 of their existence in maternal love ; but too 
 gentle-natured, too refined ever to develop or 
 illustrate the darker tragedies and deeper sen- 
 sualities of the Latin race ; for something child- 
 like and something queenly its dignity, its 
 calm, its sweetness is shown by them, and 
 nothing of the heavy voluptuousness of a Julia 
 Farnese, or the criminal passiveness of a Lucrezia 
 Borgia. The most exalted type of the Venetian 
 woman is seen in the Venetian Madonna the 
 one enthroned in Giorgione's picture at Castel- 
 franco, and in the Bellini Madonna at the Frari 
 the supremest ideal of motherhood and chastity ; 
 but another ideal of the race is the queenly 
 woman ; she who is represented as a part of the 
 pomp of state, the splendid creature of ceremony. 
 We see her in Veronese's pictures of Venice
 
 48 SORDELLO 
 
 Triumphant ; a magnificent being ; but she has 
 no personal life. We see her in Titian's Sacred 
 and Profane Love; the sumptuously clad lady 
 there who belongs to the world, expresses it, 
 is dedicated to it, limited by it. She is cold, 
 she is superb, she is selfish, and she lives with- 
 out joy. The other ideal is represented as a 
 daughter of Venus ; her beauty is a part of the 
 very vitality of nature, obeys its law, attracts, 
 not repels. We have seen her in the festivals 
 of youth and beauty ; her whole being radiant 
 with love and enjoyment ; living like a flower 
 for a brief and full moment of expansion, not 
 trammelled or checked by the ascetic conscience, 
 nor ever darkened and abased by the sense of 
 sin. Her goodness of heart keeps her in all 
 honour, and if she falls by prompture of the 
 blood, she is never degraded ; for no accident 
 can destroy her sense of feminine rectitude, 
 which is the law of her life. She retains her 
 womanly delicacy and finds peace and honour 
 in love. She is the eternal feminine. And 
 such a woman was Cunizza, daughter of the 
 Tuscan Adelaide and of Ezzelin " the monk," 
 as he was called for he ended his days in a 
 monastery at Oliero. He was father of many 
 children and had been husband to many wives ; 
 one was the famous S t perinella, the richest 
 heiress of Padua, another equally rich, was
 
 AND CUNIZZA 49 
 
 Cecilia de Baion ; and last came the Tuscan, 
 Adelaide, the mother of Cunizza. 
 
 Cunizza was born under the influence of the 
 planet Venus. Dante says it. Although held 
 in honour by the sternest moralist, by a mind 
 of the strictest sense of justice, by Italy's 
 greatest poet, she has not escaped the censure 
 of several commentators of the Divina Commedia 
 who have blackened her name, which yet lights 
 up the chronicler's page and gives a living 
 interest to the verse of the poets of the gay 
 science. Her winning face, her unhesitating 
 devotion to the passionate impulses of her 
 heart have kept her name in story and in verse. 
 We must follow her as she was followed 
 by her contemporaries if we would see her 
 life burning like a richly -fed and ardent 
 flame, attracting and dazzling whoever met 
 her, "car" as a Provencal poet wrote " sa 
 beltaz e sos rics prez seignoreiga." A chivalric 
 gossip of the day, William of Lucerne, a trou- 
 badour, seeking to better his fortunes in the 
 prosperity of Treviso, or at the Castle of 
 Romano, declares that they who speak ill of 
 Cunizza make a great mistake ; for she is be- 
 yond all other women in worth and beauty, 
 and he adds that whoever makes war upon her 
 reputation will learn whether his sword cuts or 
 bends. Ugo de St Cyr replies that he knows 
 
 D
 
 50 SORDELLO 
 
 well enough that William's sword cuts, but not 
 in the valley Jehoshaphat will so many blows 
 have been dealt as William must give if he 
 really means to vindicate Cunizza ; and he adds 
 that not all the doctors of Salerno can restore, 
 or medicine, her good name. The personal 
 allusions to Cunizza and her adventures in the 
 Marca Trevigiana, by contemporary poets, in 
 the Provencal life of Sordello, and in Rolandino, 
 excite the liveliest curiosity, and in a way give 
 us glimpses of her. Bordello's flight with her 
 from San Bonifazio, and also her second flight 
 with Bonio of Treviso, is but a part of her 
 story. The echo of her impulsive and im- 
 passioned life, the rumour of her numerous 
 adventures, seemed never to have died entirely 
 out of the memory of men, and from time to 
 time she and Sordello are revived by allusion or 
 by story in prose or verse. The earlier lovers 
 of Verona rival Da Porto's Romeo and Juliet, 
 though these have the added lustre of Shake- 
 speare's presentation of them. Cunizza's was 
 one of those rich and complete organisations to 
 which the ordinary restrictions of married life are 
 not only oppressive, but insufferable. Sordello 
 and other Proven9al poets praised her, or alluded 
 to her wilful and joyous life ; but it was left 
 for Dante's earliest commentator to degrade 
 her as a magna meretrix, in contradiction to the
 
 AND CUNIZZA 51 
 
 infallible judgment of Dante himself who 
 honoured her memory as a woman, and exalted 
 her to the dazzling sphere of Paradise to a 
 place there only lower than the place of 
 Beatrice. Dante's exaltation of Cunizza has 
 puzzled most of his commentators, and led 
 to much speculation. The researches of Prof. 
 T. Zamboni at first seemed to afford a con- 
 clusive answer to the question of the cause 
 of Dante's elevation of Cunizza to the " Shining 
 Sphere." Later investigations of Cunizza's life 
 brought to light a document which was un- 
 known to Prof. Zamboni, and which has been 
 set forth with an argument to diminish the 
 importance of " the document of emancipation," 
 upon which Prof. Zamboni relied for his in- 
 teresting defence of Cunizza. He was satis- 
 fied that Dante exalted Cunizza to Paradise 
 because she gave freedom to the slaves of 
 Romano, and was, as he claimed, the first one 
 in Mediaeval Italy to do this act of humanity. 
 He cited a document emanating directly from 
 Cunizza; a document which established the 
 fact that she was at the time living at Florence 
 after the terrible destruction of her family, and 
 that then and there, in extreme old age, she 
 emancipated the slaves of the domain of 
 Romano. It has since been made apparent that 
 this was not the first act and example of the
 
 52 SORDELLO 
 
 kind, nor one so uncommon as it was asserted to 
 be ; but it is none the less interesting to know 
 that she gave freedom to all the men in bond- 
 age upon the lands of the Ezzelini. She was 
 living with the kinsman of her famous mother 
 Adelaide, at the house of the celebrated Caval- 
 cante, father of Guido Cavalcante, Dante's poet- 
 friend ; and there Dante, as a boy, must have seen 
 and heard her and been impressed by the story 
 of her life, her misfortunes, her goodness and 
 strength of soul. And what a pathetic figure was 
 Cunizza, the aged princess, as she was called, in 
 the house of Cavalcante. She, the last survivor of 
 her extraordinary family, yet not broken by the 
 blows of fate, though bereft of whatever glori- 
 fied her life, grieved beyond cure and in exile. 
 Her measureless sorrows must have given their 
 own solemnity to her spirit ; yet they seem 
 not to have weakened her mental force, for she 
 gave proof of intellectual and moral vigour to 
 the last. Instead of seeking the shelter of a 
 convent like a benumbed and frightened soul, 
 she sought the companionship of one of the 
 most remarkable men of his time, Cavalcante 
 the elder, the philosophic Epicurean sceptic. 
 Ghibelline as she was, however, no religious 
 house would have harboured her. Cunizza 
 must have looked back upon the swiftly-sped 
 years of her existence, its proud joys, its im-
 
 AND CUNIZZA 53 
 
 perious passions, its appalling catastrophes, its 
 unutterable woe, now all hushed and gathered 
 in peace, as upon a picture ; or as upon 
 a vision j which left her silent and com- 
 passionate, a true Pieta, a Mother of Sorrow, 
 contemplating her sacred dead, herself sancti- 
 fied by suffering, detached from the sins of 
 her youth, remembered perhaps, but not 
 with penitential tears. The passion of her 
 young years had gone down, and she may have 
 looked back as we look at the sky after the 
 storm has departed leaving no trace of itself. 
 Widowed and bereft, whether there was oblivion 
 or transfiguration in her memories, there was 
 no such thing as abasement in them. A tem- 
 perament like hers no doubt kept her spirit 
 brave and pleasant to the last. She was de- 
 livered from the tumult of her senses, and one 
 likes to think that goodness and gratitude light- 
 ened for her the burden of sorrow, and stayed 
 her steps even to the grave. Did Sordello and 
 Cunizza meet in the after years of their long 
 life ? It is not improbable , for the tenderness 
 of noble souls may have brought them together 
 a brief moment, perhaps to say : Peace and 
 farewell. Is not this the epitaph for every 
 sincere passion when dead ? Once gone, it 
 cannot be found again ; once dead, it cannot be 
 revived. Peace and farewell we say to our
 
 54 SORDELLO 
 
 dead years, our past passions, our old loves. 
 We do them no wrong ; we salute them, and 
 pass on. 
 
 That Cunizza was a woman of great spirit 
 to the very end of her days is manifest from 
 the unusual energy of her expression, which 
 survives in and breaks through the cold 
 formality and stiffness of a legal document in 
 which she sends the Tedeschi, who betrayed 
 her brother Alberic at San Zenone, to a 
 hundred devils. We have seen that her name 
 is honoured by Dante. It is probable that as 
 a Ghibelline he in no way accepted the slander- 
 ous stories with which the triumphant Guelphs 
 blackened her name. But he does in fact put 
 in her own mouth the reason for which she has 
 a seat in heaven, making her say : 
 
 " Cunizza fu chiamata, e qui refulgo 
 Perche mi vinse il lume d'esta Stella," 
 
 that is to say, " Cunizza I was called j I shine 
 here because I was conquered by the influence 
 of Venus." 
 
 Furthermore, it was probably notorious that 
 she had been a great-hearted woman. While 
 Dante implies the all potent amorous influence 
 of the planet under which she was born, he 
 dismisses any examination of the sins of her 
 youth with the simple statement that she but
 
 AND CUNIZZA 55 
 
 obeyed her star. If she sinned, she sinned 
 through her temperament ; not regarded or 
 punished as an adulteress, but forgiven much 
 because she loved much. How could Dante 
 condemn her when the Syrian Magdalen was 
 not condemned by Christ ; and the woman of 
 Samaria found grace in His sight ? But what 
 is strange and it has not escaped remark, is the 
 fact that while Dante is indulgent towards 
 Cunizza, he places the unfortunate Francesca 
 da Rimini in Purgatorio. Was it that he thought 
 the suffering of a long life purged Cunizza 
 of the sins of her youth, or that as a fierce 
 Ghibelline he refused to accept the slanderous 
 stories of Guelph chroniclers and poets concern- 
 ing the Lady of Romano ? The scandal of her 
 youth after her marriage with the Count of San 
 Bonifazio first brings her into notice, when we 
 are told she ran away with Sordello who stole 
 away with her at the instigation of her brothers 
 Ezzelino and Alberic. After her flight with 
 Sordello, her next notorious adventure was with 
 Bonio, a gentleman of Treviso, a married man, 
 with whom, according to Rolandino, she fled, 
 " travelling at a great cost in search of pleasure 
 through many parts of the world. After several 
 years of absence both came back to Treviso, 
 where her brother Alberic was Podesta. She 
 never detached herself from Bonio (tanto ipsa erat
 
 56 SORDELLO 
 
 amorata in sum) 'during his life." Bonio was 
 killed by Ezzelino while defending Treviso 
 when the latter assaulted the 'city. Cunizza 
 followed her brother Ezzelino to Padua and 
 later married Count Ranero of the noble family 
 of Breganze. Ezzelino killed him. Cunizza 
 again a widow remained with Ezzelino at 
 Padua. 
 
 The last glimpse we get of Cunizza in her 
 extreme old age is at the Castle of Cerbara, in 
 the valley of Bisenzio, once the home of her 
 mother Adelaide. It was there that she made 
 her last will and testament in the presence of 
 that famous Judge Convenevole di Gualfredonio 
 di Bici, giudice da Prato who was Petrarch's 
 " Master." The last survivor of her great 
 family, in exile, despoiled of her possessions, 
 she then and there reasserts her claim to the 
 confiscated property of the family of Romano ; 
 and then and there she makes her will be- 
 queathing to one of her young cousins Count 
 Alessandro of the Alberti, her castle of Musa, 
 near Treviso. Something of the fatality that 
 marked every period of her life followed her 
 last recorded act ; for in favouring one of three 
 brothers, Alessandro, rather than Guglielmo 
 and Napoleone, the latter, who had been dis- 
 inherited by his father, was the more em- 
 bittered. Not long after the date of Cunizza's
 
 AND CUNIZZA 57 
 
 testament and perhaps even before her death, 
 he murdered his brother Alessandro at the 
 Castle of Cerbara. It is probable that Cunizza's 
 life of almost a century terminated on the 
 eve of, or soon after "the terrible domestic 
 tragedy which rendered the name of Alberti 
 odious." The conjecture is at least not im- 
 probable, showing as it does to the very end of 
 Cunizza's life the tragic element that rose with 
 and followed her resolute and happy nature ; 
 herself a woman whom no fortune could 
 abase, and no circumstance change. The 
 sympathy of Dante for the great lady of 
 Romano is perhaps best accounted for by 
 Antonio Guasti, who well says that none 
 better than Dante could understand and 
 sympathise with her temper and aspirations, 
 for he like her was an exile, he like her was 
 despoiled of his possessions ; like her he was 
 passionate and invincible in temperament. His 
 impression of her remains definite enough. In 
 his verse she is a high and joyous spirit. He 
 puts in her mouth " language which is unusual, 
 haughty rather than conciliating," but which it 
 has been remarked, is in perfect accord with 
 the spirit of the two documents emanating from 
 her, the one of 1265, the other of 1279. And 
 not less does he convey to us an expression of 
 her joyous mind when she lightly and disdain-
 
 58 SORDELLO 
 
 fully dismisses any questioning of her place in 
 Paradise, saying : 
 
 ' ' Ma lictamentc a me medtsma indulgo 
 La cagion di mia sorte, e nc,n mi noia 
 Che for se parria forte al -vottro vulgo."
 
 AND CUNIZZA 59 
 
 THERE are two brief and ancient Prove^al 
 documents concerning Sordello the lives of 
 the Provencal poets, transcribed in red, pre- 
 ceding the specimens of their poetry. One 
 describes him as a Mantuan of the Castle of 
 Goito, a courteous Captain, 1 most attractive in 
 his person, a great lover, but crafty and false to 
 women, and to his hosts with whom he stayed 
 and states that he loved Cunizza, the sister of Ser 
 Ezzelino and of Ser Alberico of Romano, and 
 wife of Count San Bonifazio ; and that he was a 
 great personage who went about with a splendid 
 suite of knights. The other MS. adds he was 
 the son of a poor knight, Ser El Cort, etc. 
 
 The first is one of the treasures of the Vatican, 
 the other of the Bibl. Nationale de Paris. Both 
 agree as to his excellence as a poet, his flight 
 with Cunizza, and they alike leave no doubt as 
 to his adventurous career and self-exile from 
 Italy, and refuge at the court of the Count of 
 Provence, where he lived in honour. 
 
 1 Gtntils Catanis a title of distinction like that of marquis 
 or count. Pcrticare.
 
 60 SORDELLO 
 
 " Gallant and Bard and Knight " he was, and 
 praising him as such, the Mantuan chroniclers 
 are supported by all that has been found of 
 contemporary testimony concerning him, though 
 we must reject the incidents and orations with 
 which they illustrate and magnify his public 
 life. There is no evidence that he was a 
 Prince Visconti or Lord of Mantua. The 
 oldest Mantuan chronicle (Breve Chronicon Man- 
 tuanum ab anno 1095-1299) does not mention his 
 name. It was first stated that he was Prince 
 of Mantua by Volteranno, and repeated by 
 Leandro Albertus in his Descrittione d 1 Lombardie; 
 following both, Ziloti, Equiciola, Maffei, Sacchi, 
 Gionta, Sainte-Pelaye, and others to our day 
 call him Prince Visconti, and Lord of Mantua. 
 Pietro Lambechie, in his annotations to Platina's 
 " History of Mantua," remarks that no contem- 
 porary mentions Sordello as Prince of Mantua. 
 Sordello may have been Podesta, or Governor 
 of the city at some time. Its form of govern- 
 ment was republican, and doubtless he may 
 have been elected Podesta, an office held but 
 for six months at a time, without re-election. 
 It is not improbable that he filled the office with 
 honour, and his position then would account 
 for Volteranno's expression when he called him 
 principe de Mantua. That he returned from 
 Provence and distinguished himself in the de-
 
 AND CUNIZZA 61 
 
 fence of the city when Ezzelino ravaged the 
 land, may be true, but we lack historic evidence 
 of it. Legend alone, generally based on truth, 
 first presents him as the valiant defender of his 
 mother city. It is only when he is associated 
 with Charles of Anjou that we have historic 
 data of his later military life and of his public 
 importance. He is spoken of as dominus Sordellus 
 in an act of the year 1259 when Charles Count 
 of Anjou and of Provence receives as a part 
 of his dominion the city of Cuneo. He is one 
 of the eight witnesses of the deed, and his 
 name appears with other personages who are 
 present : he also appeared in an official char- 
 acter as a follower of Charles of Anjou in 
 the city of Riez, in the Bishop's palace ; as a 
 witness, with other dignitaries, to attest the 
 treaty between Guido Delfino of Albona and 
 of Vienne, and Charles of Anjou in 1257. 
 Sordello is one of the signers with other 
 persons of importance ; and, on the same day, 
 and at the same place, another document is 
 signed by sixteen witnesses, the Bishop of 
 Frioul, and other personages of rank and merit, 
 including "i/ milite Sordello" That he was a 
 man of consequence in the suite of Charles of 
 Anjou is indisputable. The legend that so 
 persistently associates his name with the time of 
 Mantuan liberty, may stand as so much tribute
 
 62 SORDELLO 
 
 to his fame though of a later date. O. 
 Schultze, whose researches have brought to- 
 gether some new facts concerning Sordello, 
 refers to a notice by Bartholemy, from which it 
 appears that Barral de Baux transmitted to 
 Sordello, on the 15th of December 1255, fifty 
 pounds, which were due to Sordello as part of 
 the yearly pension paid to him by the com- 
 mune of Marseilles. It is also apparent from 
 Buffi, Histoire de Marseilles, referred to by O. 
 Schultze, that Sordello lived at Marseilles at 
 the Court of Barral, and later, that he served 
 as witness in a matter between Anjou and the 
 Bishop of Marseilles at San Remy in 1257. 
 
 Sordello's adventures, his losses at play one 
 satire in Provencal plainly charges him with 
 being a desperate gambler his love of good 
 company, his disputes, in the fashion of his 
 day, with rival wits and troubadours, and later, 
 his professed distaste for military life, have so 
 far compromised his name that there is question 
 of two 1 Sordellos, for some have found it diffi- 
 cult to reconcile the youth of Sordello, his 
 early manhood even, with the impressive per- 
 sonality described by Dante the lover and 
 companion of Virgil in the Under World the 
 translator of Caesar, the austere patriot, grieved 
 and indignant at the condition of Italy. Several 
 
 1 See Appendix 3.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 63 
 
 writers, who have attempted to tell Sordello's 
 story, have resorted to this theory of two 
 Sordellos, attributing to one an illustrious 
 origin, the honours of the defence of Mantua, a 
 grave and studious life, and the violent death 
 of an Italian patriot of the thirteenth century, 
 whom they call Prince Visconti, Podesta of 
 Mantua; the other Sordello is the famous 
 troubadour who went to Provence, to whom it 
 pleased the early Italian chroniclers to attribute 
 the heroic deeds and lost writings of the great 
 Mantuan who was so admired by Dante. To 
 confirm the theory of two Sordellos they cited 
 Dante's treatise in prose, de la volgare eloquenza 
 in which he speaks of a poet called Gotto, 
 Mantovano, and elsewhere, in the same work 
 alludes to Sordello of Mantua, in a passage 
 which, if not taken in its obvious sense, 
 is perplexing. Tiraboschi's conjecture that 
 Dante's poet, called Gotto, Mantovano, is one 
 and the same person as Sordello Mantovano, 
 seems to be correct, and there are satis- 
 factory reasons for thinking that the Sordello 
 of the Ante Purgatorio is the Sordello alluded 
 to in Dante's Volgare eloquenza. In that treatise, 
 he says, Sordello is admirable in his language j 
 not only in his poems, but in whatever fashion he 
 expresses himself ; for he abandoned the common 
 speech or dialect. Dante does not say that
 
 64 SORDELLO 
 
 Sordello wrote Provencal, but speaks of him as a 
 poet, and we must infer that Sordello expressed 
 himself in the aulic or courtly language, illinguagio 
 nobile. Nothing of his Italian poetry but a con- 
 jectural piece attributed to him has reached us. 
 
 Benvenuto da Imola, who relates Bordello's 
 adventurous love for Cunizza, affirms that 
 Ezzelino drove him away and that his emis- 
 saries followed and assassinated him. The 
 story no doubt was the popular version, 
 for a long time accepted, to account for 
 Sordello's disappearance from North Italy. 
 Rolandino's expression concerning him has 
 not escaped comment. In his account of 
 Ezzelino, he says, Sordellus de ipsins familia. 
 Did he mean that he was by birth of the same 
 family, or merely that he was of the household, 
 or in the service of the family of Romano ? 
 There is no other indication of a family tie. 
 The Chronicle of Pietro Gerardo of Padua, 
 purporting to have been written in the time of 
 Ezzelino (but its genuineness has since been 
 questioned), mentions Sordello as a man faith- 
 ful to Ezzelino. The fact that he carried off 
 Ezzelino's sister from her husband at her own 
 brother's instigation, indicates that he held close 
 and trusted relations with the family of Romano. 
 Rolandino's allusion to Sordello as of the family 
 of Ezzelino, gives probability to Browning's
 
 AND CUNIZZA 65 
 
 representation of the famous troubadour in his 
 youth living under the care of Adelaide, the 
 Florentine wife of Ezzelino III. As we have 
 pointed out, conjecture can lead us in no more 
 alluring path, nor find a more interesting situa- 
 tion, than by following Sordello and Cunizza 
 from the days of their childhood in one of the 
 many castles of the Ezzelini, at the base of the 
 Venetian Alps at Bassano, or Verona, to the 
 time of her marriage with Count Richard, 
 the hereditary foe of her family, and to her 
 flight with Sordello two years later. That 
 Sordello should have become notorious as a 
 gallant by this adventure with the young 
 wife of a prominent nobleman, is to say he 
 bore himself like a knight who was bound to 
 rescue and serve his lady ; the law of honour of 
 the time, made such service paramount to all 
 other obligations. Whatever claims his host, 
 the Count of Saint Boniface had in his absence 
 upon Sordello, they were not sufficient to make 
 him resist the wishes and the commands of the 
 family of Romano urging him to assist Cunizza 
 to escape from her husband's castle. As it is 
 expressly stated that he took her away at the 
 instigation of her brothers, it is not improbable 
 that some tie of blood bound him to execute 
 their wishes ; some potency of association, some 
 urgent necessity, enlisted him to act for them 
 E
 
 66 SORDELLO 
 
 and for his lady. So much at least is suggested 
 if not defined by Rolandino, who does not 
 censure Sordello for his conduct in the affair 
 that is left to the older Proven9al biographer. 
 He rather seems to justify him, while he relates 
 Cunizza's own adventures, and depicts her as 
 an extravagant and restless spirit. The precise 
 degree of family interest and personal passion, 
 or the chivalric disinterestedness of his age, that 
 gave impetus to Bordello's conduct at the castle 
 of San Bonifazio, is hardly to be determined at 
 this late hour, and we must accept it as we find 
 it, an incident of mediaeval private life. For 
 thirty-five years the rival families of Romano 
 and Bonifazio were battling with each other, now 
 in the streets of Verona, now at Vicenza, Padua, 
 Ferrara, ravaging each other's lands and assault- 
 ing each other's castles. The whole Trevisian 
 March, and part of Lombardy, followed the 
 fortunes of one or the other of these leaders 
 the one Guelph,the other Ghibelline Bonifazio, 
 partisan of the Pope, Ezzelino, Vicar of the 
 German Emperor, Frederic II. Both sought 
 their own aggrandisement, and each other's 
 destruction ; for they were not less intent on 
 public sway than private vengeance. Con- 
 temporary testimony tells us that Sordello was 
 pros e valens, as he was called in a tenzon by 
 Alberico of Romano, then Podesta of Treviso.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 67 
 
 But he was not a man to remain a mere partisan 
 or but a man of action. Probably his sincerity, 
 his sensibility, his imagination, made it impos- 
 sible for him to give himself entirely to the 
 personal animosities of his time. Be this as it 
 may, his own humanising passion had compro- 
 mised him with the two most potent lords of 
 North Italy. On one side was his enemy Count 
 Richard of San Bonifazio, allied with the great 
 Lord of Este, on the other was Ezzelino, the 
 Ghibelline, for the most part master of all be- 
 tween the Brenta and the Piave. Sordello had 
 given mortal offence to both. He found him- 
 self in danger of sudden death at the hands of 
 one, or both, united to drive him from Italy, or 
 to destroy him. He seems to have gone first to 
 the Court of Alberic of Romano, at the time at 
 enmity with his brother Ezzelino. There, too, 
 Cunizza went, for she also left Verona and her 
 dreaded brother, to live under the roof of 
 Alberic at Treviso. Before or later, Sordello 
 went beyond, to Onigo, and perhaps to the 
 Court of the Patriarch of Aquileia. According 
 to the brief biography in the Provengal Codex, 
 at the Vatican, he became involved in a love 
 affair with Otta of Onigo. She was the sister 
 of his hosts, two brothers, the lords of the 
 land. 
 
 The immediate cause of Sordello's flight from
 
 68 SORDELLO 
 
 Italy was not only the enmity of Count Bonifazio, 
 but the nearer and more pressing one of the 
 exasperation of the brothers the lords of 
 Strasso whose sister, Otta, he had clandes- 
 tinely married, after which we hear of him 
 at Treviso, where, in spite of powerful pro- 
 tection, he was not secure. At any rate then 
 and there was closed his experience in the 
 marca Treviziana. He appears next in Provence, 
 and there is evidence that he went to Spain and 
 Portugal. De Lollis, who traces him step by 
 step from his part in a tavern brawl at Florence 
 on to the last historic record of his life in the 
 suite of Charles of Anjou in the Kingdom of 
 Naples, has left no fact unexamined concerning 
 him. His deductions sometimes lower rather 
 than enhance the historic figure of Sordello, 
 who, like Dante, or King David, outgrew the 
 sins of his youth the rank dressing of his lusty 
 years nor did they prevent him from becoming, 
 as we have seen, one of the most honoured and 
 striking personalities of a great epoch. One 
 modern critic censures his conduct both as 
 regards Cunizza and Otta, and another would 
 induce us to think that he gave a platonic love 
 to Cunizza, but acquitted himself badly in 
 eloping with Otta, whom he abandoned. How 
 culpable he was towards one or both of his hosts 
 it is not for us to determine at this late date. But
 
 AND CUNIZZA 69 
 
 it is manifest that he was without defence. His 
 situation was not only one of great peril, it 
 meant certain destruction for him if he remained 
 in Italy. And furthermore he probably had 
 little sympathy for the ruthless purpose of 
 either party who sought the headship of Italy 
 to rule in the name of Pope or Emperor. He 
 went into exile. He went to the most civilised 
 court of Europe to Provence, where his fame 
 preceded him. He had already become known 
 as a Provencal poet, and he was appealed to as a 
 judge of good verse. Americ de Peguillan of 
 Toulouse, who lived some time in Italy, con- 
 cludes one of his own pieces of verse by saying 
 that his messenger will carry it to Sordello, 
 who will give a true verdict upon it according 
 to his custom. This circumstance is cited as 
 a proof that the Provencals themselves regarded 
 him as a judge of Prove^al poetry. 
 
 Sordello is best explained as one of those rich 
 organisations more often met with perhaps in 
 Italy, but which every man of genius in greater 
 or less degree illustrates. His life reveals the 
 difference which exists in such a man between 
 his youth and age. We see he outlived the 
 mob of his passions, and reached the dignity of 
 a grand character. He became entirely de- 
 livered from what are called the sins of youth. 
 They had their time of blossoming. It is correct
 
 70 SORDELLO 
 
 to represent him as too finely organised, too 
 much in advance of his time, to be willing to 
 give himself wholly to the life of action, and as 
 fighting man and politician emulate or succeed 
 to Salinguerra, or do the work of an Ezzelino. 
 This is in strict conformity with the historic evi- 
 dence concerning Sordello. He did indeed keep 
 himself more or less apart from the bloody busi- 
 ness of his time till the last account of him in 
 1267, when Charles of Anjou sends him to 
 Naples and he is referred to as Sordello of 
 Godio. He was for many years in the service 
 of one of the most implacable men of the age. 
 Strange destiny, associated briefly, in his youth 
 with the terrible Ezzelino, in his latest years 
 with Anjou the two greatest soldiers and 
 tyrants of his time ! But even Ezzelino was 
 not always a horror to men. He comes to us 
 splendid and pleasant, at a moment of knightly 
 life, in an anecdote kept in the Cento Nove/te. 
 
 Sordello's residence at the court of the Count 
 of Provence lets us see him in the most brilliant 
 and honoured conditions of his being, and 
 knowing something of it at least adds to our 
 sense of the milieu of his life at that time. 
 
 Provence is a country of fervid and dazzling 
 skies, rivalling both Italy and Spain in colour, 
 in light, and in form. The afterglow of Greece 
 and Rome shone there, for Roman refinement
 
 AND CUNIZZA 71 
 
 survived longest between the Alps and the 
 Pyrenees. From the eleventh to the thirteenth 
 century a brilliant life and a new literature made 
 the country a centre of cultivated interest. Its 
 literature was formative even in Italy. It drew 
 from Italy poets of great name. The three 
 elements of what has been called artistic poetry, 
 love of glory, enjoyment of life, and worship of 
 woman, found the most remarkable expression 
 in the poets of its refined and passionate people. 
 Everything favoured their delicate and ardent 
 imagination. Moorish influences from Spain 
 enriched their life after Greek and Latin in- 
 fluences had been exhausted. Provence gave to 
 the world what has been well called the courtly 
 poetry, the poetry of a privileged class, of 
 privileged lives ; it was brilliant, exclusive, ex- 
 travagant ; an expression of studied art, of deli- 
 cate sentiment. It was admired and praised by 
 Dante. Its poets were princes, barons, knights ; 
 and yet in the crowd of courtly poets of rank 
 were men of obscure origin and poor estate, 
 lifted by their gifts and rewarded for their 
 talents. Any man of merit and fame was sure 
 of a welcome at the castle courts of the great 
 lords of the South of France. 
 
 Sordello was fortunate in seeking this land of 
 princes and poets. Count Raymond Berenger 
 the Fifth was surrounded by men of distinction
 
 72 SORDELLO 
 
 from all parts of Europe, and his court was 
 perhaps the most splendid of all the great 
 seigneurs of Provence. It was compared to 
 King Arthur's. It is affirmed that Sordello first 
 went to Provence at the age of seventeen, called 
 to the service of Count Berenger V. because of 
 his excellence as a poet, and his " curious and 
 learned inventions." 
 
 The family of the Count of Provence was of 
 singular interest and high in fortune. His four 
 daughters made illustrious marriages : each one 
 became a queen. 1 Marguerite was married to 
 Louis, King of France ; Eleanor to Henry III., 
 King of England ; Souci to Richard, Count of 
 Cornwall ; and the youngest daughter, Beatrice, 
 became wife of Charles, Count of Anjou, in 
 1246, one year after the death of her father, 
 and lived to be crowned Queen of Naples. 
 Sordello remained attached to the fortunes of 
 this princely family about forty years after the 
 death, in 1245, of his protector, Count Ray- 
 mond. It is not without interest to know that 
 the tombs of his great patrons are in the church 
 of St John at Aix in Provence, where you may 
 still see the effigy of the old lover of a splendid 
 and cultivated life. He holds in one hand his 
 sword and in the other the Rose of Gold 2 given 
 
 1 " Quattro figlie ebbe e ciascuna reina." Dante. 
 
 a The greatest mark of distinction in the gift of the Pope.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 73 
 
 by Innocent IV. ; and there, also at his side, is 
 the statue of Beatrice of Savoy, his wife. 
 
 There is but the barest indication of Sordello's 
 presence at other courts in the South of France 
 at Marseilles, at Montpellier, at Toulouse. But 
 to all the long period of his life in Provence 
 we are guided by a few widely separated dates 
 and the mention of a few cities. 
 
 When Sordello appeared in Provence a new 
 life brightened again the land which but a few 
 years before had been made a place of wailing by 
 the merciless persecutions of Innocent III. j and 
 it was in its liberated and awakened society that 
 Sordello confirmed his fame as a Prove^al poet. 
 To this period of his life belong many of his 
 poems. They emanated from a fearless spirit. 
 In them he disputes, praises, or laments j or, in 
 friendly contest with a rival poet, celebrates his 
 lady. Sometimes he expresses the perfect sub- 
 mission of a Provencal lover j then in scornful 
 terms he resents injurious comment on the cause 
 of his flight from Lombardy. We learn from 
 his verse the name of the Countess of Rhodes ; 
 of Agradiva ; of Cunizza j great ladies whom 
 he adored : and there is a mystery as to which 
 one he calls his bel restaurs, which one he calls 
 his doussa enemia. In these poems we find him, 
 so to speak, in the full play of his spirit, all but 
 a Provencal himself, rising to manly grandeur
 
 74 SORDELLO 
 
 in the universally admired Serventes or Planh 
 in which he sang his sorrow for the loss of 
 Blacas. 1 The grace of a perfect artist is shown 
 in the turn he gives to his satire, which strikes 
 to the quick the weakness or the vice it touches ; 
 but he does not leave with us the bitter sense 
 of it, nor does he compromise himself, or appear 
 as a mere railer. We feel his serene and amiable 
 nature while he says that he is so hated by 
 great barons because he openly tells the truth, 
 yet turns to his Lady with : " Lady, beautiful 
 restorer, dear as life, so long as I find you kind 
 I care not who is unfriendly," and he leaves us 
 with the thought of him as a tender and delicate 
 soul. But in some of his poems he does not 
 appear heroic, nor do they even express any 
 elevation of mind. 
 
 It is perhaps best to be indulgent towards him 
 concerning their significance. And in any case, 
 we are not to take them as indicative of the 
 temper and pitch of his character ; for there is 
 a point, a mood, when every man, no matter 
 how great his genius, or how high his sentiment 
 of life, is on the level of common things, and 
 expresses them. A great dramatist, like Shake- 
 speare, delivers himself of this vulgar mood in 
 his comic characters. Shakespeare's FalstafF, his 
 Sir Toby, his fools and clowns are at least 
 1 Vatican MS. 5132.
 
 AND CUNIZZA 75 
 
 so much of his mind, that we can say : so, at a 
 given moment, he thought, saw life, used the 
 stuff of his experience. A purely lyric genius 
 has not this vicarious issue for his personal 
 moods nor his commoner sympathies : he either 
 keeps them voiceless, or, like Beaudelaire, com- 
 promises himself by confessing to the world 
 what bad company he has met, and what repre- 
 hensible thoughts have possessed him. 
 
 Sismondi's sweeping conclusion about Pro- 
 ven^al poetry, his censure of its scandalous 
 element, is one that bears upon every literature 
 of life. It is intemperate to press it exclusively 
 against the Proven9al poets ; and Sismondi con- 
 tradicts himself, and yet is nearer the truth 
 when he says : " Cependant c'est un merite de 
 la poesie Proven9ale d'avoir rendu un culte a 
 cette beaute cheveleresque, et d'avoir conserve 
 au milieu des vices du siecle le respect de ce qui 
 est honnete, et 1'amour des sentiments eleves." 
 
 The exaggerated sentiments, the over-refined 
 language, and constant interest in the spring- 
 time of life of the Proven9al poets, and their 
 worship of the lady, was an offset to mediaeval 
 invective contro foe minis. Before we object to it 
 all, or repeat the usual phrase about the monotony 
 and the immorality of the courtly poetry, we 
 should consider how much more objectionable 
 was the expression of the common or popular
 
 76 SORDELLO 
 
 mind against women. The Proven9al poets 
 exalted " the Lady " as a true civiliser, they 
 celebrated her as a purifying element of matter, 
 while the clergy degraded woman as a provo- 
 cation to " sin." Mediaeval Latin abounds in 
 gross invective, in ribald satire against women, 
 because the ascetic mind of the time found in 
 her, as in love, in marriage, and even in the 
 family, not only its corrective, but its most 
 potent adversary. All honour, then, to the 
 Proven9al poets who reacted against the darker 
 mind of their age and broke through its re- 
 stricting and false morality. Their sentiment 
 of life was far more humanising and liberating 
 than the teaching of the cloister and the practices 
 of the cell. When Italy was traversed by 
 thousands of flagellants grovelling and bleed- 
 ing in penitential abasement, or rushing wildly 
 from city to city striving after the impossible, 
 neither the Umbrian madman nor the Umbrian 
 saint were justified. If we look then to Pro- 
 vence, or to the Marca Trevigiana, and to the 
 last Proven5al poets, we find something better, 
 and Sordello in his disinterested worship of his 
 lady appears nearer to us than the fanatics of 
 his age. When he says he asks of love but 
 consolation and honour he is like a modern 
 man. 
 
 Though Sordello had early and frequent
 
 AND CUNIZZA 77 
 
 intercourse with the ProveiKjals, he remained 
 Italian in his spirit, and realistic rather than 
 extravagant, like many of the poets of the 
 South of France. He was a realist in love ; he 
 was not scholastic and metaphysic like Guido 
 Guinecelli and Dante. He even said he would 
 write for his lady simply, and things easily 
 understood. Dante, though he developed the 
 "philosophic" argument as it was not dreamed 
 of by the Provengals, is in his most potent 
 expression a true successor and imitator of 
 Sordello realistic in expression, ideal in senti- 
 ment, direct, vivid, personal. Italian poetry of 
 the thirteenth century, while it derived much 
 from the Provencal, embodied a new element 
 abstract and difficult for most readers. But 
 Sordello, Italian as he was, did not illustrate 
 nor express the new spirit, though it is claimed 
 he shows a glimmering of it of the dolce stil 
 nuovo of Dante and Cavalcante, which was 
 developed after his work was done. Italian 
 poetry of the Vita Nuova, the new life, the new 
 love, was far more mystical than Sordello's, 
 whose wit and charm and passion sought a more 
 direct expression, more vigorous, and at once 
 satiric and fervid. His satire is terse, vital, 
 conclusive. His expression of sentiment has a 
 certain passionate grace which confirms the 
 report that he was the most irresistible trouba-
 
 78 SORDELLO 
 
 dour of his time. He even boasts that no one 
 could resist his advances j and, like D'Annunzio 
 to-day, regarded himself in his youth as an 
 " uomo fatale." This part of his story no 
 doubt belongs to his reckless days. He reached 
 a graver mind, a nobler fame. 
 
 Canello thought Sordello's lament for Blacas 
 Pindaric in its force and fire. Perticare devoted 
 himself to prove that it was so admired by 
 Dante that he even adopted the primary image 
 or conception of it, an image which seems barbar- 
 ous and revolting to our taste, in the nineteenth 
 century, but it must have been liked in the 
 thirteenth century, and it is startling enough to 
 arrest attention even now. A heart of flame, 
 a heart pierced with seven swords, symbol of 
 the seven sins, visible, represented in its proper 
 form, carved or painted upon the breast of 
 a Madonna, or of an image of Christ, either 
 in Spain, Italy, or France, often shocks our 
 Northern taste in these countries, and we quite 
 forget the bloody and lurid rhetoric of our own 
 hymns 
 
 " There is a fountain filled with blood 
 Drawn from Emmanuel's veins." 
 
 All of which is kindred to the symbolism of 
 fact the image of a heart to be eaten which 
 I find in Sordello's famous poem, and also in 
 Dante's Vita Nuova
 
 AND CUNIZZA 79 
 
 e d'este core ardtndo 
 Lei fa-ventosa umilmtnto pascea. 
 
 Sordello by a bold and sudden expression 
 of his imagination recommends that a piece 
 of the great heart of Blacas be given to each 
 of the cowardly princes he names, that they 
 may get courage by feeding upon it. With this 
 strong metaphor he expresses his high sense 
 of his friend's virtues and his scorn for the 
 princes who lacked the courage for which 
 Blacas was renowned. No funeral lament ever 
 served better to express at the same time a sense 
 of the worth of the dead and contempt for the 
 living. The irony of it is unsurpassed. This 
 celebrated poem, of which there have been 
 several translations in Italian, stirred the trou- 
 badours of the day. It gave them a new 
 suggestion, a new idea, and they tried to equal 
 it, if not to surpass it, imitating Bordello's 
 Lament. It has been remarked that up to the 
 time of its appearance the Proven9al poets had 
 produced funeral elegies which were " as mono- 
 tonous as they were cold." Sordello distin- 
 guished himself by his originality, and there is 
 something both new and felicitous in the motif 
 and expression of this little piece ; it would 
 be difficult to say which is the most poignant, 
 the terms of praise or of satire, that with so 
 much energy and frankness are contrasted with
 
 8o SORDELLO 
 
 each other. I am but quoting the language of 
 Fauriel, commenting on Bordello's famous verse. 
 I may add that it is plainly the expression of a 
 living and indomitable mind, as remarkable for its 
 proud and derisive spirit as for its freshness. 
 Bertrand d'Allamanon and Peire Bremen both 
 adopted Sordello's idea, one suggesting that 
 Blacas' heart should be given to noble ladies as 
 heavenly food; the other dividing his body 
 between nations as a miracle-working substance. 
 
 I should leave the reader with an inadequate 
 idea of Sordello's poetry by referring only to 
 this often cited poem. It is said that there 
 is more originality and talent shown in his 
 satirical than in his love poems ; and yet, several 
 of these last are admitted to be both charming 
 and graceful. Very interesting is Sordello's 
 own admission that he affects two styles, one 
 simple and easy to understand, the other a thing 
 of great art. He says : " It gives me pleasure to 
 compose a pleasant song to a gay air. The 
 dearest lady of my choice to whom I give 
 myself, does not enjoy verses written with 
 studied art. Since it does not please her, 
 henceforth I will only write songs easy to sing, 
 pleasant to hear, plain in meaning ; songs for 
 her who likes what is artless." 
 
 In one of his most bitter serventes he replies 
 to an attack by Peire Bremen, and says he will
 
 AND CUNIZZA 81 
 
 unmask the idiot who has accused him of im- 
 posture. It is in this piece that Sordello resents 
 being called a jongleur 
 
 Ben a grin tort car m'apellajoglar 
 
 (Vatican codice). 
 
 and in a few lines the difference of social con- 
 dition of a troubadour and a jongleur, is stated. 
 Speaking of himself Sordello says he does not 
 follow others, but others follow him ; that he 
 takes nothing which can be made a reproach to 
 him ; that he is just and loyal, and Jives upon 
 his own revenues. After drawing the portrait 
 of his slanderer, he declares that if he meets the 
 gallant who libels him, he will assuredly give 
 his wife occasion to wear mourning ; vows to 
 justify his threats if he catches him, and adds 
 that all the gold of Montpellier will not save 
 him from his blows. Another of his poems 
 turns upon a question of chivalry and love. It 
 is a debate with his friend Bertrand d'Allamanon. 
 Sordello makes himself the exponent of the 
 lover, Bertrand is the advocate of the knight. 
 Sordello says it is a poor business to exchange 
 the lover's delights for blows, and hunger, and 
 cold, and heat. He expresses his aversion to 
 the soldier's ideal. After boasting of his own 
 preference for " the sovereign joys of love," he 
 says, that he goes to the embrace of his lady 
 F
 
 82 SORDELLO 
 
 while his friend Bertrand goes to battle, and if 
 Bertrand has the esteem of the great French 
 lords, he has the sweet kisses of his love, 
 which are worth the finest stroke of lance in all 
 the world. It is obvious that if we take this 
 debate seriously Sordello represents himself as 
 a " /ache Lombard." But doubtless only a man 
 who had given well-known proofs of valour, 
 and whose courage was beyond question would 
 have ventured this kind of pleasantry. Very 
 likely it was his extravagant way of paying 
 a higher compliment to his mistress ; for by 
 declaring he holds glory less than her love, he 
 for the moment shows himself the more extra- 
 vagant in his love ; the super-subtle Italian 
 outdoes the Proven9al in a contest at the Castle 
 Court, to win the favour of his lady. He 
 seems to have loved a noble lady who gave him 
 by word no encouragement, but whose look bid 
 him to hope. She is that lady of whose tender 
 glance he tells us in one of his poems. He 
 says that since the eyes have no power to 
 deceive he will believe what they tell him. 
 This lady is "full of honour and virtue," the 
 object of his most delicate and passionate hom- 
 age. The ideal is present in his love poems, 
 and there is also grace and mockery in them ; 
 in others we find an exultant and boastful 
 libertinage. In a spirit of Italian bravado he
 
 AND CUNIZZA 83 
 
 says that the whole world has made war upon 
 him because of his amours, and that he is ad- 
 vised to change his ways; that everybody tells 
 him of his dangers from jealous husbands. He 
 says that they have indeed good cause to be 
 jealous, but that he neither cares for their 
 displeasure or hatred. He says no woman has 
 ever resisted his " sweet solicitations." All 
 this no doubt expresses an average Italian 
 morality of the time, and it is now hardly 
 amusing. He is redeemed by a better mood, 
 one of true devotion and refined taste. His 
 dispute with Bertrand shows his purely Italian 
 spirit, at bottom practical, keen, calculating. 
 
 Sordello requests Charles of Anjou not to 
 take him to the Crusades. He says he is in 
 no hurry to go to Paradise ; that the sea makes 
 him sick, though it may be good for the health 
 of other men. He recommends it to his old 
 friend Bertrand. All this, with its mixture of 
 license and good sense, and its very modern 
 temper, is but the playfulness of a lively spirit, 
 nor should it be taken so seriously as to dis- 
 credit his courage and fidelity. And yet it has 
 so far put him in question, that Emeric David 
 refused to accept him as the same Sordello 
 whom Dante admired. Even Fauriel could not 
 reconcile the Sordello of the verse with the 
 Sordello of Dante, and thought Dante must 
 F*
 
 84 SORDELLO 
 
 have ignored not only his poetry, but his real 
 character, using him wilfully as a type of his 
 own patriotism. 
 
 Perticare, who is supported by Bartoli, is of 
 the opinion that, on the contrary, Dante was so 
 truly informed of, and filled with sympathy for 
 the historic Sordello, and that he so well under- 
 stood his mind, that his own famous expression 
 of sorrow over Italy in the Seventh Canto of 
 the Purgatorio, is wholly in the temper of Sor- 
 dello himself, and that Dante absorbs, as it 
 were, the genius of the Mantuan troubadour. 
 The spirit is Sordello's, but the great mono- 
 logue is Dante's. 
 
 Twice thus, by two poets, Sordello's spirit 
 has been evoked, and his name has been used 
 as the fit and noblest expression, the personal 
 embodiment of their own sentiment of life. 
 What Dante did, Browning has done in his 
 own way, following Dante's example, giving to 
 his thoughts the prestige of Sordello's name. 
 
 Like Dante, Sordello's intellect was first 
 awakened by love. The years transformed an 
 earthly passion, and he appears in a graver 
 character. " A ceaseless round of study " led 
 him, like our own Milton, " to the shady places 
 of philosophy " ; for it is as a writer of learned 
 treatises that he is first mentioned after Dante. 
 Nostredamus, citing the record of the monk of
 
 AND CUNIZZA 85 
 
 the island of Lerins, refers to his treatises on 
 the gravest subjects in the library of the con- 
 vent, and says that love is not the theme of his 
 verse. 
 
 Sainte-Pelaye and Crescimbeni the one in 
 France, the other in Italy were the first to 
 correct this statement by mentioning that fifteen 
 of his poems are devoted to love. But it was as 
 the writer of the Thesaurus Thesaurum, of Summa 
 Juris, and of Los progres e avansaments dei Res 
 d'Aragon that he was held in esteem by his im- 
 mediate successors. His satire on " the Great 
 Barons" in the form of a funeral lament for his own 
 great-hearted friend Blacas, is oftener mentioned 
 and cited than his love poems. But he is the 
 author of a remarkable expression concerning 
 the sweet tyranny of a woman over the life of 
 her lover. He calls her dolza enemia sweet 
 enemy, an expression which both Petrarch and 
 Bramante have appropriated ; and it appears 
 again in the French verse of Du Bellay. 
 Perhaps the most original of Bordello's terms of 
 endearment is when he calls his lady Belh 
 Restaur beautiful restorer. 
 
 We have no data to determine Bordello's 
 precise relations to the later political tragedies 
 of his time. De Lollis thinks that he was at 
 the battle of Benevento. He is but able to cite 
 documents of 1269 after the victory of Charles
 
 86 SORDELLO 
 
 of Anjou wherein Sordello is endowed with 
 feudal rights over five castles and adjacent land 
 in the Abruzzi. These documents show that 
 Sordello was honoured and trusted, and, in 
 fact, his grandia grata et accepta servitia is re- 
 corded : Sordellus de Godio delectus miles fami/iaris 
 et fidelis. And, citing the deed, Prof, de Lollis 
 says that the two titles had a real and definite 
 value ; for that of miles was conferred only 
 upon one who had been knighted by the king, 
 with the usual ceremony ; and the term fami/iaris 
 implied rights and duties highly honourable at 
 Court. 
 
 It was a sixteenth century legend that Sor- 
 dello was buried at San Pietro, in Mantua 
 that city set by the Mincio, which there spreads 
 its shining waters into twin lakes. The old 
 town has a bridal look in spring-time, with its 
 blossoming orchards and green meadows. So 
 beautiful and broad a vision of fresh and limpid 
 water gives to the lily city an enchanting aspect, 
 and it could hardly ever have been obliterated 
 from the mind of a poet. It is, perhaps, with 
 a lasting sense of the hold of first impressions, 
 and the dearness of one's native place, that 
 Dante represented Sordello's watchful spirit 
 suddenly surging out of silence at the mention 
 of his "Mother City." The brilliant figure of 
 the splendid cavalier of the Marca Treviziana,
 
 AND CUNIZZA 87 
 
 the unrivalled poet of Provence in Italy, is sup- 
 planted by the graver personage of later life, 
 the " good " Sordello with something majestic, 
 something of what Aristotle called magnificence 
 in his nature, alone, yet free to companion the 
 greatest spirits 
 
 un anima 
 Sola so/etta, verto noi riguarda.
 
 Appendix 
 
 1. NOTE TO PAGE 21. 
 
 SORDELLO'S imprisonment at Novara has been much 
 discussed. Merkel concludes that he was probably 
 imprisoned for debt, as at the time Charles of Anjou, 
 then at Rome, hardly knew how to provide for his 
 army there, still less for the claims against his followers, 
 stranded, or wounded, or ill, at Novara. De Lollis 
 affirms that he was held as a prisoner of war, perhaps 
 wounded, certainly ill, as he declares himself. The 
 Pope's letter in his behalf states that he was detained 
 in the hospital for the poor. 
 
 2. NOTE TO PAGE 26. 
 
 The work of De Lollis, accepted as fully " worthy 
 to stand with the best French and German studies of 
 Provenal," is yet closely criticised and resisted for 
 certain conclusions relating to Sordello, and these con- 
 clusions often seem to be not well founded. While we 
 are grateful for his edition of " Sordello," we are not 
 altogether pleased with his representation of the man 
 and poet, for the reason that he lowers, rather than 
 raises, his subject ; contrary to the way of the artist,
 
 90 APPENDIX 
 
 and the poet, who enhance their subjects by their 
 treatment of them the way of Dante, the way of 
 Browning. Furthermore, De Lollis, betrayed by the 
 heat of controversy in an encounter with Torraca in the 
 selva spinoza of historical research, and of language, 
 and seeming to hold a brief to accuse and abase 
 Sordello, reaffirms his own conclusions, too belittling 
 and degrading to Dante's Sordello, who comes to 
 us as a type of noble and majestic life, but who, De 
 Lollis says, is inspired by Sordello's own proud lament 
 for the death of Blacas, and not at all by the character 
 and life of Sordello himself. The Dantesque figure, 
 he says, differs totally from the Sordello of Story, 
 whom, he says, was a mediaeval poet, an adventurer, a 
 ravisher of women in his youth, and indifferently 
 devoted to them, and, according to the occasion, 
 Guelph or Ghibellin. 
 
 Torraca, an earnest advocate pro Sordello, reaffirms, 
 in reply to De Lollis, the high merit of Sordello, 
 saying that during Sordello's youth, when some of the 
 best Provencal poets were living, he had occasion to 
 compete with the most celebrated ; and he appears, by 
 the fecundity and vigour of his verse, superior to nearly 
 all ; in his maturer years superior to all his contem- 
 poraries, who turned with respect to the Italian 
 troubadour; and that later Dante himself, in the 
 Divlna Commcdia, shows that he follows Sordello's 
 verse in more than one line ; in the IV. canzone, 
 and again in the IV. treatise of the Convito, which 
 contain lines derived from Sordello's " On Nobility " 
 in his Ensegnamen d'oncr.
 
 APPENDIX 91 
 
 Bordello's multiform nature and varied experience 
 doubtless will continue to provoke controversy and he 
 is to be rightly interpreted only by a poet. The 
 historic critic but shows us what fagots were consumed 
 in a great and ardent life. 
 
 3. NOTE TO PAGE 62. 
 
 Owing to the researches of Gitterman, the existence 
 of a third Sordello has been established, to whom his 
 discoverer attributes the adventure of thejirst one with 
 Cunizza. And strangely enough the third Sordello is, in 
 fact, found associated with Ezzelino, in a document 
 wherein he is mentioned as a witness to a treaty, con- 
 cluded in 1254, between Ezzelino and Albert 
 Palaracino un Sordellus quijlut of Masano. Gitterman 
 claims that this one is the Sordello who carried off 
 Cunizza. In this fashion Dante's Sordello is delivered 
 from the reproach as well as robbed of the romantic 
 interest of his adventure in early manhood, which made 
 him notorious. The discovery and the argument based 
 upon it was at first startling enough. The argument has 
 since been refuted by the stringent criticism of Merkel 
 supported by the precise declaration of the most 
 ancient Provengal account of Sordello. Furthermore 
 Gitterman's argument is again refuted by the later dis- 
 covery by Bertoni, of a Provengal poet Reforzet, 
 who knew Sordello, and who, in a line of his verse, 
 manifestly alludes to Sordello's flight with Cunizza 
 qelfes de mug de son alberc fugir.
 
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