“Cacciaguida’s Place: An Anti-mercantile History of Florence within the Structure of the Paradiso”
Susan Noakes

In PARADISO XV-XVIII, Dante represents his ancestor Cacciaguida as recounting the history of the city of Florence at the end of the Middle Ages. Whereas twentieth-century historians have presented that history as foundaitonal for the development of early modern economic and social systems, Cacciaguida narrates it as a fall from grace, soon to culminate in near-apocalyptic disaster.

What can readers of Dante’s COMMEDIA learn from reflecting on the discrepancy here between the poet’s rhetoric of the fallen city and historians’ narratives of glorious “Fiorenza” as a bud readying itself for bloom? The question about PARADISO long ago, and famously, posed by Erich Auerbach--why is Dante at his most political and polemical when he is closest to the sacred?--changes focus here and highlights an important sense in which the structure of this last cantica, based not merely on Aquinas’s reading of the NICOMACHAEAN ETHICS, sets forth a comparative study of genealogies and their relations to enduring power and wealth: valor. Divine Father and Incarnate Son; the House of Anjou; St. Francis and his merchant father; St. Dominic and his travelling, militant seed; Dante and his father and grandfathers: this series of genealogies in the PARADISO allegorizes varying ways of producing wealth and transmitting it to future generations. The PARADISO’s location of the Alighieri family within the narrative of enrichment and inheritance which must be central to any discourse about late medieval Florence serves ends which, while apparently personal, in fact address wide-ranging contemporary debates about the morality of new economic practices. The vocabulary in which these genealogies are described, like Cacciaguida’s anti-mercantile narrative of the history of Florence, is derived from highly polemical Franciscan and Dominican discussions of usury. Dante’s pilgrim-character initially understands Cacciaguida’s remarks merely as rhetorical elevation of an otherwise rather modest lineage, but as poet he employs this vocabulary to show how Cacciaguida’s family and urban history is an outgrowth of basic heavenly structures. When readers appreciate the character of this vocabulary, which apprehends commerce not as a purely economic but also as an ontological activity, they find an opening which may allow them to begin to understand better the COMMEDIA’s relation to late medieval Tuscan economic and social history.