Inferno · Canto XXVIII ·
Inferno XXVIII — The Demon with the Sword
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 28 of 100 · Inferno, Canto XXVIII
Before reading
This is one of the cantos of the Inferno that depends entirely on its image. The bolgia of the sowers of discord has a single punishment, an unforgettable one, and the canto is essentially a slow procession through it. Be prepared. The reading is harder for the body than for the mind.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim and Virgil have left the bolgia of the fraudulent counsellors and are now looking down into the ninth bolgia of Malebolge, the bolgia of the seminator di scandalo e di scisma — the sowers of discord and schism. The sinners here are men who divided what should have been whole: religious communities, political factions, families, the body of a single person divided against itself. The punishment matches the sin exactly. Each soul is split open by a great sword-bearing demon stationed in the bolgia, walks the circle for the length of a wound's healing, and is split open again when it returns to the demon. The bolgia is the most explicitly contrapassic in the Inferno — the punishment is the sin given a body.
What it helps to know
The canto opens by acknowledging that what it is about to describe exceeds language. Dante invokes a catalogue of historical battlefields — Cannae, Ceperano, Tagliacozzo — to argue that no recorded carnage in human history could match what the pilgrim sees in this bolgia. The catalogue is unusual in being secular and military rather than scriptural. The poem is signalling that the sin it is about to anatomise is political in the deepest sense.
The first major soul named is Mohammed (570–632). Dante places the founder of Islam in this bolgia not as a false prophet — there is no equivalent of the heretics' tombs from canto X here — but as a schismatic, a man who, in the medieval Christian reading, broke off a great section of the body of the Church. The placement is theologically specific and historically unjust by any reading available today; it depends on the medieval European misconception that Mohammed had been a Christian deacon or cardinal who quarrelled with Rome. The canto inherits that misconception entire and the modern reader should know it. Ali ibn Abi Talib, Mohammed's son-in-law, walks beside him, split from forelock to chin — the schism within the schism, since the line of Ali is the line of Shi'a Islam.
The most arresting figure in the canto is Bertran de Born (c. 1140–1215), a Provençal troubadour-knight whom Dante revered enormously as a poet and condemned absolutely as a politician. Bertran wrote some of the most beautiful war-poetry of the troubadour tradition, but he was also reputed to have driven a wedge between Henry II of England and his eldest son, the Young King Henry — counselling the son to rebel against the father. In the moral economy of the canto, dividing father from son is the deepest form of discord; Bertran's punishment is to carry his own severed head in his hand like a lantern, the brain parted from the trunk in which it began.
A small but important detail: midway through the canto, one of the sowers of discord — Pier da Medicina — sends through the pilgrim a prophetic warning to two Italian lords (Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Carignano) that they will be drowned in a sack off the coast of Cattolica by the treachery of a third (Malatestino, the youth of one eye). The warning is a piece of operative magic: souls in Hell, the canto suggests, can foresee the near future of the living world and pass messages through travellers. The pilgrim never delivers them. The futility is part of the indictment.
What to read for
Notice the canto's last word. Counterpoise — contrapasso. This is the only place in the Commedia where the word appears. Dante is naming, at the bolgia where the principle is most visibly enacted, the formal principle that governs every punishment in the Inferno. Pay attention to who is given the line.
The canto is shorter than its impact suggests. The procession is long; the dialogue is short. The poem is letting the image do the work.
From here on: illustrations and analysis. The three images below are scenes from the canto, and after them comes the close reading — famous lines quoted in full, paradoxes explained, political and theological freight unpacked. If you have not yet read the canto, stop here — read it, then come back.
After reading
What the canto did
The canto opened by declaring its own task impossible. Who ever could, e'en with untrammelled words, / Tell of the blood and of the wounds in full / Which now I saw, by many times narrating? The strategy is deliberate. By insisting on the inadequacy of speech to its subject, the poem lets its images do work that any explanation would weaken. The bolgia of the sowers of discord is the most graphically violent bolgia in the Inferno and the canto that walks through it is held together not by argument but by a single recurring shape: a soul split open by a demon with a sword, the wound healing as the soul walks the slow circle, the wound reopened when the soul returns to the demon. The contrapasso here is exact. Those who in life divided what should have been whole are now divided in body, eternally, by a stroke that completes itself in their own continued motion.
The opening battlefields
The catalogue Dante invokes to measure his bolgia is military and Italian. He names Cannae (the 216 BC battle in which Hannibal annihilated a Roman army and the corpses yielded so many gold rings, says Livy, that the spoils filled measures by the bushel); Ceperano (the 1266 ambush by which Charles of Anjou took the southern crossings from the Hohenstaufen); Tagliacozzo (the 1268 battle that finished the Hohenstaufen line in Italy and was won, the chroniclers said, by the strategist Erard de Valéry without a fight). The list is unusual in the Inferno for its absence of scriptural register. The canto is treating the sin of discord as a sin against the political body, and the measurement of its punishment is taken from the political record of the previous fifty years.
Mohammed and the medieval misreading
The placement of Mohammed in this bolgia is one of the Commedia's most historically consequential errors. Dante inherits and codifies the medieval European misreading that placed Islam not as a separate religion arising in the early seventh century but as a Christian schism — a quarrel between a deacon (or, in some traditions, a cardinal) named Mohammed and the Roman Church, played out as a major institutional defection. The placement is therefore precise within Dante's frame of reference and unjust by any frame of reference outside it. The pilgrim sees Mohammed split open from chin to groin, his hands prying his own torso apart; he sees Ali walking beside him with a wound across the face from forelock unto chin. The geographic accuracy of the wounds matters: Mohammed is split through the body, the founder of the schism; Ali is split through the face, the second schism within the first (the Sunni-Shi'a division that traces to the contested succession after Mohammed's death). The architecture of the punishment is internally coherent even where the historical thesis it depends on is wrong.
The canto does not soften the placement and the modern reader should not soften it. What the modern reader can do is notice that the bolgia is one of the Inferno's most ecumenical condemnations: Christian schismatics, secular political dividers, and one Provençal troubadour-knight all walk the same circle, and the demon's sword falls without distinction of creed.
The unheard prophecies
A small but striking feature of the canto is its use of the pilgrim as an undelivered messenger. Pier da Medicina, his throat slit, asks the pilgrim to bring warning to Guido del Cassero and Angiolello da Carignano, two Italian lords who will, the canto says, be drowned in a sack off the coast of Cattolica by the treachery of a third lord, the youth of one eye (Malatestino dei Malatesta). Mosca dei Lamberti, whose hands are stumps, asks to be remembered as the man whose single phrase — cosa fatta capo ha, a thing done has a head — split Florence into Guelphs and Ghibellines in 1215. None of the warnings was ever delivered; the historical record contains no evidence that the prophesied murder was averted. The canto's most haunting structural detail is that the bolgia of discord generates speech that travels but does not save. Souls in Hell can foresee the future of the world but cannot reach it; the living pilgrim who carries the messages does not pass them on. The futility is, the poem suggests, what makes the bolgia hellish in a sense beyond its physical punishment: the sowers of discord were great speakers in life, and their speech in death produces no effect.
Bertran de Born and the naming of the principle
The canto's last figure is Bertran de Born, the great Provençal troubadour-knight, walking the bolgia floor as a headless trunk carrying his own severed head by the hair like a lantern. It of itself made to itself a lamp, / And they were two in one, and one in two. Bertran's military verse — the sirventes that praised the smell of war, the colour of bloodied lances, the splintering of helms — was canonical in Dante's own troubadour reading. Dante had imitated him. And yet the Vita Nuova poet places him here for what was reputed of him politically: that he had counselled the Young King Henry to revolt against his father Henry II of England. To divide a son from his father is, in the canto's hierarchy, the deepest cut. The punishment is the moral architecture of the sin made visible: brain parted from trunk in the man who parted father from son.
Bertran's last lines are the canto's last lines, and they are the moment the Commedia names — for the only time in the entire poem — the formal principle that governs every punishment in the Inferno:
Because I parted persons so united, Parted do I now bear my brain, alas! From its beginning, which is in this trunk. Thus is observed in me the counterpoise. (Inf. XXVIII.139–142)
Così s'osserva in me lo contrapasso. The Italian word contrapasso — counter-suffering, the punishment that mirrors the sin in its exact reverse — is the technical term for the entire architecture of Hell, and it appears in the Commedia only here, in the last line of Bertran de Born's speech. The poem has been showing the principle since canto V; only now does it consent to name it, and the naming is given to a damned soul. Dante does not annotate his own poem. He lets one of the most articulate sinners in the Inferno do it for him, and he places the explanation at the moment the image of the principle is most graphic.
Famous and meaningful passages
The opening declaration of inadequacy.
Who ever could, e'en with untrammelled words, Tell of the blood and of the wounds in full Which now I saw, by many times narrating? Each tongue would for a certainty fall short By reason of our speech and memory, That have small room to comprehend so much. (Inf. XXVIII.1–6)
The opening tercet is a topos — the modesty topos of the Latin epic — used here for a specific purpose: to license the canto's recourse to image over explanation. What the verse cannot say, the body in the bolgia will show.
Mohammed names himself.
While I was all absorbed in seeing him, He looked at me, and opened with his hands His bosom, saying: See now how I rend me; How mutilated, see, is Mahomet; In front of me doth Ali weeping go, Cleft in the face from forelock unto chin. (Inf. XXVIII.28–33)
The self-rending — si lacera — is the canto's signature gesture. The schismatic completes his own wound by holding it open; he is the agent of his own continuing punishment. The geographic accuracy of the wounds — body, face — is the poem's quiet architectural joke.
Bertran de Born appears.
I truly saw, and still I seem to see it, A trunk without a head walk in like manner As walked the others of the mournful herd. And by the hair it held the head dissevered, Hung from the hand in fashion of a lantern, And that upon us gazed and said: O me! It of itself made to itself a lamp, And they were two in one, and one in two; How that can be, He knows who so ordains it. (Inf. XXVIII.118–126)
Two in one, and one in two — due in uno e uno in due. The line plays with the language of trinitarian theology, applying it ironically to the unity-in-division of the schismatic's body. The closing tag — He knows who so ordains it — defers the impossible mathematics to the only authority who can make sense of it.
The naming of the principle.
Because I parted persons so united, Parted do I now bear my brain, alas! From its beginning, which is in this trunk. Thus is observed in me the counterpoise. (Inf. XXVIII.139–142)
The single appearance of contrapasso in the Commedia. Memorise this. Every wound in every bolgia of the Inferno is the visible enactment of this principle; the poem consents to name it only once, and only here, at the moment its meaning is most graphically clear.
What to watch for
Watch how rarely the Commedia explains itself. The naming of contrapasso in this canto is the exception that proves the rule: Dante's poem prefers to show the moral logic of its punishments rather than to state it. After this canto, the principle returns to being implicit — and the reader who has learned the word should carry it silently through the cantos that remain.
Watch the bolge thin out. Two bolge remain in Malebolge — the alchemists and the counterfeiters of canto XXIX, the falsifiers of word and person of canto XXX — and then the architecture of Hell changes. The giants of canto XXXI mark the wall between the eighth and ninth circles. The geography is sliding toward the bottom.
This post is part of Reading Divine Comedy, a slow daily companion to Dante's Commedia in the Longfellow translation — read one canto at a time, with a short orientation before and a close reading after. From Inferno I to Paradiso XXXIII.