Purgatorio XX — Hugh Capet Speaking Into the Stone

Before reading

This is the second canto of the terrace of avarice. Adrian V opened it with a brief and tender pope's confession; XX continues it with a long French king's denunciation. The pilgrim threads his way past the prone bodies along the inner wall and stops to listen as one of them, in the small voice of a man speaking into the floor, calls out three examples of poverty and generosity into the dark, then names himself as the founder of the French royal house, then delivers a prophecy of his descendants' future crimes that runs from the present moment of the poem all the way into Dante's near future. The canto ends with the entire mountain trembling and every soul on every terrace singing a single hymn in unison — the Gloria in excelsis of the angels above Bethlehem.

Where the canto sits

The terrace of avarice is the longest of the three upper terraces — it runs from canto XIX into canto XXII — because Dante's diagnosis of the world's misery is heavily weighted toward this sin. Avarice in the Commedia is not chiefly the private vice of the miser; it is the public sin of kings and popes. The two souls who speak on the terrace are therefore a pope (XIX) and a king (XX). The structural pairing is intentional: the two offices that Marco Lombardo's two suns speech in XVI identified as the proper governors of Christendom are both on this terrace face-down, hands and feet bound, sticking to the pavement of the earth they should have governed for higher things.

What it helps to know

The speaker is Hugh Capet (c. 940–996), founder of the Capetian dynasty of France. He was elected King of the Franks in 987, displacing the last Carolingian claimant, and his direct line ruled France continuously from then until 1328 (and through cadet branches all the way to 1848). In Dante's time, the Capetian house was the most powerful royal lineage in Western Europe, and its current head was Philip IV the Fair (1268–1314), the king whose conflict with Pope Boniface VIII had culminated in the outrage at Anagni — the 1303 abduction of the pope by Philip's agents Sciarra Colonna and Guillaume de Nogaret, which broke Boniface within weeks and effectively transferred papal authority to French control. The papacy would shortly move to Avignon for the seventy-year Babylonian Captivity. Dante's hatred of the Capetian line in 1300 is the hatred of an Italian Ghibelline watching the French royal house systematically subordinate the papacy to its own crown.

The historical Hugh Capet was almost certainly not the son of a butcher — he was the son of Hugh the Great, Duke of the Franks. Dante's son of a Parisian butcher line reflects a popular legend, not the historical record. The legend served Dante's purposes: a dynasty founded on butcher-blood would, in his diagnosis, naturally produce kings with the impulses of butchers. The detail also confuses several Hugues — the canto's speaker has been read by commentators as Hugh Capet, as Hugh the Great, or as a deliberate composite. Dante does not clarify.

The descendants Hugh denounces are five Charleses and one Philip. The Charles who came to Italy (line 67) is Charles of Anjou, who in 1266 defeated and killed Manfred at Benevento and then in 1268 executed the young Hohenstaufen heir Conradin at Naples — thrust Thomas back to heaven refers to Charles of Anjou's suspected poisoning of Thomas Aquinas in 1274. The Charles who came forth from France, without arms (line 70-78) is Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV, sent by Boniface VIII to "pacify" Florence in 1301 — and who in fact handed the city to the Black Guelphs, sealing Dante's exile. The third Charles is Charles II of Anjou, King of Naples. Carlo zoppo, the lame Charles, sold his own daughter into a degrading dynastic marriage to pay a debt. And the new Pilate is Philip IV himself, the abductor of Boniface and the destroyer of the Templars.

The cry of Mary at line 19 is from a soul in labour-pain — as a woman in childbirth does — calling out the canto's first example of opposite virtue. Mary's poverty at the inn of Bethlehem stands as the first answer to avarice. Fabricius, the third-century BC Roman consul who refused to be bribed by Pyrrhus and lived in such poverty he had to be buried at state expense, is the second. Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop who is said to have left three bags of gold by night in the window of a poor man whose three daughters were about to be sold into prostitution, is the third — the original Santa Claus, here as a Christian giver.

The hymn at the canto's close is the Gloria in excelsis Deo — the angels' announcement to the shepherds of Bethlehem at the birth of Christ. Every soul on the mountain sings it when an earthquake announces that a soul has completed its purgation. Which soul has completed it — the question this canto's earthquake raises and refuses to answer — will be revealed only at the start of the next canto.

What to read for

Notice the canto's strange ventriloquism. Hugh Capet speaks from the floor, into the floor, in the voice of a man delivering a prophecy he cannot stop. The voice that condemns the Capetian line is the voice of its founder. Pay attention to how the Commedia loves to give its harshest political judgments to speakers who are themselves implicated.

Notice the unison at the end. The entire mountain — every terrace, every soul, every penitent in any stage of purgation — joins the hymn when the earthquake passes. This is the Purgatorio's most cinematic moment of collective utterance. The whole community of the saved acknowledges, simultaneously, the freeing of one soul.

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 with an apostrophe — accursed mayst thou be, thou old she-wolf — that brought the great beast of Inferno I back into the Purgatorio's argument. The she-wolf of insatiable appetite, blocking the slope at the start of the whole Commedia, was being named again on the terrace of avarice as the political beast that had filled the world. Then a voice cried sweet Mary into the dark from the prone bodies along the inner wall, and three examples of poverty and generosity were called out in turn — Mary at the inn of Bethlehem, Fabricius the unbribable Roman, Nicholas the gold-giving bishop. Then one of the prone shades introduced himself and turned the canto into one of its longest sustained denunciations: Hugh Capet, root of that malignant plant which now overshadowed all Christendom, surveying his own royal descendants in a prophecy that ran from 1266 to 1314 and named at least five Capetian kings as the perpetrators of the most consequential political crimes of Dante's century. The canto closed with the entire mountain shaking, every soul on every terrace breaking into the Gloria in excelsis in unison, the pilgrim standing stunned, and Virgil refusing — for the moment — to explain what had happened. The next canto would reveal the cause.

Why Hugh Capet speaks for the avaricious

Avarice in Dante's diagnosis is the political sin par excellence. The miser hoarding coin in a cellar is a small example of it; the king and the pope diverting whole nations toward dynastic accumulation are the large one. The terrace of avarice has therefore been organised by Dante around the two offices Marco Lombardo's two suns speech in canto XVI identified as the proper governors of Christendom — Pope and King — and the two speakers given the longest voices on it are a pope (Adrian V in XIX) and a king (Hugh Capet here). The structural pairing is exact: the two offices that should have led the world toward the higher good are face-down on the same terrace, weeping the same psalm.

Hugh Capet's complaint against his descendants is not, in the canto's own framing, the complaint of a victim. He calls himself the root of that malignant plant — radice fui de la mala pianta — and accepts authorship of the line whose growth he is about to condemn. The canto's deepest implicit doctrine is that the sin he is purging — avarice as the founding impulse of his dynasty — produced, by inheritance, the actions of his descendants. The Capetian crown was won by displacing the Carolingian line and continued by accumulating territory through ruthless dynastic marriage and outright fraud. Hugh, in purgation, watches the harvest of his planting. The form of the speech is prophecy — I see — but the events he sees are, by 1300, all either accomplished or imminent.

The descendants he denounces are these.

Charles of Anjou (1227–1285), brother of Louis IX of France, summoned to Italy by the papacy to drive out the German Hohenstaufens. He killed Manfred at Benevento in 1266, beheaded the boy-heir Conradin at Naples in 1268, and (Dante believed) had Thomas Aquinas poisoned in 1274 to prevent him from advising against Charles's Sicilian policies. Thrust Thomas back to heaven.

Charles of Valois (1270–1325), brother of Philip IV, sent by Pope Boniface VIII in 1301 to "pacify" Florence. He arrived without significant arms, was welcomed by the Black Guelphs, and used his nominal mediator's role to enable the political purge that sentenced Dante to exile. The lance he carried, Hugh says, was Judas's — the lance with which he joust let was Judas's.

Charles II of Anjou (1254–1309), the Lame, King of Naples. He sold his own daughter Beatrice to the elderly Marquis Azzo VIII d'Este in 1305 to pay off a political debt; the marriage was a public scandal. I see him sell his daughter and chaffer for her, as do pirates with their female slaves.

Philip IV the Fair (1268–1314), King of France, the new Pilate. The most consequential crime named is the outrage at Anagni in September 1303: Philip's agents Sciarra Colonna and Guillaume de Nogaret broke into the papal palace at Anagni and abducted Pope Boniface VIII, holding him captive for three days; the broken Boniface died within weeks. The papacy would shortly move to Avignon under Philip's effective control. The further crime named is the destruction of the Templars — Philip's seizure of the Order's wealth and the torture and burning of its members in 1307–14, conducted without decretal (without papal authority). Both events were ahead of the poem's dramatic date (1300) but past Dante's writing date.

The canto contains, in short, the Commedia's most concentrated indictment of the political house Dante held responsible for the destruction of Italian liberty and for the corruption of the medieval Church. The fact that the indictment is delivered by the dynasty's own founder — a man on the terrace of avarice purging his sin — gives it a moral authority no outside critic could have provided.

The cry of Mary and the line about poverty

In the middle of his speech, just before the political prophecy, Hugh provides the canto's positive examples. The first is the cry the pilgrim has already heard from the prone bodies in the dark — a voice calling out sweet Mary in the tone of a woman in labour. The image is exact. The canto's positive examples of the virtue opposite avarice are not figures of public generosity but a figure of poverty in childbirth. Mary at the inn of Bethlehem, with no room for her in any other place, brings forth a son into a borrowed stable. The poverty is given as the posture in which the highest good entered the world. The canto's argument is that the wealth the avaricious sought all their lives was the inverse of the condition in which God himself chose to arrive among them.

The second example is Fabricius, the third-century BC Roman consul who refused Pyrrhus's bribes during the war with Epirus and lived in such poverty that the Senate had to bury him at state expense. The canto says he preferred virtue with poverty to the possession of great wealth with vice. Roman pagan example placed beside Christian Marian example — the standard two-tradition equipoise of the Purgatorio.

The third is Nicholas of Myra, the fourth-century bishop whose acts of secret almsgiving — most famously, the three bags of gold he is said to have left by night in the window of a poor man whose three daughters were about to be sold into prostitution — gave rise to the long European tradition of the giver-saint that culminated in the figure of Santa Claus. Dante does not name him as Santa Claus; he names him as the bishop whose generosity is the structural opposite of the dynastic accumulation about to be denounced.

The earthquake and what it teaches the pilgrim

The mountain shakes. Every soul on every terrace breaks into the angels' hymn of the Nativity — Gloria in excelsis Deo — in unison. The pilgrim is stunned and asks Virgil what has happened. Virgil refuses to explain, saying only that they will find out from the next soul they meet. The canto closes on this withholding.

The mechanism — which the pilgrim and the reader will learn at the start of XXI — is one of the Purgatorio's most beautiful inventions. The mountain trembles when a soul has completed its purgation and is about to ascend to Heaven. The trembling is the mountain's celebration of the freeing of one of its own. Every soul on every terrace breaks into the hymn the angels sang at the birth of Christ because the freeing of a soul into Heaven is, in the cantica's deep logic, the new birth of a redeemed person. The doctrine is precise: Purgatory is a womb, not a prison; what completes purgation is born into Paradise; and the whole community of the saved sings the same hymn for every new birth that the angels sang for the first.

That this earthquake comes in the political canto — at the close of the most savage indictment of the Capetian house — is not accidental. The completing soul will turn out to be a Roman poet whose life was not Capetian, whose century was not the fourteenth, and whose freeing has nothing to do with any of the figures named in the speech. The juxtaposition is the canto's quiet rebuke to the prophet of dynastic crimes: the mountain's joy runs on its own schedule, indifferent to the wars of Christian kings.

Famous and meaningful passages

The she-wolf returns.

Accursed mayst thou be, thou old she-wolf, That more than all the other beasts hast prey, Because of hunger infinitely hollow! (Purg. XX.10–12)

The beast of Inferno I, named again. L'antica lupa. The political diagnosis of the whole Commedia condensed into one apostrophe.

The cry of Mary.

And I by peradventure heard Sweet Mary! Uttered in front of us amid the weeping Even as a woman does who is in child-birth. (Purg. XX.19–21)

The first positive example, given as a labour-cry. The poverty of the manger announced as a woman's pain.

How poor thou wast Is manifested by that hostelry Where thou didst lay thy sacred burden down. (Purg. XX.22–24)

Mary's poverty as the inverse condition of the wealth the avaricious sought. The line is delivered as a meditation, not as a sermon.

Fabricius.

Virtue with poverty didst thou prefer To the possession of great wealth with vice. (Purg. XX.25–26)

The Roman pagan example in two lines. The choice every avaricious soul on the terrace failed to make.

The root of the plant.

I was the root of that malignant plant Which overshadows all the Christian world, So that good fruit is seldom gathered from it. (Purg. XX.43–45)

Hugh's self-identification. Io fui radice de la mala pianta. The founder of the Capetian line accepts authorship of the dynasty he is about to denounce.

The Parisian butcher.

I was the son of a Parisian butcher, What time the ancient kings had perished all, Excepting one, contrite in cloth of gray. (Purg. XX.52–54)

The legendary low origin of the Capetian house, asserted as historical fact. The last Carolingian, contrite in cloth of gray — a monk in a Carolingian abbey, the last of the line, withdrawn from the throne Hugh's faction had taken.

The new Pilate.

I see the modern Pilate so relentless, This does not sate him, but without decretal He to the temple bears his sordid sails. (Purg. XX.91–93)

Philip IV at Anagni. Veggio il novo Pilato sì crudele. The seizure of the pope is given the same iconography as the seizure of Christ. The temple he bears his ships into without decretal is the Templar treasury, raided in 1307 without papal authorisation.

The fleur-de-lis at Anagni.

I see the flower-de-luce Alagna enter, And Christ in his own Vicar captive made. (Purg. XX.86–87)

Veggio in Alagna intrar lo fiordaliso, e nel vicario suo Cristo esser catto. The Capetian banner enters the papal palace; the pope is taken; Christ is taken in his vicar. Two lines for one of the central political crimes of the fourteenth century.

The mountain trembles.

When I perceived, like something that is falling, The mountain tremble, whence a chill seized on me, As seizes him who to his death is going. (Purg. XX.127–129)

The earthquake the canto closes on. The pilgrim's body reads the trembling as the body of a man about to die — but the trembling is in fact the body of the mountain at the birth of a soul into Heaven.

The unison.

Gloria in excelsis Deo, all Were saying, from what near I comprehended, Where it was possible to hear the cry. (Purg. XX.136–138)

Every soul on every terrace, in unison. The angels' Bethlehem hymn given to the whole community of the saved as the song of every new birth into Paradise.

What to watch for

Watch the next canto open with the explanation. XXI will reveal that the trembling and the hymn were for the freeing of Statius — the Roman poet of the Thebaid — who has just completed his purgation and is now ready to ascend. The juxtaposition with the Capetian denunciation is deliberate: the mountain's joy is not for kings.

Watch the Aeneid's gravity intensify. Statius will name Virgil as the father of his own poetry without yet knowing that the soul before him is Virgil. The cantica's deepest tribute from one Latin poet to another is about to be staged.

Watch the Gloria's return. The hymn of Bethlehem, given here to the whole mountain in unison, will return as one of the central hymns of Paradiso. The link between the angels' announcement to the shepherds and the saints' welcoming of every newly-purged soul is one of the Commedia's deep liturgical structures.

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.