Can it be that Florence really did not understand the situation as we see it, or was that situation in reality very dangerous to her liberty? It is difficult to understand how she can have failed to see that the Pope had already won. It was obvious that he had come to some arrangement with Charles, which proved to be that the Church would crown him on condition that he only spent the day of his incoronation in Rome and respected the sovereignty of the Pope in the states of the Church. Moreover, if this were not enough, as Florence knew, the presence of Albornoz in Romagna had already drawn the teeth of the Visconti so far as they were dangerous to Tuscany. However, it seems to have been in considerable fear and perplexity that she saw Charles enter Padua early in November, 1354. Now if ever, some thought doubtless, the White Guelf ideal was to be realised. Among these idealists was, alas, Petrarch, whose hymn, not long written perhaps, Italia Mia, surely dreamed of quite another king than a German prince. Boccaccio was, as I think, better advised. In his seventh Eclogue he mercilessly ridicules Charles, who in fact, though not maybe in seeming, was the instrument of the Pope. He entered Italy by the Pope's leave. Padua received him with honour, but Cane della Scala of Verona clanged to his gates, and the Visconti with bared teeth waited to see what he would do. He went to Mantua and Gonzaga received him well. There he expected the ambassador of Tuscany, but as the Pope's friend the Ghibellines knew him not, they smiled bitterly at the "Priests' Emperor," only Pisa pathetically stretching out her hands to Cæsar's ghost, while, as claimant of the imperial title the Guelf republics would have none of him. Florence need have had no fear, the Church had out-manœuvred her enemies as in old time.
Charles, however, was not contemptible. Simple German as he was, he soon grasped the situation. He made friends in some sort with Visconti, and in this doubtless Petrarch, who had urged him on, was able to assist him. From them he received the iron crown, though not indeed at Monza, but in Milan, in the church of S. Ambrogio, and at their hands. That must have been a remarkable and unhappy time for the King of the Romans, in spite of Petrarch's talk and friendship. Presently he set out for Pisa and so to Rome, where he received the imperial crown on April 4, 1355, and, returning to Pisa, as though in irony of Petrarch's enthusiastic politics, crowned the grammarian Zanobi da Strada poet laureate. Yet this was surely but a German joke. As for Florence, still trembling it seems, she took as firm a stand as she could, and asked only the protection and friendship of the Emperor, offering no homage or subordination. The Sienese, on the other hand, in spite of their treaty with Florence, offered him their lordship. Others followed their example, and Pisa was filled with Ghibellines claiming the destruction of Florence, the head and front of the Guelf faction. Charles, however, refused to adventure. He demanded from Florence only money, as a fine, by paying which she was to be restored to his favour, and that her magistrates should be called Vicars of the Empire. She forfeited nothing of her liberty and none of her privileges as a free republic. Yet at first she refused to acquiesce. It was only after an infinite number of explanations that she was brought to consent. Indeed, we read that the "very notary who read out the deed broke down, and the Senate was so affected that it dissolved. On the next day the Act was rejected seven times before it was passed. The bells were the only merry folk in Florence, so jealous were her citizens of the liberty of their state."
[CHAPTER XII]
1353-1356
BOCCACCIO'S ATTITUDE TO WOMAN—
THE CORBACCIO
Those embassies, for the most part so unsuccessful one may think, which from time to time between 1350 and 1354 Boccaccio had undertaken at the request of the Florentine Republic, heavy though his responsibility must have been in the conduct of them, had by no means filled all his time or seriously prevented the work, far more important as it proved to be, which he had chosen as the business of his life. Between 1348 and 1353, as we shall see, he had written the Decameron; in 1354-5 he seems to have produced the Corbaccio, and not much later the Vita di Dante; while in the complete retirement from political life, from the office of ambassador at any rate, which followed the embassy of 1354 and lasted for eleven years, till indeed in 1365 he went again to Avignon on business of the Republic, he devoted himself almost entirely to study and to the writing of those Latin works of learning which his contemporaries appreciated so highly and which we have perhaps been ready too easily to forget.
It is generally allowed[428] that Boccaccio began the Decameron in 1348, but that it did not see the light in its completeness till 1353, and this would seem reasonable, for it is surely impossible that such a work can have been written in much less than four years. That a considerable time did in fact divide the beginning from the completion of the book Boccaccio himself tells us in the conclusion, at the end of the work of the Tenth Day, where he says: "Though now I approach the end of my labours, it is long since I began to write, yet I am not oblivious that it was to none but to ladies of leisure that I offered my work...."
That the Decameron was not begun before 1348 would seem to be certain, for even if we take away the Prologue, the form itself is built on the dreadful catastrophe of the Black Death.[429] If the book was begun between that year and 1351, it cannot, however, have been suggested, as some have thought, by Queen Giovanna of Naples, for she was then in Avignon. In 1348 Boccaccio was thirty-five years old, and whether at that time he was in Naples or in Forlì with Ordelaffo is, as we have seen, doubtful, though that he was in Naples would appear more likely; but wherever he was he had ample opportunity of witnessing the appalling ravages of the pestilence which he so admirably describes, and which is the contrast of and the excuse for his book, for save in Lombardy and Rome the pestilence was universal throughout Italy. In 1353, however, we know him to have been resident in Florence, and if we accept the tradition, which there is no reason at all to doubt, it was in that year that the complete Decameron first saw the light.[430] It was known, however, in part, long before that, and would seem indeed to have been published—if one may so express it—in parts; not perhaps ten stories at a time—a day at a time—as Foscolo[431] has conjectured, but certainly in parts, most likely of various quantity and at different intervals. This would seem to be obvious from the introduction to the Fourth Day, where Boccaccio speaks of the envy and criticism that "these little stories" had excited, and proceeds to answer his detractors. It is obvious that he could not at the beginning of the Fourth Day have answered criticisms of his work if some of it had not already seen the light and been widely read.