In spite, however, of Dante’s very real gratitude to Cangrande, there grew up a coldness between them which seems to have been mainly brought about by Dante’s unsociable and critical temperament. It was no less experienced a judge of men and of the society of his time than Petrarch who writes of Dante and his relations with Cangrande:
“When banished from his country he (Dante) resided at the court of Cangrande, where the afflicted universally found consolation and an asylum. He was at first held in much honour by the Dog (dal Cane), but afterwards he by degrees fell out of favour, and day by day pleased less that lord. Actors and parasites of every description used to be collected together at the same banquet; one of these, most impudent in his words and in his obscene gestures, obtained much importance and favour with many. The Dog, suspecting that Dante disliked this, called the man before him, and, having greatly praised him to our poet, said: ‘I wonder how it is that this silly fellow should know how to please all, and that thou canst not, who art said to be so wise.’ Dante answered: ‘Thou wouldst not wonder if thou knewest that friendship is founded on similarity of habits and disposition.’ It is also related that at his table, which was indiscriminately hospitable, where buffoons sat down with Dante, and where jests passed which must have been repulsive to every person of refinement, but disgraceful when uttered by the superior in rank to his inferior, a boy was once concealed under the table, who, collecting the bones that were thrown there by the guests, according to the custom of those times, heaped them up at Dante’s feet. When the tables were removed, the great heap appearing, the Dog pretended to show great astonishment and said, ‘Certainly Dante is a great devourer of meat.’ To which Dante readily replied, ‘My Lord, if I were the Dog, you would not see so many bones’—‘Se fosse io il Can non si vedrebbe tante osse,’—meaning that, if he had been Cangrande, he would have had fewer and choicer companions at his table.
“From the strength and glory of his position in Lombardy, Cangrande would appear to have been designated by Dante as the one man fitted to unite the entire peninsula of Italy under his own rule. This belief of Dante’s, according to many of his commentators, is expressed in what has become known as the ‘Veltro prophecy’ in the first Canto of the ‘Inferno,’ the passage where the poet, finding his way barred by the leopard—‘quella fera alla gaietta pelle,’—is saved from it by the shade of Virgil, who explains to him the pure character of the heart which, as he says, ‘is but the hungrier after banqueting.’
“And then the shade continues:
“‘Many are the animals with which this beast doth mate, and there shall yet be others still, until the greyhound comes that is to make the beast die painfully. He (the greyhound) shall not feed on land or gold, but on wisdom and virtue and love. And his country shall lie between Feltro and Feltro; and he shall be the saviour of this lowly Italy.’
“And again, at perhaps the most disputed passage of the entire ‘Divina Commedia’ (Purgatorio, Canto XXXIII, line 46), Dante speaks of a mysterious personage who is to do great things and of whom he speaks as ‘A five hundred and ten and five sent by God’—‘Un cinquecento diece e cinque, messo di Dio’—which numerals, as is held by many, have reference to no other than Cangrande himself, and that the DXV of these numerals and the ‘Veltro’ of the former prophecy are only meant to signify one and the same person—the lord of Verona.
“And, in fact, Cangrande became in 1313, on the death of Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, the natural leader of the Ghibellines and the mainstay of their hopes in Italy—for his was an united and a single authority in his dominions, whereas the rule of the Visconti in Milan—the other great Ghibelline centre—was as yet but feeble by comparison and very uncertain. From then until his death Cangrande devoted himself to furthering his pet project of a federation of Italian States under his own leadership—but without success. He came to his end at the untimely age of thirty-eight, July 22, 1329, as the effect, according to Mr. Ruskin, of ‘eating apples when he was too hot.’ By then Cangrande had compelled nine other cities besides Verona to pay yearly tribute to him as their sovereign lord—Padua, Vicenza, Treviso, Brescia, Feltre, Belluno, Parma, Modena, and Lucca—their collected addition to his revenues being, as Villani said, ‘more than 70,000 florins of gold, which no other Christian King possesses, unless it be the King of France.’”
After Cangrande’s demise, however, the lordship of his dominions fell into very different hands. He was succeeded by his two nephews, Mastino and Alberto, of whom the elder was devoured by an insatiable ambition to extend his lordship still further and to make of it an independent kingdom and the arbiter of Italian destinies; whilst the younger, Alberto, was merely a man of pleasure. Thus it came about that before long Mastino had engaged his people in disputes with the republics of Florence and Venice and the clans of Este, Visconti, and Gonzaga; Alberto, as his subscription to the general ill-will, having at the same time inflicted an outrageous wrong upon the great Paduan house of Carrara in the person of one of its women. So that the Scaligeri had to contend with external foes and with rebellion as well. By the end of 1339, ten years after Cangrande’s death, their dominions had been reduced to the two cities of Verona and Vicenza; moreover, Mastino had been excommunicated for killing his uncle’s kinsman, Bishop Bartolomeo della Scala, in anger at some remonstrance on the prelate’s part. His repentance, though, was sincere and lasting; for it is said of him that, after the crime, he never again suffered any living being to look upon his face, not even allowing his wife, Taddea de Carrara, a relative of the lady injured by Alberto, to behold it. Mrs. Wiel, in her brilliant history of Verona, to which famous work I would fain express my immense obligation, is of the opinion that this tradition may well owe its origin to the fact that the armoured equestrian statue of Mastino, over his tomb in Verona, is represented with the vizor down, as indicating Mastino’s desire to conceal his features permanently from sight.
But from now on, for more than forty years, murder plays almost the chief part in the chronicle of the Scaligeri. After Mastino came his son, Cangrande II, who was murdered by his younger brother, Cansignorio, aged twenty, with his own hand on December 14, 1359. Soon after, Cansignorio was proclaimed, together with his own younger brother Alboino, lord of Verona, but soon Cansignorio exiled Alboino to Peschiera, because he was afraid of the youth’s popularity with the citizens. Years went by whilst Alboino lay in exile at Peschiera; during which years two natural sons, Bartolomeo and Antonio, were born to Cansignorio in Verona. Cansignorio, however, was not fated to live long, for death came to seek him out in his thirty-sixth year, but he knew of its certain coming some time beforehand, and faced it resignedly. But, even while he was dying, the news was circulated in the streets of Verona that his brother Alboino had suddenly died at Peschiera—of poison, as the people declared, in order that he might not succeed to the lordship that Cansignorio had destined for his own illegitimate sons. But then every death of which the cause was not quite plain was ascribed to poison in those days, so that it seems only charitable to believe that public opinion may have been at fault in its verdict upon the death of Alboino della Scala.
Cansignorio himself died on October 19, 1375, and his sons, Bartolomeo and Antonio, reigned for a while together in his stead. But Antonio was infected with ambition to be the sole ruler of Verona; moreover, he was jealous of the love which all who knew him bore toward Bartolomeo.