Dante As Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia

Dante as Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia

Francis R. Hittinger IV

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2016

ABSTRACT

Dante as Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia

Francis R. Hittinger IV

Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has traditionally been viewed through the lens of his poetic masterpiece, the Commedia. While his so-called “minor” works, including the overtly political book four of Convivio and the treatise Monarchia, have been studied, much of this work tends to read Dante through the theologized, over-determined hermeneutic of the narrative of his poetic journey through the afterlife. Also, because of the overwhelming temptation to associate Dante’s place in intellectual history with his clerical contemporaries in Paris and Bologna, a similar trend (often combined with the first) reads Dante as merely an idiosyncratic but minor epigone of the scholastics in his non-poetic work. The latter vein of interpretation is very common and tends to generate interpretations of Dante’s political thought which see it as a predominantly abstract encounter with scholastic theology and philosophy in the context of the high medieval church-state conflicts, particularly in the contentious age of Popes Boniface VIII,

Clement V, and John XXII and their bloody disputes with claimants to the Holy Roman throne and French and Aragonese monarchies over political control of northern Italian territories.

While this kind of reading is not unwarranted—for Dante’s Monarchia does make strong claims in the late medieval church-state conflict and deploys a philosophical lexicon current with scholastic intellectuals of the time—many scholars have read

Dante’s monarchical theory in Convivio and Monarchia exclusively as a response to and

dialogue with the major scholastic and juridical writers, particularly of the “mirrors of princes genre,” on both sides of these political conflicts between Church-State claims to authority. This is not completely wrong, but in so doing many have, conversely, failed to understand that Dante is making a coherent and unique normative argument. Such readings fail to read Dante 1) as a real Florentine politician, 2) as an enthusiastic follower of Aristotelian paradigms (not merely a scholastic Aristotelian), 3) as a committed political secularist, and 4) as contextualized within the rich municipal, social, economic, and political histories of Florence and Medieval Italy.

This study thus moves away from previous approaches to Dante’s political thought and does a close re-reading of Convivio and Monarchia in a properly historicized framework, inspired by the work of Ernst Curtius and modern historicist methodology, contextualizing it in 13th and 14th century history. In particular, the study departs from Dante’s denunciation of greed in his lyrics, Commedia, Convivio, and

Monarchia to establish the fact —through extensive research in economic history, commercial development, economic thought, political history, social history in medieval

Italy etc.— that far from being a merely abstract denunciation of mammon or usury, like that found in the Bible and other theological writings, it is a unique and acerbic response to broad changes that can only be construed, on the basis of historical scholarship, in terms of the emergence of early capitalism in Florentine society around the early to mid 13th century. During Dante’s life, greed became a serious object of social discourse, with voices expressing both approbation and disapprobation, because of the monetization, urbanization, and commercialization of northern Italy. Moreover, during this period the Florentine state is effectively transformed from a bourgeois merchants’

republic to an oligarchy of the wealthy. The rise of a mega-wealthy, nouveau riche economic elite resulted in many social dislocations and factional conflicts. Through an examination of the economic and social development of the Florentine state and the role its powerful banks and firms played in it—from its early popolo governments, ordinances of justice, white and black Ghibelline crises, through the early 14th century

Mercanzia—I thus adjust the typical church-empire historiographical binary to show that Dante’s monarchical theory is in fact a meaningful response not only to the broader ideological claims of the church-empire (spiritual-secular) conflict, but in fact, is also a response to the latter’s imbrication within the political and economic development of early capitalism. My investigation includes extensive research on the relationship between banking, commerce, and papal and Florentine-state political phenomena.

Thus, having pointed out the existence of a historical object we might call medieval

Italian “political economy” as interlaced with traditional historiographies of Church-

Imperial-City-State politics in 13th and 14th century Italy (chapters 2 and 3), and the history of the historiography of capitalism during the same period (chapter 4), I carefully examine Aristotle in terms of Dante (chapter 5). In particular, I show that

Aristotle’s conception of justice, chrematistic wealth-getting and monetary accumulation (natural vs. unnatural), and the moral teloi of the human being and state in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics moor and inform Dante’s main claims and denunciations of greed in regards to his own time: Aristotle presents an alternative model to his contemporary status quo. By understanding Dante’s political works as an

Aristotelian inspired critique of political economy (Dante cites “the philosopher” hundreds of times) I show that Dante is responding to emergent capitalism as an

institutionalization of greed which leads to infinite and unsolvable regressions of conflict which only one universal monarchical authority can stop, provided that such a monarch acts according to properly Aristotelian philosophical conceptions.

Chapter 1 serves as an initial overview of the whole study, also positioning it in relation to debates within the field of Dante studies; chapter 2 examines the international and political situation of Florence and Italy during Dante’s time; chapter 3 proposes a new historiography of this history and examines it as the development of

“political economy”; chapter 4 explores the emergence of capitalism in Florence and

Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries (also motioning to debates about the nature and definition of “political economy” and “capitalism”); finally, chapter 5 examines

Aristotle’s critique of political economy in the Ethics and Politics, then pivots to Dante’s deployment of such Aristotle’s paradigms in Convivio and Monarchia to both denounce the injustices generated by the intertwinement of politics and acquisitive monetary wealth-getting and to articulate a monarchical political model for stopping the deleterious effects of greed.

Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...... ii Chapter 1. Dante's Political Thought as Political Economic Thought: Criticism, Historicism, and New Avenues for Research ...... 1 1. Introduction: Greed, Wealth, and Political Economy ...... 2 2. Dante's Political Thought ...... 18 3. Critical Reception ...... 56 Chapter 2. Papato, Impero, Commune, Banchiere: The History of International, Italian, and Florentine Political Development in the 13th - Early 14th Centuries ...... 86 1. International and Italian Political Situation ...... 90 2. The Political Conditions of Florence ...... 100 3. Dante's Entry into Politics and the Period up to and following his Exile ...... 118 Chapter 3. Florentine Political History as History of Political Economy ... 130 1. The Primo Popolo, Ghibelline Restoration, and Victory of the Guelfs (Florentine Bankers, French Monarchy, and Pope) ...... 136 3. Priorate of the Guilds and Secondo Popolo (1282) to Ordinamenti di Giustizia (1293-1295) ...... 143 4. Papal Intertwinement with Florentine (and Tuscan) Capitalism, and the Political Economy of White and Black Guelfism (1281-1304) ...... 150 5. The Consolidation of Political Economic Interests in the post-1308 Mercanzia as an Effective Rule of Corporations over the city of Florence ...... 170 Chapter 4. Capitalism or 'c'apitalism? A Brief History of the Historiography of Capitalism and its Origins in 13th and 14th Century Italy ...... 180 Chapter 5. Aristotle’s Paradigm and Dante’s Critique of Political Economy in Monarchia and Convivio: Wealth-getting, Greed, Chrematistic states, and Justice ...... 215 1. Aristotle as Political Economist ...... 216 2. Aristotle’s Critique of Political Economy in the Nicomachean Ethics and Politics ...... 221 3. Dante vs. Greed: Wealth, Virtue, and Incontinenza in Doglia mi reca and Inferno ...... 249 4. Dante’s Critique of Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia ...... 264 Bibliography ...... 292

Acknowledgements

It goes without saying that over the course of my many years of graduate school, going back to the University of Notre Dame, where I completed my M.A. degree (2010), many people have helped me along the way in getting to Columbia, and in the long process of the completion of my studies, dissertation, and doctoral degree here at

Columbia. Here is my attempt to remember all of you, your help, and give you my sincere gratitude.

From my days at Notre Dame (2008-2010), I’d like to thank Christian Moevs for his kind and patient mentorship and instruction in mindfulness; Patricio Boyer, for his confidence, direction, and theory at just the right moments; and Vittorio Hösle, for opening a completely new window for me onto my work in Italian Studies through

Giambattista Vico. Thanks also to all the people at ND’s department of RLL who gave me the foundations that enabled me to move on to Columbia. I could not have gotten to the completion of this work if you had not been in my life when you were.

At Columbia, I give special thanks to my adviser and sponsor, Prof. Teodolinda

Barolini for her many years of patient mentorship, intellectual rigor, and kindness.

There is no thanks adequate enough for my committee members past and present, who have been so supportive in of me and this project over the last three years, Prof. Stathis

Gourgouris, Prof. Nelson Moe, Prof. Joel Kaye, Prof. Pier Mattia Tommasino, and Prof.

William Caferro of Vanderbilt University: I could not have gotten here without you!

Thanks too to Prof. Paolo Valesio and Prof. Elizabeth Leake of the Italian department for being there for me over the years when I needed your help and advice.

Many friends and colleagues deserve thanks. Know that I’ll always value your friendship and support. Thanks in particular to Grace Delmolino and Nick Engel for such a quality of personal and moral support in getting through the dissertation and graduate school that my gratitude is simply impossible to put into words. Thanks to

Robert Moore and Lisa Yountchi for the life of the mind, peculier outings, and therapy sessions. To Westenley Alcenat, thanks for the solidarity with the cause, we will soldier on. Thanks to my colleagues in the Italian department at Columbia, past and present, including, Pieter Van Hove, Akash Kumar, Steve Baker, Seth Fabian, Savannah Cooper-

Ramsay, Luke Rosenau, Irene Bulla, Maddalena Vaglio Tanet, and Jenny Rhodes for being there through good and stormy weather. Thanks to Lani Muller for making things work. Thanks to my dear friends at Columbia’s Butler Library and Digital Humanities

Center, Bob Scott, Nancy Friedland, Anice Mills, Karen Green, Ian Beilin, and Meredith

Levin for giving me a home away from home and so many great conversations. And not to forget: so many thanks to Alan Klima of Academic Muse for bootcamping me here.

Last but not least, I thank my whole family, including my wife Maria, my daughter Beatrix, and my son Leo Hittinger for their love while I wrote so much.

Thanks to my father Russell Hittinger and my mother Mary Freeman: this has been a long time coming! Many many thanks to my parents-in-law, Norbert and Elaine

Hornstein, for without their generous child-care support this dissertation would never have been written.

Finally, thanks to Columbia University—the Graduate School of Arts and

Sciences, the department of Italian, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and

Society—for the institutional and financial support of my studies that made this dissertation possible.

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For Maria, Beatrix, Leo, Mom and Dad.

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Chapter 1. Dante's Political Thought as Political Economic Thought: Criticism, Historicism, and New Avenues for Research

1. Introduction: Greed, Wealth, and Political Economy

Throughout the Commedia, Dante condemns greed and the accumulation of wealth as directly intertwined with the political dysfunction and injustice of the Italy of his time. In conversation with Forese Donati in Purgatorio, Florence is the place that “day by day [is] deprived of good and seems along the way to wretched ruin” (di giorno in giorno più di ben si spolpa, / e a trista ruina par disposto).1 In the canto of Brunetto

Latini—in which Dante also evokes an unmistakable linkage between sodomy and usury—we see that while Florence was once great, it has become a “nest of wickedness”

(nido di malizia) where “[there is] a people presumptuous, avaricious, envious” (gent’è avara, invidiosa e superba).2 Indeed, we learn in Inferno 16 a sentiment reiterated in

Paradiso 15-18: that “the newcomers to the city and quick gains” (la gente nuova e i sùbiti guadagni) have infected Florence with “excess” (dismisura).3

1 Purg. 24.80-81; Text and translations of the Commedia (Mandelbaum) and Convivio

2 Inf. 15.78; Inf. 15.68

3 Inf. 16.73-74; For an investigation into the Aristotelian valence of the term misura and how it fits into Dante’s larger courtly, sociological, and ethical framework in the Commedia and in his lyric poetry, see Teodolinda Barolini, "Sociology of the Brigata: Gendered Groups in Dante, Forese, Folgore, Boccaccio-From 'Guido, I' vorrei' to Griselda,” Italian Studies 67, no. 1 (2012): 4-22 and Teodolinda Barolini, "Aristotle's Mezzo, Courtly Misura, and Dante's Canzone Le Dolci Rime: Humanism, Ethics, and Social Anxiety," in Dante and the Greeks, ed. Jan M Ziolkowski (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2014). For a close to complete catalogue of greed and monetary corruption in the Commedia, see Leonid M. Batkin, Dante e la società italiana del '300 (Bari: De Donato, 1970).

In his encounter with Sordello, before vituperating the corruption of Florence, Dante cries out for a monarch—a Caesar—capable of restoring peace and order to an Italy that is “[an] abject…inn of sorrows…[a] ship without a helmsman in harsh seas” (serva, di dolore ostello, / sanza nocchiere in gran tempesta) and devoid of peace.4 Everywhere,

“all flee from [virtue] as if it were an enemy” (virtù così per nimica si fuga) and throughout Italy, there is not a single government imbued with philosophical authority—invoking the words of Ecclesiastes— “whose king is noble and whose princes devote their time to the people’s needs and not to their own wantonness” (lo cui re è nobile e li cui principi usano il suo tempo a bisogno, e non a lussuria).5 In Paradiso, where corrupt church and state governance is contrasted to the di