"I was a man of arms, and then became a cordelier, trusting, thus girt,to make amends; and surely my trust had been fulfilled but for the Great Priest,[1] whom may ill betide! who set me back into my first sins; and how and wherefore, I will that thou hear from me. While I was that form of bone and flesh that my mother gave me, my works were not leonine, but of the fox. The wily practices, and the covert ways, I knew them all, and I so plied their art that to the earth's end the sound went forth. When I saw me arrived at that part of my age where every one ought to strike the sails and to coil up the ropes, what erst was pleasing to me then gave me pain, and I yielded me repentant and confessed. Alas me wretched! and it would have availed. The Prince of the new Pharisees having war near the Lateran,[2]--and not with Saracens nor with Jews, for every enemy of his was Christian, and none of them had been to conquer Acre,[3] nor a trafficker in the land of the Soldan,--regarded in himself neither his supreme office, nor the holy orders, nor in me that cord which is wont to make those girt with it more lean; but as Constantine besought Sylvester within Soracte to cure his leprosy,[4] so this one besought me as master to cure his proud fever. He asked counsel of me, and I kept silence, because his words seemed drunken. And then he said to me, 'Let not thy heart mistrust; from now I absolve thee, and do thou teach me to act so that I may throw Palestrina to the ground. Heaven can I lock and unlock, as thou knowest; for two are the keys that my predecessor held not dear.' Then his grave arguments pushed me to where silence seemed to me the worst, and I said, 'Father, since thou washest me of that sin wherein I now must fall, long promise with short keeping will make thee triumph on the High Seat.' Francis[5] came for me afterwards, when I was dead, but one of the Black Cherubim said to him, 'Bear him not away; do me not wrong; he must come down among my drudges because he gave the fraudulent counsel, since which till now I have been at his hair; for he who repents not cannot be absolved, nor can repentance and will exist together, because of the contradiction that allows it not.' O woeful me! how I shuddered when he took me, saying to me, 'Perhaps thou didst not think that I was a logician.' To Minos he bore me; and he twined his tail eight times round his hard back, and, after he had bitten it in great rage, he said, 'This is one of the sinners of the thievish fire.' Therefore I, where thou seest, am lost, andgoing thus robed I rankle." When he had thus completed his speech the flame, sorrowing, departed, twisting and flapping its sharp horn.
[1] Boniface VIII.
[2] With the Colonna family, whose stronghold was Palestrina.
[3] Not one had been a renegade, to help the Saracens at the siege of Acre in 1291.
[4] It was for this service that Constantine was supposed to have made Sylvester "the first rich Father." See Canto xiv. His predecessor, Celestine V., had renounced the papacy.
[5] St. Francis came for his soul, as that of one of the brethren of his Order.
We passed onward, I and my Leader, along the crag, far as upon the next arch that covers the ditch in which the fee is paid by those who, sowing discord, win their burden.
CANTO XXVIII. Eighth Circle: ninth pit: sowers of discord and schism. --Mahomet and Ali.--Fra Dolcino.--Pier da Medicina. -Curio.-- Mosca.--Bertrau de Born.
Who, even with words unfettered,[1] could ever tell in full of the blood and of the wounds that I now saw, though many times narrating? Every tongue assuredly would come short, by reason of our speech and our memory that have small capacity to comprise so much.
[1] In prose.
If all the people were again assembled, that of old upon the fateful land of Apulia lamented for their blood shed by the Trojans,[1] and in the long war that made such high spoil of the rings,[2] as Livy writes, who erreth not; with those that, by resisting Robert Guiscard,[3] felt the pain of blows, and the rest whose bones are still heaped up at Ceperano,[4] where every Apullan was false, and there by Tagliacozzo,[5] where without arms the old Alardo conquered,--and one should show his limb pierced through, and one his lopped off, it would be nothing to equal the grisly mode of the ninth pit.
[1] The Romans, descendants of the Trojans.
[2] The spoils of the battle of Canon, in the second Punic War. [3] The Norman conqueror and Duke of Apulia. He died in 1085.
[4] Where, in 1266, the leaders of the army of Manfred, King of Apulia and Sicily, treacherously went over to Charles of Anjou.
[5] Here, in 1265, Conradin, the nephew of Manfred, was defeated and taken prisoner. The victory was won by a stratagem devised by Count Erard de Valery.
Truly cask, by losing mid-board or cross-piece, is not so split open as one I saw cleft from the chin to where the wind is broken: between his legs were hanging his entrails, his inner parts were visible, and the dismal sack that makes ordure of what is swallowed. Whilst all on seeing him I fix myself, he looked at me, and with his hands opened his breast, saying, "Now see how I rend myself, see how mangled is Mahomet. Ali [1] goeth before me weeping, cleft in the face from chin to forelock; and all the others whom thou seest here were, when living, sowers of scandal and of schism, and therefore are they so cleft. A devil is here behind, that adjustsus so cruelly, putting again to the edge of the sword each of this crew, when we have turned the doleful road, because the wounds are closed up ere one passes again before him. But thou, who art thou, that musest on the crag, perchance to delay going to the punishment that is adjudged on thine own accusations?" [2] "Nor death hath reached him yet," replied my Master, "nor doth sin lead him to torment him; but, in order to give him full experience, it behoves me, who am dead, to lead him through Hell down here, from circle to circle; and this is true as that I speak to thee."[1] Cousin and son-in-law of Mahomet, and himself the head of a schism.
