Ugolino della Gherardesca
Ugolino della Gherardesca (* approx. 1220 in Pisa , † March 1289 ibid), Count of Donoratico, was a Tuscan nobleman of Sardinian origin, naval commander and, as the head of the powerful della Gherardesca family, one of the leading politicians in the city republic of Pisa. At the instigation of his political rival, Archbishop Ruggieri, he was finally imprisoned with two sons and two grandchildren and left to starve. He became immortal through the portrayal of his fate in Dante's “Divine Comedy” , where he appears in Inferno , and Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg's tragedy Ugolino .
Life
Ugolino was around 1220 in Pisa as a member of the old, originally from Sardinia originating family Gherardesca born of a traditionally Ghibelline sex, thanks to its connection with the Swabians had received possessions and titles in the Republic of Pisa. In 1252 he became governor of Sardinia for King Enzio of Sardinia and remained so until the end of Hohenstaufen rule.
In Pisa he allied himself with the Visconti , the leaders of the Guelph party , to whom he had come into close contact through his sister's marriage to Giovanni Visconti, judge of Gallura. Between 1271 and 1274, together with Giovanni Visconti, he was involved in a series of actions against imperial rule. This unrest ended in 1274 with the arrest of Ugolino and the exile of Giovanni Visconti. Visconti died the following year, and Ugolino, who was no longer considered dangerous, was released from custody and banished from the city for a year. He immediately began to conspire against the Ghibelline Pisa with the cities ruled by the Guelfs. Finally, with the support of Charles I of Anjou , he attacked his hometown and forced it to a humiliating peace treaty that included his rehabilitation and that of the other Guelphs in exile.
In the following years he lived inconspicuously in Pisa, but tried steadily to increase his influence. When the war between Pisa and Genoa broke out in 1284 , Ugolino was given command of a division of the Pisan fleet. At first he won a few minor sea victories against Genoese ships; in the naval battle of Meloria on August 6, 1284, however, he held back with his ships and thus contributed to the complete defeat of Pisa. This behavior has earned him the charge of treason. Nevertheless, Ugolino was elected Podestà , head of the city government, in 1284 . In addition to his political skills, the fact that the Guelfi cities of Florence and Lucca had used the Pisan defeat to attack Pisa may also have contributed to this . It is possible that a city chief with close ties to the Guelphs was hoping for a better negotiating position for the weakened Pisa. In fact, through his political contacts, Ugolino succeeded in persuading Florence to conclude peace. Lucca, however, demanded the cession of the forts Asciano, Avane, Ripafratta and Viareggio as a condition of peace. Such a weakening one did not want to accept in Pisa, since these castles represented key positions in the defense against Lucca. In order to come to a peace with Lucca, Ugolino finally concluded a secret agreement according to which the castles were left undefended so that Lucca could take them.
On the other hand, negotiations about a peace treaty and an exchange of prisoners with Genoa dragged on because Ugolino was not prepared to cede Rocca Castle in Sardinia as requested. There were two explanations for this behavior, both of which are probably party-political: While the Guelfan side claimed that the Pisan prisoners in Genoa had declared that they would rather die than witness the shameful fall of the fortress, the Ghibelline side assumed Ugolino that he was not interested in a peace treaty with Genoa because the return of the Pisan prisoners, many of whom were leading Ghibellines, would have jeopardized his political power. Although Ugolino was the most influential man in Pisa at that time (1285) and sought to secure absolute power for himself, he was viewed with suspicion on both sides: the Ghibellines regarded him for his collaboration with the Guelphs, his behavior in the naval battle of Meloria and his lack of interest in the fate of the Ghibelline prisoners in Genoa as a traitor, the Guelphs suspected him of harboring ongoing sympathy with the Ghibelline cause because of his origins. When he was appointed Capitano del popolo for 10 years in 1286 , he had to share this dignity with his nephew Nino Visconti, Giovanni's son. This dual rule did not last long: Nino Visconti aspired to the office of Podestà and for this purpose contacted the Archbishop Ruggieri degli Ubaldini , the leader of the Ghibelline party. When Ugolino found out about this, he drove Nino out of the city in 1287, as did several prominent Ghibelline families, and was proclaimed Lord of Pisa. In April 1287, he again refused a peace treaty with Genoa, although it wanted to be satisfied with a sum of money instead of the requested castle, as he feared the return of the prisoners who had sworn vengeance for the extension of their captivity.
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Ugolino was at the height of his power when Pisa was shaken by a dramatic rise in prices in 1288. The food shortage caused by this led to bitter reactions in the population, who ventured into violence that also involved the noble families. Ugolino killed one of the archbishop's nephews in an armed conflict. On July 1, 1288, he left a council meeting in the Church of San Bastiano, which had discussed peace with Genoa without result, when he and his companions were attacked by Ghibelline armed men. They withdrew to the town house and offered bitter resistance until a fire was finally set on the building. Ugolino was captured and thrown into the "Muda", a tower that belonged to the Gualdini family, along with his sons Gaddo and Uguccione and his grandsons Nino (called il Brigata) and Anselmuccio. By order of the archbishop, who in the meantime had proclaimed himself a Podestà, the keys to the prison were thrown into the Arno in March 1289 and the prisoners were left to starve.
Their bodies were buried in the cloister of the Church of San Francesco . In 1902 the remains were exhumed and transferred to the burial chapel of the della Gherardesca family.
The legend
Although Giovanni Villani and other writers mention the story of Ugolino, their fame is entirely based on Dante's Divine Comedy , in which Ugolino and Ruggieri are banished to the ice of the second ring (Antenora) of the ninth and deepest circle of hell (Canto XXXII, 124-140 and XXXIII, 1-90).
Ugolino appears in the inferno as a damned soul, but also as an avenging demon: Only his head protrudes from the ice of the ninth circle of hell, which in vengeance eternally gnaws at the skull of Archbishop Ruggieri.
In Dante's Divine Comedy, the scene is portrayed as follows:
- “You hear now: I was Count Ugolin, / Archbishop Roger, whom I bit into pieces. / Now listen why I am such a neighbor. / That he treacherously tore freedom from me / When he deceitfully beguiles my trust / And killed me, you will know that. / [...] / A narrow hole in the wall of the dungeon, / Named by me from hunger, where certainly / Some people are still closed to bitter grief, / [...] / When I woke up in the first red of dawn, / There Whined, still half asleep, my own who were with me, and asked for bread. / [...] / They were already awake, the hour is approaching, / Wherever else the food is brought to us, and everyone / Waves' because of the dream of misfortune. / I heard the barren / dreadful tower locking below me - and I looked in the face / all the children without saying a word. / I didn't cry. So I stare inwardly, / You were crying, and my Anselmuccio asked: / You look like that - Father! Oh what do you have Speak! / But I didn't cry, and for that day I said / I said nothing and nothing all night until again / The morning light of the world was in the east. / When his beam fell into my miserable dungeon / A little, it seemed to me that I would find / On four faces mine and my torment. / I bit my hands in misery, / And those, thinking that I was greed / After eating, they rose swiftly / And shouted, Eat us, and we suffer less! / As we get the poor cover from you, / Oh, so undress us, father, also from it. / Because of her I try to keep still; / We stayed mute that day, the rest of the day. / And you, oh earth, couldn't split yourself? / When we reached the fourth day, / My Gaddo crawled up to me with soft pleading: / What are you not helping? My father, help me! / There he died - and that's how I saw her, / As you see me, on the fifth, sixth day, / Now that, now that, sink and pass. / Already blind, I grope where everyone was, / she cried three days, since her eyes were broken, / Until hunger did what sorrow cannot do. ”(Inf. XXXIII, 13-18; 37-39; 43- 75)
It is not clear why Dante Ugolino was banished to the circle of traitors. When classifying Ugolino among the traitors, he refers to the cession of the Pisan castles to Lucca. Another possible reason would be his behavior in the naval battle of Meloria, which, however, is not attributed to treason by any author before the 16th century. Daniella Bartoli finally assumes in the sixth volume of the Storia della letteratura italiana that Ugolino's alliance with the Guelphs was the real reason.
According to Dante, the prisoners in the tower were slowly dying of starvation, and before they died, Ugolino's children asked their father to eat their bodies. Ugolino's story ends with the ambiguous sentence: "Then the hunger was stronger than the sadness" (più che il dolor poté il digiuno) , which can be interpreted in two ways: Ugolino either wants to say that he ate the corpses of his children out of hunger or he just means that he died of starvation because he couldn't die of grief. The first, more gruesome, thesis is the more popular and widespread. Hence the accusation of cannibalism is associated with Ugolino's figure . The fact that Dante Ugolino gnaws at Ruggieri's skull also alludes to this. In the fine arts, after a verse of Dante, he is often depicted biting his own hands in despair ("I bit into both hands with sorrow" / "ambo le man per lo dolor mi morsi" , Inferno XXXIII, 57), for example in Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Gate of Hell and in Ugolino and his sons by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said of Dante's Ugolino episode:
- “The few terzines in which Dante includes the starvation of Ugolino and his children belong to the highest that poetry has produced, because it is precisely this narrowness, this laconism, this silence that brings us the tower, the hunger and the rigid despair the soul."
Geoffrey Chaucer in Monk's Tale of the Canterbury Tales and Shelley also wrote the horrific events .
Another literary processing comes from the German poet Heinrich Wilhelm von Gerstenberg . His tragedy Ugolino , a forerunner of Sturm und Drang , published in 1768 , is considered to be his main work.
Scientific analysis
The historical circumstances of captivity and death have not yet been fully clarified.
The Italian archaeologist Francesco Mallegni is convinced that he identified the remains of Ugolino and his descendants in 2002. In 2003 he published his research results in a book. DNA analysis confirms that the remains are from a father, whose sons and grandchildren are concerned, and comparisons with the DNA of descendants of the Gherardesca family living today show that there is a 98 percent probability that they are members of the same family.
The forensic analysis speaks against the accusation of cannibalism: The examination of the rib bones of the skeleton attributed to Ugolino revealed traces of magnesium, but not of zinc, which would have to be present if the deceased had consumed meat in the weeks before his death. He was also a man of over seventy and nearly toothless at the time of his imprisonment, making it even less likely that he could have survived his younger inmates and ate their meat. Mallegni also points out that the skull of the oldest skeleton was damaged. So, if this is Ugolino, malnutrition doesn't have to be the only cause of death, even if it made his condition worse.
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ D. Alighieri: Commedia. translated by Carl Streckfuß , ed. by R. Pfleiderer. Philipp Reclam Jr. Verlag, Leipzig 1876, p. 186ff.
- ↑ cf.: Pisa, you, the beautiful country's disgrace, / [...] / For, even if Ugolino's wickedness, / As it is said, the locks betray you, / What slaughtered the children your anger? from Dante Alighieri: Commedia. translated by Hermann Gmelin . Reclam Jr. Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, pp. 128f.
- ^ D. Alighieri: Commedia. translated by Hermann Gmelin. Reclam Jr. Verlag, Stuttgart 2001, p. 127f.
- ^ Goethe: Writings on literature - Ugolino Gherardesca.
- ↑ Francesco Mallegni, M. Luisa Ceccarelli Lemut: Il conte Ugolino di Donoratico tra antropologia e storia. 2003, ISBN 88-8492-059-0 .
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Ugolino della Gherardesca |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Italian nobleman |
| DATE OF BIRTH | around 1220 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Pisa |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 1289 |
| Place of death | Pisa |