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THE TWELVE AMBASSADORS AND UGOLINO'S JUBILEE INSCRIPTION: DANTE'S FLORENCE AND THE TARTARS IN 1300

1997; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 52; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1179/its.1997.52.1.1

1748-6181

Peter Armour,

Byzantine Studies and History

Questi non ciberà terra né peltro, ma sapïenza, amore e virtute, e sua nazion sarà tra feltro e feltro. With these words, in the first canto of the Comedy, Dante's Virgil predicts the future arrival of the Veltro who, by driving the she-wolf back into Hell, will be the salvation of ‘quella umile Italia’ where Aeneas founded his state, the divinely willed origin of Rome and its world-wide Empire. The enigmatic sign by which this poor, wise, loving, and virtuous deliverer will be recognized is that his ‘birth’ or ‘nativity’, or his ‘nation’ or ‘people’, will be ‘between felt and felt’. Already at the time of Boccaccio, and again more recently in the present century, some interpreters of the Comedy have linked this reference to felt with the Mongols or Tartars, and specifically with the burial rituals or the enthronement of their Emperor, the Great Khan; hence the deliverance of the West might have its origins in the East with a ruler who, amidst great power and wealth, would be reminded of his own mortality and essential poverty, as represented by the felt. There are, moreover, two further lines of enquiry which connect Florence and the Tartars in or around the year 1300, perhaps indeed during the spring of that centenary Jubilee year, at the very time in which Dante set his account of the dark wood, his failure to climb the sunlit hill, and Virgil's prediction, and possibly even not long before he began to write this first canto.