Paradiso · Canto XVI ·
Paradiso XVI — The Roll Call
Reading Divine Comedy · canto 83 of 100 · Paradiso, Canto XVI
Before reading
This is the middle canto of the three Cacciaguida cantos, and the most local. The previous canto set the figure: a great-great-grandfather in Heaven, an elegy for old Florence, the autobiography of a crusader. This canto is the long catalogue. Cacciaguida names the great families of his city as they were in his youth, and traces, family by family, what became of them by Dante's day. Read it as one would read a graveyard.
Where the canto sits
The pilgrim is still in the Heaven of Mars, the fifth sphere, in front of the descended light of Cacciaguida. The cross of warrior-souls continues to turn behind them. The conversation begun in canto XV has not paused; it simply turns, in this canto, from the lost city in general to the lost families in particular. The structural function is to fill out the picture of old Florence the previous canto sketched. The thematic function is darker — to prepare the reader for the prophecy that the next canto will deliver. To know what was lost, the Commedia says, you have first to see the houses that lost it. Then the prophecy will land.
What it helps to know
Twelfth-century Florence was, in the city's own self-understanding, governed by perhaps thirty or forty old patrician houses — case nobili, the noble families — whose names recurred across generations in the records of consuls, judges, and bishops. By Dante's day, two centuries on, most of those houses had vanished, broken by feud, by exile, by economic collapse, or by the rise of the new merchant families that bought their way into civic prominence. The vanishing was the subject of bitter common talk in Dante's Florence — every old citizen knew which house had once been great and which had not — and the canto puts the whole conversation into Cacciaguida's mouth as the verdict of the dead on the living.
A short list will make the recital legible. The Uberti were the great Ghibelline house of the thirteenth century — Farinata's house, the one whose tomb appears in Inferno X — and by Dante's day they had been wiped out of the city by the Guelph triumph. The Cerchi and the Donati were the Guelph rivals whose feud split the Guelph party itself into Whites and Blacks; Dante belonged to the White Cerchi faction, and the Black Donati victory in 1301 was the proximate cause of his exile. Caponsacchi, Lamberti, Ughi, Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ormanni, Alberichi, Della Sannella, Arca, Soldanieri, Ardinghi, Bostichi — these are the names of the old houses whose fall Cacciaguida itemises. Most are now names only.
The canto also takes up the question that has haunted Italian municipal history ever since: what happens when too many new people arrive too quickly. Cacciaguida's diagnosis — the intermingling of the people has always been the source of malady in cities — is the standard medieval moralist's account, the one Aristotle's Politics taught and the one all the Italian chroniclers repeated. The modern reader will hold the diagnosis at arm's length. The poem does not.
The closing tercets turn to a single specific incident: the Buondelmonte murder of 1216, in which a young noble named Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti, on the eve of his marriage to an Amidei daughter, broke the engagement and married a Donati girl instead; he was murdered in revenge on Easter morning at the foot of the statue of Mars by the Ponte Vecchio. The killing was taken by Florentine memory as the spark that lit the Guelph–Ghibelline fire that would burn through the next century. The canto ends in the smoke of that small private quarrel.
What to read for
Notice the canto's metric: a list. The first half is a roll-call of the old names — the verbal equivalent of the gravestones in a parish cemetery — and the reading-aloud is the point. The poem is making the lost houses present by saying them. Read the names aloud if you can.
Notice the canto's politics. Cacciaguida is not impartial. He is a man of the old families, and he names the new merchant families with the contempt the patrician class always reserves for the merchant one. The poem does not endorse the contempt; it lets it stand. The reader may take it or refuse it.
The final image, of the city's lily-banner that was never placed reversed on the spear in those days, refers to the medieval custom by which a defeated army had to drag its standard reversed in surrender. The line is brief. It does most of the canto's 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
Cacciaguida named the families. He gave the rough population of the city as it had been in his day — a fifth of the population of Dante's day, all of them within the old wall. He named perhaps thirty noble houses by name, in groups of three or four to a tercet, and traced what had become of them. He moved from the old patrician houses that had vanished, to the newer mercantile families that had risen, to the immigrant families from the contado that had swelled the city beyond the old walls, to the small specific cases — the Adimari, the Caponsacchi, the families whose particular fall illustrated the more general one. And he closed on the Buondelmonte murder, the single event Florentine memory took as the spark of the long civil war. The canto is the longest piece of pure local history in the Commedia. It is also, by design, the bleakest. The roll-call is a graveyard catalogue, and the figure of the lily-banner never reversed on the spear in those days is the elegiac envelope around the whole thing.
The opening on blood-nobility
The canto opens with the pilgrim's small gesture of formal respect — addressing Cacciaguida with the formal plural voi instead of the familiar tu — and the Commedia's narrator interrupts to remark, in three of his rare self-conscious tercets, on the strangeness of blood-nobility itself.
The interruption is sharp. Blood-nobility — the inherited honour of an old name — is poor; it is a thing the moralist disdains; and yet the pilgrim is using its grammar (voi instead of tu) in the one place where blood-nobility actually exists, in Heaven, with his own ancestor. The poem is licensing what it has just criticised. The licence is the canto's first piece of honest reckoning: I know what I think about hereditary honour, and I am about to spend a hundred lines mourning the loss of the great families anyway. The canto's politics are not coherent. The poem says so.
The catalogue and its method
The roll-call itself is performative. Cacciaguida names the Ughi, the Catellini, the Filippi, the Greci, the Ormanni, the Alberichi — even in their fall illustrious citizens — and the listing is the eulogy. He moves to the Della Sannella, the Arca, the Soldanieri, the Ardinghi, the Bostichi. He says where the Caponsacchi came from (the village of Fiesole, descended into the marketplace and risen) and what families crossed them. He names the Galigai, the Sacchetti, the Giuochi, the Fifanti, the Barucci, the Galli, the Chiaramontesi. The poem makes no concession to the modern reader who has never heard of any of them. The point is the practice of naming — the gravestone-rubbing — and the modern reader who skims is reading the canto in the only honest way the modern reader can.
Buried in the catalogue is one detail Dante's first readers caught instantly and the modern reader needs flagged: the Cerchi are named (Cacciaguida's own family of the time, the Caponsacchi, are placed next to the Sacchetti and the Giuochi), and what is conspicuously absent is any explicit praise of the Donati, the family whose feud with the Cerchi split the Guelph party and drove Dante into exile. The canto knows whose side the poet is on. It just refuses to say so plainly.
The diagnosis of immigration
Cacciaguida's account of why the old city failed is straightforward and disagreeable. The intermingling of populations — the rural folk from Campi and Certaldo and Figline who flooded into Florence as the city grew — is, he says, the source of malady in cities, as in the body the food it surfeits on. The medical metaphor is the standard one of the medieval moralist: the city is a body; new population is undigested food; the body sickens. Cacciaguida adds the more pointed line that a blind bull falls faster than a blind lamb, by which he means that great bodies politic come down harder than small ones.
The diagnosis is the standard patrician one of every period in which old elites are being displaced by new ones, and the poem inherits it without irony. The reader of the twenty-first century, having heard the same diagnosis offered in support of every nativism the modern world has produced, has to hold the canto's xenophobic moralism at arm's length. The reader is not obliged to share Cacciaguida's politics; the poem does not require the sharing; what it requires is that the politics be heard exactly as the moralist of the period heard them. The intermingling of the people has always been the source of malady in cities is what the people of the old families said in Cacciaguida's day and what some still say. The line is part of the historical record the canto is constituting. It is not, on the poem's own terms elsewhere, the verdict of Heaven on people who move.
The Buondelmonte tercet
The closing movement of the canto is the single specific incident on which Cacciaguida pins the long history of Florentine factionalism. Buondelmonte de' Buondelmonti, a young noble, was engaged in 1215 or 1216 to a daughter of the Amidei family — a peace-marriage between two rival houses. On the eve of the wedding he broke the engagement, at another's prompting (Florentine tradition supplied the name of the Donati dowager who put him up to it, in the hope of marrying him to her own daughter instead), and married the Donati girl. The Amidei murdered him in revenge on Easter morning of 1216, at the foot of the broken classical statue of Mars at the south end of the Ponte Vecchio. The killing pulled the great houses into the feud that, the chronicler Villani would later say, gave the Ghibelline and Guelph factions their names in Florence and lit the long civic fire.
The canto's tercet on Buondelmonte is exact:
O Buondelmonte, how in evil hour Thou fled'st the bridal at another's promptings! Many would be rejoicing who are sad, (Par. XVI.140–142)
The direct apostrophe, the conditional would be rejoicing who are sad, the imputation of an unnamed another who put the young man up to the breach — the whole long civic disaster pinned on a single small wrong choice. The poem is making the largest available argument: that history is made of small private decisions whose consequences run for centuries, and that the city the moralist mourns was lost not to some great structural force but to one young man's broken word.
The closing tercet
The canto closes on the figure of the lily.
With all these families beheld so just And glorious her people, that the lily Never upon the spear was placed reversed, Nor by division was vermilion made. (Par. XVI.151–154)
Four lines where the canto's grammar expects three. The same orphaned-fourth-line ending the closing of Paradiso XIII used, and the closing of Paradiso XV used. The structural signature of the Cacciaguida cantos — and of the Commedia's more grief-loaded endings — is the line that hangs into the next white space because the tercet cannot finish what it started.
The lily — the giglio, the heraldic Florentine flower — was, in 1251, after the Guelph triumph, reversed: the city's lily-banner had been changed from white-on-red (the older Florentine standard) to red-on-white in token of the Guelph victory over the Ghibellines. Cacciaguida is saying: in my day, the banner was never reversed on the spear in surrender, and the lily had not yet been made vermilion (red) by division, by faction. The colour-change of the city's own coat of arms is the figure of the city's loss of itself. Nor by division was vermilion made — né per division fatto vermiglio — is the canto's final compressed verdict on factional politics.
Famous and meaningful passages
The interruption on blood-nobility.
O thou our poor nobility of blood, If thou dost make the people glory in thee Down here where our affection languishes, (Par. XVI.1–3)
The narrator's own voice, breaking in to flag the strangeness of using courtly grammar for the poor idea of inherited honour.
The pilgrim's formal address.
And I began: 'You are my ancestor, You give to me all hardihood to speak, You lift me so that I am more than I.' (Par. XVI.16–18)
Voi three times in three lines. The honorific plural is the canto's small ceremony of recognition.
The dating.
From uttering of the 'Ave,' till the birth In which my mother, who is now a saint, Of me was lightened who had been her burden, (Par. XVI.34–36)
Cacciaguida dates his own birth by the years since the Annunciation — from the Ave — in the medieval astronomical idiom. The figure is unsentimental theology: even the family genealogy runs from the angelic greeting at Nazareth.
The population.
All those who at that time were there between Mars and the Baptist, fit for bearing arms, Were a fifth part of those who now are living; (Par. XVI.46–48)
The geography is exact: from the statue of Mars at the south of the Ponte Vecchio to the Baptistery of San Giovanni at the north — the old city. The population a fifth of what it has since become.
The diagnosis.
Ever the intermingling of the people Has been the source of malady in cities, As in the body food it surfeits on; (Par. XVI.67–69)
The patrician's old complaint. The poem reports it; the reader is left to judge it.
The roll-call.
I saw the Ughi, saw the Catellini, Filippi, Greci, Ormanni, and Alberichi, Even in their fall illustrious citizens; (Par. XVI.88–90)
The tercet that names six houses in three lines. The canto's typical density.
The further roll-call.
And saw, as mighty as they ancient were, With him of La Sannella him of Arca, And Soldanier, Ardinghi, and Bostichi. (Par. XVI.91–93)
Five more.
The Caponsacchi arrival.
Already had Caponsacco to the Market From Fesole descended, and already Giuda and Infangato were good burghers. (Par. XVI.121–123)
The new families come down from the hill-town of Fiesole into the marketplace of Florence. The note is double-edged: good burghers, but immigrants from the contado all the same.
The Buondelmonte.
O Buondelmonte, how in evil hour Thou fled'st the bridal at another's promptings! Many would be rejoicing who are sad, (Par. XVI.140–142)
The single named killing on which the canto pins the long civic disaster.
The lily.
With all these families beheld so just And glorious her people, that the lily Never upon the spear was placed reversed, Nor by division was vermilion made. (Par. XVI.151–154)
The closing four-line tercet, the orphaned fourth line carrying the colour-change of the city's coat of arms — vermilion by division, the heraldry of faction.
What to watch for
Watch the prophecy. The next canto picks up the unease the long catalogue has built into the pilgrim's mind — what are you not telling me? — and the answer will be the prophecy of exile, the most direct piece of speech Dante ever assigns to anyone about himself. The whole of canto XVI exists to make the prophecy land. Now — having seen what the lost city was — the reader will understand what the loss of that city cost the man who is about to be told he will lose it again.
Watch the figure of the vermilion lily. The colour-change of the Florentine coat of arms is one of the Paradiso's small recurring emblems for what factional politics does to public symbols. The poem will return to the figure of the disfigured public sign in Paradiso XVIII (the eagle of Jupiter assembled out of the souls of just rulers, a counter-emblem to the partisan lily of Florence) and again in Paradiso XXVII (the great closing denunciation of the Church for having made my graveyard a sewer of blood). The canto's last line is the small picture; the cantica's later denunciations are the working out.
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.