It might seem otiose to remark that cantos 14-18 of the Paradiso rely extensively on imagery with overwhelming crusading overtones. They focus, after all, on Cacciaguida, who was released into Paradise by “quella gente turpa” on the battlefield of the Third Crusade (Par. 15.145), and who shares his glory with a leader of the First Crusade. But commentators and critics have in general ignored this fact, with the result that one recent study even suggests that Dante here seeks to offer “an alternative” to crusading rhetoric[1]. A brief survey of the episode’s use of such rhetoric, together with its spotty subsequent reception, will provide a richer and more accurate understanding of the medieval context in the Cacciaguida episode.

I will begin with the simplest instances before turning to the most extensive, if least recognized, manifestation of our phenomenon. First, the pilgrim’s praise for the splendors confronting him in the Sphere of Mars: “O Elïòs che sì li addobbi!” (Par. 14.96). Mestica, early in the 20th century, seems to have been the first to note that “Addobbare ebbe nel medio evo significato di Armare e vestir cavaliero.”[2] But only in 1968, upon the appearance of Giacalone’s commentary, did any commentators note that “dubbing” was the rite by which crusaders took the cross.[3]

What so bedazzles the pilgrim, of course, is the crucial image of the episode: “sì costellati facean nel profondo / Marte quei raggi il venerabil segno / che fan giunture di quadranti in tondo” (Par. 14.100-02). “The sign of the cross, drawn upon the planet Mars, as upon the breast of a crusader,” glossed Longfellow [1867, on Par. 14.101], but, beyond his general observation, the crusading connotations of this image have barely been acknowledged.[5] Since at least the time of Tommaseo [1837/1865], it has been a critical commonplace to identify Dante’s cross as an allusion to the signum Filii hominis of Matthew 24:30. This verse resonated very powerfully in crusading rhetoric, as it does in a sermon on the power of the cross by the thirteenth-century friar, Gilbert of Tournai: “The cross is also a sign of glory. Matthew 24[:29-30]: Then the sign of the Son of Man will appear in heaven, when the sun will be darkened and the moon will not give its light; then the light of the cross will appear, radiate and shine.”[6]

The crusading connotations of this constellated cross in the sky become stronger when the figure of Cacciaguida, about to welcome his great-great-grandson, is likened to a shooting star on a still evening (Par. 15.13-21). There are, of course, a number of classical antecedents at play here; the most commonly cited is from Metam. 2.320-22, where Ovid compares the fall of the son, Phaeton, to a shooting star, contrasting with Dante’s use of the simile with regard to the appearance of the father. The mode of this soul’s death, however, makes it worth noting that crusade propaganda never tires of citing the celestial upheaval that portended the divine sanction of the iter Iherosolimita. Again, Matthew 24 was the key text: in explaining a powerful meteor shower that the French believed to be a deadly hailstorm, Baldric of Dol says, “We know, as has been truly attested, that at one time or another the stars shall fall from heaven [Matt. 24:29]. But the motions of the stars, through their parabolas and locations with respect to the earth, compare with the motion of Christianity.”[7] Such passages pervade Italian chronicles as well; the sole entry for 1095 in a chronicle of Bari concerns the igniculi that were seen falling de coelo quasi stellae per totam Apuliam, which led the population of France towards the Holy Sepulchre, while a crusade chronicle written in the Abbey of Monte Cassino remarks that upon the liberation of the Holy Sepulchre in 1099, God “showed many signs, powers, prodigies and portents to sharpen the minds of Christians so that they should want to hurry there. For the stars in the sky were seen throughout the world to fall towards the earth, crowded together and dense, like hail or snowflakes.”[8] It seems inevitable that Dante would have encountered this mode of rhetoric when reading about Cacciaguida’s celestial companion, the crusading hero Godfrey of Bouillon.

A final relevant connection in these cantos, with ethical rather than celestial or military implications, shows that the very rhetoric that has led others to discount the presence of any crusading connotation in our episode in fact underscores the depiction of Cacciaguida as ideal soldier of the cross. According to Brenda Deen Schildgen, yielding perhaps to our modern inclination toward embarrassment about the crusades, “One of the most intriguing aspects of the Cacciaguida cantos is that beyond the few references he makes to his martyrdom (Par. 15.139-48), Cacciaguida spends most of his time talking about family history, Florence, and Dante’s future.”[9] The implication is that Dante provides an “alternative” to crusading rhetoric. But such commitment to earthly ties (which so embarrassed Thomas Bergin)[10] in fact puts the glory of Cacciaguida’s crusading into sharp relief. Jeffrey Schnapp has commented that Cacciaguida “is one of those referred to by Jesus in Matt. 19:29 ‘who have left behind house, or brothers, or sisters, of father, or mother, or wife, of children, or lands in my name’ ([Schnapp’s] italics) and who as a reward ‘shall possess life everlasting.’”[11] I have elsewhere outlined the appropriation of this verse by crusading propagandists, and here take this opportunity to point to the most poignant expression of the crusading imperative to leave behind “ogne cosa diletta / più caramente” (Par. 17.55-56). Gilbert of Tournai’s sermon on the power of the cross, made widely available only very recently, includes an exemplum of a certain knight who had his sons brought to him so that he could embrace them for a long time before embarking on his voyage. When his servants urge him to send the boys away, “He [told] them: I had my sons brought before me so that, by exciting my feelings towards them, I would leave them behind for Christ’s sake with greater anguish of the mind, so that I would count for more with God. When one leaves one’s country, one’s belongings, parents, spouse and children (parentes, uxor et filii) are bands which hold one back.”[12] The sign of the Son, its seems, in leading Cacciaguida to Jerusalem in his lifetime, ultimately embraced him into its fold, where he could yet again enjoy, if only via this single encounter with Dante, the pleasures that are found in the arms of father, son, and wife, left behind so long ago.[13]

[2] References to commentators not otherwise cited are to the Dartmouth Dante Project [telnet://library.dartmouth.edu].

[3] See now Jeffrey T. Schnapp, The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante’s “Paradiso” (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 137 and 137-38 n. (with references).

[4] Gesta francorum et aliorum Hierosolymytanorum: The Deeds of the Franks, ed. and trans. Rosalind M. Hill (London: Nelson, 1962), 1. For a list of citations of this biblical verse, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, “Death on the First Crusade,” in David Loades, ed., The End of Strife (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1984), 25 n. 52. See further Riley-Smith, “Crusading as an Act of Love,” History 65 (1980), 179.

[5] Schnapp acknowledges that around the apocalyptic cross of light in the sky, “an important literature developed, which … would include numerous hagiographic texts and crusade narratives,” among many other genres (123). But in his account crusading is entirely tangential: “Dante’s cross of light in cantos 14-18 belongs, properly speaking, to the iconographic conventions of the Exaltation of the Cross, as represented in the apsidal mosaics of Sant’ Appollinare in Classe, Ravenna” (77-78).

[6] In Crusade Propaganda and Ideology: Model Sermons for the Preaching of the Cross, ed. and trans. Christoph T. Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 207.

[7] Recueil des historiens des croisades, Historiens occidentaux, 5 vols. (Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, 1844-95), 4:16; my translation.

[8] The Barese chronicle is in Monumenta Germaniae Historica, Scriptores, ed. G. H. Pertz (Hannover, 1844), 5:62; the passage from the Monte Cassino chronicle is translated in Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986), 33. Riley-Smith’s book surveys such rhetoric in chronicles of the First Crusade (33-34); on its use in those of the Second Crusade, upon which Cacciaguida was killed, see Giles Constable, “The Second Crusade as Seen by Contemporaries,” Traditio 9 (1953), 272 and n. 301.

[9] Schildgen, 69.

[10] A Diversity of Dante (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1969), 151.

[11] Schnapp, 217.

[12] In Maier, ed., 203. See my “Dante’s Ulysses and the Erotics of Crusading,” Dante Studies 116 (1998), 66-69, 85-86n.

[13] Research support from the Australian National University and the Australian Defence Force Academy helped me in writing this essay.