How was the economy in Dante's time? And what relationship did Dante have with the economy? To answer these questions we rely on an essay by Giovanni Cherubini, one of the leading international scholars of medieval history, who passed away at the age of 85 on 22 February. The work (Dante and the economic activities of his time) is the reworking of a conference held in Florence, in Palazzo Vecchio, on 21 May 1989. At the time the anniversary of the birth of the poet was celebrated, while today is the National Day dedicated to Dante Alighieri, of which in 2021 the 700 years since his death. The date of March 25 (the "Dan Tuesday") is the one in which, according to scholars, the journey into the afterlife begins Divine Comedy.
THE ECONOMY OF FLORENCE BETWEEN THE TWO CENTURIES
Let's start from Florence. Between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Dante's city had about 100 inhabitants and was among the four major European centers together with Milan, Venice and Paris. The economic scenario, what we would call today conjuncture, was at the peak of a development process: “a golden age”, writes Cherubini. The new wealth generated by banking and commerce (Florentine merchants were the greatest financial power on the continent) brought with it the construction of public buildings, churches and private palaces, increased consumption and the explosion of luxury, above all in clothing.
"The city - continues the historian - presents itself to us as one of the most advanced fronts of the commercial revolution, of social change and of the affirmations of the new bourgeois classes". All accompanied by "profound changes in economic ideals, such as a brand new dignity of the market and an irrepressible desire for profit, as well as new business techniques, starting with the habit of writing account books and various administration books, commercial letters, treatises of commerce".
DANTE AND THE GOLDEN FLOWER
With these new realities Dante was never in tune. On the contrary, he felt and always manifested an aristocratic disdain for the rise of the merchant-bankers and for the aspirations of wealth. The poet's condemnation even fell on the material and symbolic instrument of bourgeois affirmation: the gold florin, minted for the first time thirteen years before the birth of Dante (in 1252) and which became the most important and appreciated international currency during the years of his exile (started in 1302 and continued until his death in 1321). "Maladetto flower" Dante calls it in canto IX of XNUMX. Paradiso, stigmatizing the banking operations with which the Florentines instilled the desire for riches even in Christian shepherds, who became "wolves" and were no longer able to lead the "sheep and lambs" entrusted to them.
GEARLESS, PRODIGAL, USURERS
The deploration of the hunger for gold also returns in canto VII of theInferno, where the greedy and the prodigal are punished with the same penalty: the two ranks of the damned roll massive boulders along two specular semicircles, in opposite directions, and when they meet at the two ends they ask each other "why are you holding onto the boulder?" and "Why are you rolling it?", after which they turn and repeat the scene over and over again. For Dante, the motive for the two apparently opposite sins is the same: the desire for wealth, which leads the miserly to accumulate substances for the pleasure of possession and the prodigals to lavish them without control.
The other great economic sin is usury, which Dante understands differently from us. In line with Scholasticism, the poet considers the very fact of asking for interest on a loan to be illicit, regardless of its size. From this perspective, which passes through Aristotle and Genesis, every onerous credit is to be condemned because it generates money from money, despising both nature and work, and therefore God.
REFUGE INTO THE DREAM
How to defend yourself from all this? In the face of the horror of avarice and its twin sins, in the face of the corruption that dominates Florence, in the face of "this citizenry bastardized by the gross blood of the incitizen peasants, vulgarized by the villains who keep a keen eye on the trade in money, which they change and trade - concludes Cherubini - Dante takes refuge in the dream of a citizenship uncontaminated by external contributions, pure even in the blood of the most modest craftsman". The Florence that Dante associates with the times of his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguida, but which in reality lives only "in the poetic and ideal imagination". In a dream, indeed. A medieval man's dream.
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