The Pleasant Nights

I. Fable 1
The Disobedience of Salardo

LAURETTA

Salardo, the son of Rainaldo Scaglia, quits Genoa for Monferrato, where he disobeys certain injunctions imposed upon him by his father’s testament. For that reason he is condemned to death, but, being delivered, he returns to his own country.

In every endeavour that we undertake, or think to undertake, whether good or bad, we should first consider the results. Now that we are about to begin our pleasant and playful entertainment, I could have wished that another besides myself had been chosen for the first recitation. In truth, I feel unequal to the task, for I am not experienced in the art of ornate and polite discourse in which my gracious companions are so adept. But if it is your pleasure, insofar as the drawing of lots has decided that I must go first, I will commence in order not to inconvenience this honourable company, vowing to make the best use I can of the scant abilities Providence has granted to me, while leaving an ample and spacious field to my companions to follow to tell their stories in a manner more graceful and fluent than ever I could master.

That son is held for blessed, even more than blessed, who obeys his father with all due reverence, because in so doing he carries out the commandments of God, lives long in the land, and prospers in all his works. Contrarily, he who is disobedient may be held for unhappy, even more than unhappy, when all his undertakings come to a miserable and ill-fated end, as you will easily see from the tale I’m about to tell you.

So to begin, gracious ladies, in Genoa – which is an ancient city, and as pleasing, perhaps, as any in the world – there lived not long ago a gentleman named Rainaldo Scaglia. He was not only a man of great wealth, but equally endowed with knowledge and wit. Salardo, his son, he loved above anything in the world and had trained him up in his youth in every worthy and liberal art, omitting nothing that would lead to success, honour, and personal glory. Now it came about that in his advancing years, Rainaldo fell into a grave sickness and, seeing that his end was near, he called to a notary to make up the will that would give to Salardo all his earthly goods. In exchange, in the manner of a good father, he begged his son to honour his memory by fixing certain precepts firmly in his mind and promising never to go against them. The first was that, no matter how much he loved his wife, he should never trust her with his secrets. The second was that in no wise should he bring up the son of another as his own or make him the heir of his own goods who was not of his own flesh and blood. The third was that he should never subject himself to a prince who ruled over his state entirely according to his own unconstrained will. When these matters were completed and his final blessing bestowed, Rainaldo turned his face to the wall and in less than a quarter of an hour gave up the ghost.

With Rainaldo deceased, Salardo became his universal heir. But now that he was a rich, young, well-born gallant, he showed but moderate grief, and instead of troubling himself with the administration of his estates or of taking his father’s precepts to heart, he went in hot pursuit of a wife, searching where he thought most to find one from a good family and with a pleasing personality. Thus it came about that, within a year of his father’s death, he had married Theodora, the daughter of Messer Odescalco Doria, a Genoese nobleman of the highest standing. She was very beautiful and of a virtuous mind, although she was somewhat haughty. Salardo was so deeply enamoured of her that, whether night or day, he couldn’t let her out of his sight. They remained together as the years went by, but still no child was born to them. Yet Salardo yearned for an heir. Disregarding his father’s counsel, he decided to adopt a child, to rear him as his own legitimate and natural son, and in the end to leave him all his earthly wealth. So, with his wife’s consent, he lost no time, but carried out his purpose, for he adopted the son of a poor widow, named the boy Postumius, and gave him the very best education.

Some time later, Salardo took it into his head to quit Genoa and seek a home elsewhere, not because he did not find the present city fair and pleasant, but out of a surging desire for change of a kind that often seizes upon those uncontrolled by the will of an elder. So with great store of money and jewels, and with sumptuous equipage, he left Genoa with his beloved wife Theodora and his adopted son Postumius and set out for Piedmont, making a halt at Monferrato. Here by slow degrees he made the acquaintance of many of the citizens, accompanying them on the hunt or attending social gatherings – things in which he took no small delight. So great was the generosity that he displayed towards each one of them that not only friendship but honour was granted to him by all.

Before long, the rumour of Salardo’s splendid hospitality came to the ears of the prince, the marquis of Monferrato, who, seeing that this newcomer was a handsome gentleman, well born, rich, courtly of manner, and ready for any gallant enterprise, took him into high favour and would seldom let a day pass without seeing him. His influence over the marquis became so extensive that, at last, it came about that anyone seeking a favour from the ruler would contrive to have his petition pass through the hands of Salardo, without whose intercession nothing would follow. Mindful of the new favour he enjoyed, Salardo studied the arts of ingratiation, ever eager to devise new pleasures for his patron, who, as became a young man, was passionate about the sports of the field. To this end, he kept a great number of falcons and hounds for the chase, together with all the appurtenances of venery worthy of his high estate. And for all such hunting or hawking excursions, Salardo’s company was indispensable.

Being alone one day, Salardo began to consider the great fortune that had befallen him through the favour of the marquis. Then his thoughts turned to his son, Postumius, of how discreet and dutiful he was, how upright and graceful. Dwelling upon such matters, he said to himself, ‘Ah, how sorely mistaken was my poor old father. Dotage must have overtaken him with age, as it does many of the elderly. I can’t imagine what frenzy or folly urged him to command me so particularly against raising a child not of my own blood, or against making myself subject to an absolute prince. I now see the foolishness of his precepts, for what son born to a father could be more sober, courteous, gentle, and obedient than my adopted Postumius? Where could I find greater affection and more honourable treatment than is given to me by the marquis, even though he answers to no superior? In truth, exalted as he is, he pays me so much love and worship that it seems as though I’ve been placed in charge and that he is my subaltern. I’m so amazed by these things I don’t know what to say. But one thing certain is that with old people it’s a common trick for them to forget the tastes and inclinations of their youth, for in laying down rules and regulations, they impose burdens on others they wouldn’t have touched with the tips of their own fingers. In this, they’re not moved by love, but by a craving to keep their offspring in prolonged subjection. Now that two of the injunctions imposed upon me by my father against all expectations have been proven false, I should now put the third to the test of experience, for I feel certain that my sweet and beloved wife will confirm beyond all doubt her warm and grounded affection. She whom I love more than the light of mine eyes will give ample proof of the foolishness and folly of miserable old age that takes such joy, with the hand of the dead, in imposing intolerable restrictions on the living. Truly, my father must have been insane when he made his will, deprived of memory, senseless with age, and acting worse than a child. To whom do I owe my trust if not to the one who has left her home, abandoning her father, mother, brothers, and sisters to become one with me in heart and soul? Surely, I may reveal all my secrets to her, however important they may be. So I will put her fidelity to the test, not on my own account, for I doubt it not, but only as an example to all those simple-minded youths who think it an unpardonable sin to disobey the commandments of their doddering old fathers living in their illusions, their thousand-fold frenzies, and continuous vacillations.’

In these terms, Salardo took exception to his father’s wise injunctions and considered how he could best be rid of them altogether. After a time he left his room, descended the stairs without being seen by anyone, and went over to the mews at the palace where the falcons of the marquis were kept. Of these, he took one which was a great favourite of its owner and secretly conveyed it to the house of a friend whose name was Fransoe. To this man he handed over the bird and begged him, for the sake of their friendship, to keep it for him till the time came when he might reveal the reason for his request. Then, upon his return home, he took a falcon of his own, secretly put it to death, and carried it to his wife, saying, ‘Theodora, my beloved wife, as you know well, I find it hard to get a moment’s rest on account of the many hours I’m constrained to spend in attendance on the marquis in hunting, fowling, jousting, and other sports. Sometimes I barely know whether I’m dead or alive. So to keep him from spending all his time at the hunt, I’ve played him a trick he will relish but little. But perhaps it may keep him at home and give us and others some repose.’

To this his wife said, ‘So what have you done?’

‘I have killed his best falcon,’ Salardo replied, ‘the favourite of them all. When he looks for it in vain, I swear he’ll die of rage.’ And with that, he lifted his cloak and took out the falcon which he had killed and handed it over to his wife, directing her to have it cooked that they might dine upon it in honour of the marquis.

When Theodora heard this speech and saw the dead creature, she was sorely grieved and thereupon, turning to Salardo, she reproached him severely for his foolish jest. ‘Why have you committed such a serious offence,’ she said, ‘insulting the marquis in this way, who thinks so highly of you and heaps such great favour upon you, and places you above all the others? Alas, Salardo, I’m afraid our ruin approaches. If the marquis should discover what you’ve done, you’ll certainly be in great danger of death.’

Salardo answered, ‘But how could this ever come to his ears? The secret is yours and mine alone. So now, by all the love there is between us, I beg you to be careful not to reveal it, for should he find out, our ruin would be complete.’

‘Have no fear,’ said Theodora, ‘I would rather die than disclose such a secret.’

The falcon was cooked and supper was served while Salardo and his wife took their places at the table. But the lady refused to eat any of the bird, even though with gentle words Salardo urged her to do so. Remaining obstinate to the last, however, he gave her such a blow to her face that her cheek turned scarlet red. Then she began to cry and complain bitterly of his abuse until at last she arose from the table muttering under her breath that she would carry that blow in her mind for as long as she lived and that in due time she would repay him. The next morning, she crept out of bed early and hastened to tell the marquis of the falcon’s death. The news so fired him with rage that he ordered Salardo to be seized immediately and to be hanged by the neck like a common criminal. Then all his goods were to be divided into three parts, the one part given to his wife as accuser, the second to his son, and the remaining part to the man who would serve as hangman.

Postumius by this time had become a vigorous and well-grown youth. When he heard his father’s doom and the disposition of goods according to the orders of the marquis, he ran quickly to Theodora and said to her, ‘Mother, would it not be wiser for me to hang my father myself and gain the third of his goods than to let them go to a stranger?’

To which Theodora replied, ‘Truly, my son, you speak well, because in doing this your father’s wealth will remain intact with us.’

So Postumius went straightway to the marquis to ask for permission to hang his father and thus earn the third part due to the executioner – a request which the Prince graciously allowed.

Salardo now took precautions to confide the entire secret to his faithful friend Fransoe, asking him at the same time, that, when the hangman should be ready to do his work, he beg for him an audience with the marquis so that, by the Prince’s grace, he might say what he could in his own defence. Fransoe carried out this request most faithfully. Meanwhile, the wretched Salardo, in prison and bound in shackles, awaited from hour to hour the time when he would be led to a shameful death on the scaffold.

With bitter weeping, he said to himself, ‘Now I know and clearly understand that my good old father in his wisdom gave me those precepts for my profit. He gave me sage counsel and I cast it aside, senseless fool that I am. Mindful of my safety, he warned me against the enemies of my own household. But see now how I have delivered myself into their hands and given them my riches to enjoy. He understood well enough the temper of despots who, in the space of an hour, can love and hate, exalt and cast down. These things he warned me of, but I had to thrust my head into the jaws of this marquis and put my faithless wife to the proof, as though I were eager to sacrifice at the same time my substance, my honour, and my life. God forbid that I should have put my wife’s treachery to the test. Ah, Salardo, better to have followed in your father’s footsteps and to let others seek out the company of princes. Now I see into what straits my foolish confidence in myself, in my wife, in my wicked son, and above all, in this ungrateful marquis have led me. Now I see the value of the love this prince holds for me. How could he deal more cruelly with me than by robbing me of my goods, my life, and my honour at a single blow, showing thus how his love is turned to hatred? Now I recognize the truth of the proverb, “a prince is like wine in a flagon, sweet in the morning and sour at eve.” Where now is my nobility and where are my kinsmen? Is this the end of my wealth, loyalty, uprightness, and courtesy? O my father, dead though you may be, I believe that when you gaze into the mirror of the Eternal Goodness and see me about to be hanged for no other reason than disbelieving and disregarding your wise and loving counsel, you will pray to God to have compassion on my youthful errors. Disobedient and ungrateful though I am, I pray to you for pardon.’

While Salardo in his misfortune was thus communing with himself, his son Postumius, with the air of a practised hangman, went with all the court to the prison and, arrogantly presenting himself to Salardo, said, ‘My father, insofar as you are condemned to be hanged today by order of the marquis, and given that a third of your goods goes to the one who ties the noose, I know that for the love you have for me, you won’t be angry about the role I’ve chosen to play, because by this means your goods won’t fall into the hands of strangers, but will remain in the family. I’m sure you’ll be pleased by this.’

Salardo listened attentively to his speech and replied, ‘God bless you my son. The course you have chosen pleases me greatly. At first the thought of death terrified me, but now I’m content to die after hearing your words. So do your work as quickly as you can.’

Postumius first implored his father’s pardon and then, having kissed him on the mouth, put the halter about his neck and exhorted him to meet his death with patience. When Salardo saw this turn of events, he stood astonished. After a short time, he was led out of the prison with his arms bound and a rope around his neck, accompanied by the hangman and the officers, and was hurried towards the place of execution. Once there, he turned his back towards the ladder standing against the gibbet, and in this position he climbed up, step by step. When he had reached the top, he looked down courageously upon the assembly and told them in detail the cause that had brought him to the gallows, and with gentle words he implored pardon for any offence he might have given. Then he exhorted all young people to be obedient to their fathers. When the crowd heard the cause for which Salardo was condemned, to the last person they lamented his unhappy fate and prayed that he might still be pardoned.

While these events were taking place, Fransoe raced to the palace and made this address to the marquis: ‘My most illustrious Lord, if ever you have been prompted to show one drop of pity towards anyone, I now doubly urge you to employ your customary clemency and gentleness in the case of your friend, who has been led out to suffer a shameful death for faults entirely unknown to him. What reason do you have, my Lord, to condemn this wretched Salardo, who loved you so dearly and who never wrought an offence against you in thought or in deed? Most gracious Prince, merely allow your faithful friend to be brought into your presence and I will demonstrate to you his utter innocence.’

Such a petition made the marquis’s eyes flame with rage as he sought to thrust Fransoe out of his presence, but the suppliant threw himself down at the Prince’s feet and, embracing his knees, he cried out with tears, ‘As you are a just Prince, have pity. Don’t let this guiltless man die because of your anger. Calm yourself and I will prove his innocence. Hold your hand but one hour for the sake of that justice which you and your father have always revered. Let it not be said that you put your friend to death without cause.’

Still enraged, the marquis replied, ‘I see you too wish to go the way of Salardo, and you will if you go on antagonizing me like this, for I’ll have you placed beside him.’

‘My Lord,’ Fransoe replied, ‘after making an enquiry, if you don’t find Salardo entirely guiltless, I ask for no greater favour than to be hanged next to him in reward for my years of service.’

This last speech somewhat moved the marquis, for he reasoned that Fransoe would never have said as much without being sure of Salardo’s innocence, now that he ran the risk of being hanged himself. So he granted the hour’s delay, warning Fransoe that he must look to be executed if he failed to prove his friend’s innocence. With that, he sent a messenger straightway to the place of justice with an order to stay the execution, and to bring Salardo, bound as he was and with the rope around his neck, along with the hangman and the officers, immediately back to the palace.

Upon appearing before the marquis, Salardo noted that his face was all clouded with anger. Still, he spoke out with a clear voice and a calm manner: ‘My Lord, the service I freely gave you, and the love I bear you, hardly deserved such a reward as this shame and indignity you have put upon me in condemning me to a disgraceful death. I confess to a fault that deserved your anger, but I was guilty of no crime wicked enough to warrant, unheard, such hasty condemnation. The falcon for which your wrath has been so enflamed is alive, safe and sound. It was never my intention to kill it or to insult you. It was but an instrument in a test, the details of which I will herewith reveal.’

Salardo now asked Fransoe to fetch the falcon and return it to its master. Then he told the marquis the whole story of his father’s precepts and how he had disregarded them all. When he had heard this frank and candid speech and saw the falcon as handsome and well nourished as ever, the marquis was dumfounded. But presently he raised his eyes, by then full of tears in recognizing his grievous error in condemning a guiltless man to death unheard, and said to Salardo: ‘If you could see into my heart at this moment, you would know that the suffering which you feel is nothing to mine in seeing the halter around your neck and the cords about your arms. I may never hope to be happy again knowing that I have injured a man so grievously – one who loved and served me so faithfully. If it were possible to undo it all, how glad I would be, but since this is beyond all question, I will do my utmost to wipe out my offence and make to you whatever reparation I can.’

His speech at an end, the marquis unfastened the halter from Salardo’s neck with his own hands and loosened his bonds, embracing him with the greatest tenderness at the same time. Then, taking him by the right hand and leading him to a seat next to his own, he ordered the halter to be put around the neck of Postumius for his wicked conduct, and the youth to be led away to execution.

But Salardo would not allow this to happen. ‘Postumius,’ he said to the wretched youth, ‘what shall I now do with you whom I’ve nurtured from childhood, for the love of God, only to be so cruelly deceived? On the one hand is my past love for you; on the other, the indignation I feel for the wicked deed you had planned. One calls upon my fatherly kindness to forgive you, while the other bids me to harden my heart against you. What shall I do? If I pardon you, men will jeer at my weakness. If I punish you as you deserve, I shall go counter to the divine exhortation to forgiveness. But that men may not tax me with either too great leniency or too great severity, I will not make you suffer in your person, but I will certainly no longer endure the sight of you. Hence, in place of the wealth you so greedily sought, you shall have the halter that you knotted around my neck. Keep it always as a souvenir of your cruel intent. Now go far from here and make certain that news is never heard from you again.’

With these words, he drove out the wretched Postumius, of whom nothing more was ever heard. Now as soon as Theodora was told of Salardo’s liberation, she fled to a convent of nuns where, not long after, she died in misery. When he heard the news of her death, he took his leave of the marquis and returned to Genoa, and there he lived in happiness for many years, giving to God the greater part of his riches and keeping for himself only what was necessary for his livelihood.

While Lauretta told her story, many of her listeners were moved to tears. But when they heard that Salardo was delivered from the gibbet, that Postumius was ignominiously banished, and that although Theodora fled she died star-crossed, they were exceedingly glad and gave thanks to God for his justice and mercy. The Signora now gave the word to Lauretta to pose her riddle, in keeping with the order of entertainment they had agreed upon the previous evening. Thus with a smile, the young lady offered the following words:

Pent in a prison all forlorn,

A tiny son to me was born.

Ah, cruel fate! The savage elf,

Hardly bigger than a mite himself,

Devoured me in his ravenous lust,

And changed me into sordid dust.

A fond mother I was of late,

Now worse than a slave’s is my own fate.

There was great delight in the reception of this clever enigma which the charming Lauretta delivered with such verve, and the entire company made an effort to interpret it one way or another. But when she saw that no one was likely to solve it, this beautiful girl said with a smile, ‘This enigma of mine concerns the dry bean which is imprisoned between two husks, where, in time, she engenders a worm no bigger than a mite. This worm feeds upon her until it finally consumes her, so that not only is she destroyed as a mother, but not even the condition of a servant is possible for her.’ Everyone was pleased by her explanation, and Alteria, who sat beside her, having been selected as the next speaker, began her story at once, without awaiting the Signora’s command.

I.1 Commentary

Straparola opens his collection with a sample of ‘wisdom literature’ in the guise of a novella. A patriarchal figure offers cautionary precepts or interdictions on his deathbed, a headstrong son disobeys, and experience harshly demonstrates the error of his ways. It is a complete sermon, for the doctrines are illustrated by the corresponding exempla and the whole is duly punctuated by two long soliloquies, the first of which registers the prodigal’s defiance, the second his acknowledgment of the wisdom of preceding generations. The father’s injunctions cannot be said to constitute a complete guide to living, but in touching upon marriage, the loyalty of children, and the duplicity of rulers, they implicate three relationships of trust by which a man is made vulnerable to betrayal. Taken together, they paint a rather dark picture of human nature in illustrating that the loyalty of wives is conditional, that children not in the bloodline are subject to hypocrisy, and that rulers above the law will be arbitrary and capricious in their administration of justice. Hence, their ramifications are broad enough. Let all readers be edified.

The genius of the story is in the economy with which each act of disobedience meets a correspondingly bitter revelation. The narrative design is patently compound, for while the opening scene unifies the three motifs involving rulers, wives, and adopted children and brings them to a synchronized denouement, they are nevertheless independent ideas which at some point had been assembled from disparate sources. Whether these motifs originated in the tales of ancient Rome or among the fables of the East remains a question open to investigation.1 But medieval and early Renaissance collections of exempla and vignettes contain versions of them, at first singly and then increasingly in groups that begin to resemble the design of the present story. Something of that recombinant trajectory can be reconstructed from the scattered literary remains both predating and postdating Straparola’s story.

Speculation is free whether these literary traces are borrowings from a vast and diversified oral tradition through which these motifs were transmitted, or the hand-me-down materials passed from writer to writer through imitatio. The question holds true for many of the stories to follow, whether they are re-creations from largely dissimilar literary sources, or far more likely, transcriptions from contemporary oral sources. Typically, as in the present case, generic literary cognates are not lacking, but can hardly be imagined as direct sources in light of their differences. Such a paucity of immediate literary sources repeatedly suggests that Straparola drew upon oral versions of these tales, and particularly so when closely cognate tales abound in the collections of the later ethnographers and folklorists. The question lingers in the background of nearly all the commentaries to follow.

A signature feature of this story type is the testament composed of precepts, warnings, or interdictions, themselves differing from version to version, but which invariably organize the plots of their respective stories. Tales of deathbed admonitions ipso facto represent highly charged moments as a member of the experienced generation seeks for the last time to hand down the keys to successful living to the less experienced. But these tales are often characterized by rather bizarre and cryptic expressions of that wisdom, as though spoken by a sage participating in a literary genre with conventions of its own. Cato and Saint Augustine left little lists consisting of three teachings, such as never to tell secrets to women (this one is nearly universal), never to travel by sea if you can go by land, and always to leave a proper will. As will be seen in the analogues to follow, there are injunctions against dining in households where brown bread is served to guests, or riding horses headlong into valleys.2 They are almost riddles or else simple prognostications of future accidents. Common to nearly all such narratives is a warning against confiding in wives or marrying women from neighbouring cities, who by definition are beyond the pale of local gossip by which means their misprisions might otherwise have been exposed.3 As a literary motif, the deathbed scene may have been influenced by Eastern tales. In The History of the Forty Vezirs or the Story of the Forty Morns and Eves, the twenty-seventh tale of the Vezir tells of an old merchant dying who cautions his son in financial affairs and leaves him a halter should he end up in bankruptcy. After folly and failure, the son resigns himself to a despondent suicide, but the noose is attached to the rafters of the house which, by design, collapse to reveal a ceiling stuffed with treasure, thereby giving the boy a second chance. This closural episode has been added to several of the cognate tales in the “Salardo” group as a means for re-establishing the destitute hero after his return home from a foreign court.4 Even more pertinent is the Lady’s ninth story in which a great king, on his deathbed, urges his first son to build a house in every city, the second to marry a new virgin every night, and the third to eat only honey and butter. The sons live foolishly in interpreting these figurative sayings literally. By the first was meant to build friendships everywhere, the second to be moderate in one’s pleasures, and the third never to eat to repletion. So interpreted, they constitute a miniature book of the good life.5 Such examples support the thesis that “Salardo” began as an Eastern tale, at least in its design, if not in its precise substance. A similar scene in the Ruodlieb, dating to the eleventh century, pushes the entry of the story idea back to a very early date (or challenges the Eastern provenance). These early instances clearly feature the global design around cryptic injunctions and their disobedience, but the specific commandments of the present tale are variations of a later date.

Of the three episodes that constitute Straparola’s plot – the adopted son who becomes his father’s executioner, the king who subjects a loyal follower to harsh and cruel punishment for a trifle, and the wife who betrays a mortal secret in revenge for a slap – the last of these has the longest and most complex history as a story ‘meme.’ A conventional place to begin is the Gesta romanorum, the 126th story of which tells of the boy Papirius who overhears the secrets of the Senate. When his mother browbeats him into revealing them, famously the boy concocts a false report about new legislation allowing for multiple wives. Despite her sworn secrecy (in effect the boy is putting his own mother to the test), she spreads the news by gossip until all the women of the city storm the Senate in protest. When all is revealed, the boy is celebrated for not trusting real state secrets to women.6 This story, in its own right, is amply represented in medieval and Renaissance anthologies. Another from the same collection, the 124th story, ‘Of Confidence in Women,’ approximates the test in Straparola even more closely.7 It belongs to the riddle tradition. A knight in bad graces with his king was offered clemency if he could demonstrate to satisfaction who makes the best friend, the best jester, and the worst enemy. The knight, upon reflection, provides his solution by going to court with his dog, his child, and his wife. The dog, after being wounded with a sword, returns at his master’s call as a true friend would do, the child prattles and amuses like a jester, but the wife, when struck and accused of adultery with the king, reveals a homicide formerly committed by her husband which she had promised to keep secret. In the tradition of Straparola’s tale, the homicide had been feigned by burying a calf in the place of a pilgrim reportedly slain for his money.8 The simulated crime is a piece of Straparola’s design, but ensconced here in a different story structure; these were movable and adaptable parts.

A particular representation of this motif appears in El Conde Lucanor of Juan Manuel, a work completed in 1335.9 A father counsels his son to make true friends to accompany him through life, and when the boy mentions them by the dozens, the father urges him to challenge their loyalty in times of hardship by feigning to commit a murder and to ask each to hide the body, which is, in fact, a pig in a sack. All refuse. The father then boasts of having but one-and-a-half true friends. The half friend agrees to hide the body in a cabbage patch and refuses to reveal the truth even when he is dealt a blow to the face. The complete friend, however, forces his own son to confess to the crime in order to save the friend’s son from execution, with the bizarre coda that the boy is actually hanged and the pig’s corpse is never disinterred to prove the innocence of either. Juan Manuel, in effect, abandons the integrity of the anecdote to reveal a greater truth about the sacrifices made in the name of true friendship. Nevertheless, he provides witness to the wide currency of the motif involving feigned crime, the loyalty test, and the physical provocation that leads to betrayal, with the evidence held in abeyance that leads to exoneration.

Further elements of Straparola’s design can be seen in a story by Franco Sacchetti which he most probably derived from an oral version collected towards the end of the fourteenth century.10 This tale represents an important parallel group. It is set in Siena, where a dying citizen gives his son three final instructions: never to overstay your welcome; to spend frugally and share your savings with others; and never to marry a foreign wife. Clearly represented here is Straparola’s generic design: three deathbed injunctions, disobedience, and a learning curve pertaining to all three. When a friend, burdened with many children, serves the protagonist a single onion for supper, he realizes his first error and hangs the onion on his wall as a reminder. Overpricing a horse that dies before it is sold leads him to cut off its tail and place it on the wall as a second reminder of his disobedience. He then travels to Pisa and there is contracted in marriage with a woman whose dishonesty in due course becomes manifest. The distance has deprived him of the means for knowing her true condition. Suspecting her lubricity, the protagonist creeps into her room and makes off with her lover’s trousers. By the time the bridal party arrives in Siena, the trousers have already been fastened on the wall of ‘souvenirs.’ Following the supper, the host is entreated to explain their meaning; he tells the entire story, beginning with his father’s cautionary precepts. By the end of the explanation the marriage is called off; the bride’s party of friends and relations retreats in shame and humiliation. In this tale we have the design, the wisdom pertaining to wives, animals, and friends, but not those specific to the present story. Arguably, all that remains is the substitution of parts, whether by Straparola himself, based on his reading, or by a collective process of oral transmission from which he borrows. There are still a few more surviving literary antecedents to inspect for clues to the evolving story type.

Sacchetti’s rendition, with modest variations, is also represented in the collection at one time said to have been assembled by Antoine de la Sale around 1460 under the name Les cent nouvelles nouvelles.11 The title of the fifty-second story is ‘The Three Reminders’ in reference to the objects placed on the wall. The injunctions are never to stay in the house of one who serves black bread; never to gallop a horse into a valley; and never to marry a foreign wife. Each sets up an episode in the story. The protagonist is served black bread by a jealous neighbour as a hint to leave. Then his horse breaks its neck as he gallops it recklessly in pursuit of a hare. Lastly, he marries a woman who arranges to sleep with her chaplain even on her wedding night. Bread, a horse’s hide, and clerical britches end up on the trophy wall, providing an opportunity to recount his father’s injunctions and to escape a cheating bride. This story is in turn taken over for publication in Italian by Celio Malespini as no. 14 in his Duecento novelle, published in Venice in 1609. Therein, the hero is warned not to impose upon a friend who serves him brown bread (pane di rimondini), not to ride his horse pell-mell into ravines, and not to marry a foreigner. One by one, the trophies of his errors are affixed to the wall, providing him the occasion to explain the presence of the coachman’s trousers to the bridal party.

Doubling back chronologically to late fourteenth-century France, there is a parallel literary tradition even closer to Straparola in substance, one that is derived, arguably, from a popular story type more directly in the ancestral line leading to the present tale. Its earliest trace is a story in Le livre du Chevalier de La Tour Landry entitled ‘Cy parle des trios enseignemens que Cathon dist à Cathonnet, son filz’ (This tells of the three teachings that Cathon gave to his son Cathonnet).12 The work is clearly in the ‘wisdom’ tradition, created as a manual of instruction for the author’s three daughters. The first injunction is never to take office under a sovereign without knowing him well. The second is never to do favours for malefactors, for the evil they do later will be held to the account of the tender-hearted, an injunction which bears an oblique relation to the trust misplaced in an adopted son. The third is to test your wife to make certain she will keep your secrets. In this version, the object of the loyalty test is neither a slain pilgrim nor a slain falcon, but the king’s own son, who is safely stowed in the keep of a Baron.13 Cathonnet goes so far as to tell his wife that he has sent the child’s heart to be eaten by the emperor and empress. Revealingly, the wife commits her breach of confidence through gossip with her confidantes, as in the Roman tale of Papirius. The drama comes to its crisis, as in the present tale, when the ruler, in a pique of tyrannical bluster, nearly refuses to hear the countering evidence that would release the protagonist from the gibbet. In this tale, the disloyalty of wives, the capriciousness of rulers, and the ingratitude of malignant and transgressive personalities are thematically featured. We are at last fully in Straparola’s neighbourhood.

Francesco del Tuppo supplies a version of the tale which is perhaps closest of all to Straparola’s, even though it cannot be demonstrated to be his source. In this story, the protagonist breaks the rules pronounced by his father one by one, first in taking a house in a prohibited place, then in making gifts to the king. One day, seeing a thief about to be hanged, he negotiates to have him set free. Then he hides the prince’s falcon, hears the royal proclamation of death for the perpetrator, and tells his secret to his wife. Later he strikes her for a frivolous reason, causing her to report his secret abroad. Condemned to death, no person could be found to carry out the execution except the thief for whom he had once begged grace. Then all is revealed to the king, including the precepts of the protagonist’s father, how he had defied them to his cost, and ultimately recognized their wisdom.14

An anonymous fifteenth-century manuscript in the Ambrosiana Library entitled Dell’ ingratitudine e de molti esempli d’essa (Concerning ingratitude with many examples thereof) likewise contains an intriguing variant upon the story in full novelistic treatment.15 This work, like Cynthio de Fabritii’s, is an illustration of the proverb, “Do not rescue the man condemned to be hanged, who will have you hanged instead,” which, in turn, may have originated in an exemplum. Once there was a realm in Persia with its king and a baron to whom he committed the care of his entire kingdom. This baron one day read and took to heart a book of proverbs in which he found admonitions not to rescue a condemned man lest he hang you later, not to reveal secrets to a spouse, and not to enter into matters that will test a sovereign’s love. Nevertheless, on his rounds the baron liberates a noble gentleman condemned to the gibbet. Later he requests and receives from the king a most precious ring, but upon pain of death never to reveal its provenance or to gift it to another. His curious wife persists, however, until the secret is shared. Then, following a simple reprimand, she threatens to blackmail him. When he strikes her, she peremptorily takes the ring as a sign of her guilelessness and goes straight to the king to accuse her husband of treason. Finally, the condemned man offers to execute his benefactor. But in a final audience begged of the king, a feature developed by Straparola, the baron explains the prescient proverbs, including that which warned against redeeming malefactors such as the one about to execute him. The king then reverses his ruling, has the ungrateful cavalier dragged about the city, and the treacherous wife burned. All such potential sources give proof that Straparola was, in a conventional and unacknowledged way, an imitator, just as each of those sources entails a comparative relationship to the others. The intriguing question is whether these many literary renditions came about through the rewriting of texts (imitation or riscrittura) or the transcription of tales refashioned by folk culture. Traditional source studies largely discount the latter, granting to authors the inspirations that differentiate their works from earlier literary versions, but the degree to which these stories are also embedded in the oral tradition suggests an alternative scenario of genesis. That argument is less easily substantiated in the present case than it is for many of the stories to follow. Given the large number of literary antecedents, we can imagine Straparola at his desk building his own rendition from the pieces, particularly from del Tuppo. Alternatively, that assembly may have come about through the methodical integration of parts that characterizes oral transmission during years of repetition over expanding areas. But whether Straparola acquired his materials through oral or literary channels, his story remains part of the history of an emergent narrative type, one already centuries old before it appeared in the Piacevoli notti.

Subsequent to its publication in 1550, the story of Salardo would become one of Straparola’s most widely disseminated tales. This might indicate something of particular appeal in its sense of the human condition or suspenseful design; thoughts are free on that score. But as early as 1558, it had already appeared in two chapbooks, where it is treated as a contemporary event and circulated as “moralizing” news – a cautionary story of disloyal children and treacherous wives ‘useful as well as entertaining to hear.’ It bore the title Copia di un caso notabile intervenuto a un gran gentiluomo Genovese (A picture of the notable events that happened to a Genoese gentleman) and was reprinted down to the end of the eighteenth century bearing Straparola’s name.16 But his greatest influence was in France where the Louveau translation, Les facetieuses nuits, enjoyed twelve editions or re-impressions in the sixteenth century alone. No doubt through this channel, Thomas-Simon Gueullette found his inspiration for the ‘Story of Sinadab the Son of Sazan the Physician,’ included in his Mille et un quart d’heure, which is an orientalized rewriting of the tale of Salardo.17 This is one of five stories in the collection that owes its origins directly to Straparola, making Gueullette a leading exponent of his materials, exceeded only by the Countess d’Aulnoy. Sinadab, the only son of Sazan, was a disappointment to his father; he had failed in his training as a physician and was content merely to live off his inheritance. The father’s deathbed preachments are precisely those of Straparola: never attach yourself to a prince of unproven character; never trust your wife with secrets; and never adopt a son. Bankrupted by extravagance and abandoned by friends, the protagonist sets off with a hunting hawk as his only possession. The bird brings him to the attention of a foreign king, eventuating in an offer of marriage to the king’s sister, Bouzemghir. When it was determined that she could never bear children, they adopt Rumi, the son of a slave. Only after ten years does Sinadab recall the words of his father, laughing at such foolishness in light of his present fortunes. To prove his father entirely wrong, he likewise feigns the slaughter of the king’s hawk, entrusting the real creature to a deaf-mute to keep as proof of his innocence. A dead bird is then shown to his wife who solemnly promises secrecy. But when marriage to a handsome young minister is offered to any woman able to reveal the thief, Bouzemghir becomes her husband’s accuser. As a prisoner, Sinadab reminds the king of his promises, but to no avail. When no executioners present themselves, his own son volunteers, in league with his mother to gain further control over the estate. But while Rumi was trussing up his father, the friend arrives with the king’s hawk and the truth is made known. The king then begs forgiveness for his part and invites the protagonist to behead both wife and son. Sinadab refuses, but an executioner takes his place. Reticent now to remain at a foreign court, he returns home, only to lose his treasure on the way. Proof of Gueullette’s knowledge of versions other than Straparola’s is seen in the sequel of the summer house (in The Forty Vezirs’ tradition) where the despondent and indigent protagonist, after returning to his native city, finds an admonitory letter from his father together with a rope for hanging himself. By this means, he is given a second chance when the rope pulls down the ceiling to reveal additional treasures. Only then does he come to a full appreciation of his father’s prescience and wisdom. In joining Salardo’s tale to the story of ‘King Tograï Bey and his Three Sons,’ Gueullette’s creative tactics are transparent enough, confirming his part in maintaining the legacy of Straparola in later times by “orientalizing” his stories in the spirit of eighteenth-century French parlour fiction.18

This tale was also translated into English in 1579 for inclusion as the thirty-ninth and last entry in The Forrest of Fancy, wherein is conteined very prety Apothegmes and pleasant histories, both in meeter and prose, Songes, Sonets, Epigrams, and Epistles, of diverse matter and in diverse manner. The title is worth citing nearly in full to reveal the variety within this Tudor miscellany in which all manner of recreational and edifying pieces are assembled ragtag as a commercial offering to general readers. The story in question is entitled, ‘One named Salard, departing from Genes, came to Montferat, where he transgressed three commaundementes that his father gave him by his last will and testamente, and being condemned to dye, was delivered, and returned againe into his owne countrey.’ It reads like the description of a full-length prose romance, but it is, in fact, Straparola’s tale in thirteen pages with the usual moral pronouncements, one of the few to appear in English in the sixteenth century.19

That Straparola’s tale originated in popular culture is further strengthened by the folk tales carrying its themes and motifs in after years. Either Straparola’s Notti provided the template for these renditions or, far more plausibly, they are descendants from the oral tradition that informed the Notti and all its literary antecedants. There would appear to be no other options. One such tale is found among those collected by Giuseppe Pitrè in his Fiabe, novella e racconti popolari siciliani.20 The familiar story has been given a modern setting. It tells of a man with a ‘most trustworthy wife,’ a house with a trellis, and a policeman for a ‘friend.’ He decides to test them by professing to have murdered a man whose head he threw into the well. His wife cajoles the secret from him, promising never to tell, but in little time reveals it to the policeman, who immediately tells the judge, who sends officers to arrest the man by going to the house with the trellis.21 Another folk tale is invoked as the policemen descend the well to find a head which is hairy and has horns, for the protagonist has thrown a goat’s head in the well (see ‘Post-Mortem Cuckoldry,’ XIII.4). Once the explanation is in, the story pronounces the triple moral concerning wives, policemen, and trellises by the house.

That the story circulated widely is demonstrated by a version found in the Caucasus. Chatym is the favourite of the Prince of Abacasia. His good fortune has made other courtiers jealous and he attempts to placate them. Then he tells a life-endangering secret to his wife about killing the king’s favourite falcon. The talkative wife tells a friend who tells another until it comes to the ruler’s ears. Chatym is condemned to die. In making his final preparations, he leaves a part of his estate to his wife, another to his adopted son, and a third to the executioner. True to the tradition, this adopted son offers to become his father’s executioner in order to reap the third portion. When the falcon is proven not to be the ruler’s, the hero is liberated. This version, by necessity implying many others, is further testimony to an established story tradition that had diversified itself regionally over time. Arguably, then, Straparola’s tale enjoys comparative and filiational membership in a popular tradition at least several centuries old.22

I. Fable 2
Cassandrino the Master-Thief

ALTERIA

Cassandrino, a noted robber and a friend of the Provost of Perugia, steals the Provost’s bed and his bright grey horse, and thereafter puts Father Severino into a sack, before becoming a man of good standing and careful management.

Most honourable ladies, herewith let me propose that the wit of man is so keen and subtle that there is hardly anything in the world that can baffle it, for in time matters of the greatest complexity or difficulty are solved with ease and facility. Indeed, there is a familiar saying of the common folk which goes, ‘Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ and this very proverb has suggested to me the tale I’m about to tell. It contains little comic business, I’m afraid, yet it may give you some pleasure and even some practical knowledge by showing you the skill and cunning of the consummate thief.

In Perugia, an ancient and noble city of the Romagna, renowned for its learning and sumptuous living, there dwelt, not so long ago, a handsome young scapegrace more robust than any of his day and known to all as Cassandrino. His reputation with the citizens was so evil, by reason of his many robberies, that men of all stations made frequent and lengthy complaints to the Provost of the city. But this Provost, although he soundly berated Cassandrino for his misdeeds, seemed loath to punish him. Now this Cassandrino, although past all gainsaying a most notorious knave and beyond all hope of reform, had one virtue which gained him credit with the Provost, which was that he did not rob merely for the love of money, but rather to be able to spend magnificently and offer handsome gifts, now and again, to those who favoured him. For this reason, as well as because he was affable, courteous, and witty, the Provost looked upon him so kindly that hardly a day would go by without spending time in his company.

Even so, Cassandrino was so intent not only in his thievish ways that the Provost was forced to listen to the complaints which, with complete justification, were laid against him day after day. Yet, reluctant still to bring the culprit to justice by reason of the kindly feeling in his heart, he summoned Cassandrino, one day, into an inner chamber and began to admonish him with friendly words, exhorting him to consider the perils, to put an end to his evil ways, and follow a virtuous life. Cassandrino listened attentively to the Provost’s words and made this reply, ‘Sir, I hear and clearly understand the good counsel that you’re giving to me, and I know it comes from the goodness of your heart. I’m truly grateful for this. But I’m just the victim of fools who are jealous of the prosperity of others, scandal-mongers with poisonous breaths ready in a moment to steal a man’s honour and reputation. All those who are spreading these tales about me would do better to park their venomous tongues between their teeth than to work them to my injury.’

The Provost, whose eyes were dazzled by his esteem for the scoundrel, needed little persuading. He gave full assent to Cassandrino’s words and turned a deaf ear to the citizens’ complaints regarding his felonies. Soon afterwards it came about that Cassandrino, while a guest at the Provost’s table, began telling him of a youth who was so marvellously light-fingered that he could steal anything he had a mind to, no matter how carefully guarded and protected it might be. Hearing this tale, the Provost said, ‘Cassandrino, this youth can be no other than you yourself, for there can’t be a craftier, more malicious and astute trickster anywhere. [So on pain of death if you refuse], tonight you have to steal the bed from the room where I’m sleeping. If you succeed, it’s worth a hundred gold florins to you.’

Cassandrino feigned distress over these words and answered, ‘Sir, it would appear that you take me for a thief, but I assure you that I’m not one, nor the son of one. I live by the sweat of my brow and by my own industry, such as it is, and do the best that I can for myself. But if it’s your pleasure to see me killed in such a business, I’ll do it or anything else you want for the esteem I have for you and die contented in the process.’

After this speech, without waiting for an answer, Cassandrino withdrew, for he was very anxious to humour the Provost’s whim, and so he went about all day cudgelling his brains to devise a way to steal the Provost’s bed right out from under him without betraying himself. At last he hit on the following scheme. A poor beggar of the city had recently died and was buried on that very day in a vault outside the church of the preaching friars. After midnight, Cassandrino stole to the place of the burial and, once he had opened the vault, pulled the dead body out by the feet. Then, after he had stripped it, he dressed it again in his own clothes, which fitted so well that anyone would have taken him for Cassandrino and not for the beggar. He hoisted the corpse upon his shoulders as best he could, and getting himself safely to the palace, he scaled the roof with the beggar’s body on his back using a ladder he had taken with him. Then he began quietly to remove the tiles with an iron crowbar, at last making a large hole in the ceiling of the room in which the Provost was sleeping.

The magistrate, who was wide awake and distinctly heard all that was going on, nevertheless laughed to himself, even though his roof was being pulled to pieces, for he expected every moment to see Cassandrino enter the room and attempt to carry off the bed. ‘Do your worst, Cassandrino,’ he said to himself, ‘because you won’t be stealing my bed tonight.’ But while he was thus lying there with his eyes wide open and his ears straining, expecting to have his bed snatched from under him, Cassandrino let the dead body of the beggar fall into the Provost’s room through the breach in the ceiling. The noise of it made him jump straight out of bed and light a candle, and then he saw – given the familiar clothing – what he took to be the body of Cassandrino lying mangled and crumpled up on the floor. In profound grief he cried out, ‘Ah, what a wretched sight is here! To gratify my silly caprice I have killed this man. What will men say if it gets noised abroad that he met his death in my house? One must be careful in these matters.’

Still lamenting, the Provost heard one of his loyal and faithful servants knocking at the door of his chamber. When the fellow was fully awake, he told him of the unhappy event, begging him to go dig a hole in the garden and therein bury the dead body to prevent the scandalous fact from ever coming to light in the future. But while the Provost and his servant were dealing with the deceased in the garden, Cassandrino, who had watched all their movements in silence, seeing and hearing no one else in the room, let himself down by a rope and, having made a bundle of the bed, carried it away with all possible haste. The Provost, after he had buried the cadaver, returned to his room, but when he prepared to get into bed, there was no longer one to get into. Craving sleep, he was now obliged to make alternate arrangements, thinking all the while of the sagacity and cunning of this most accomplished thief.

The next day, according to his custom, Cassandrino went to the palace and appeared before the Provost, who cried out upon seeing him, ‘Without any question, Cassandrino, you are the very prince of thieves! Who else could have contrived so cunningly to steal my bed?’

Cassandrino was silent, feigning the utmost astonishment, as if he had taken no part in the matter.

‘You have played an excellent trick upon me,’ the Provost went on to say, ‘but I must get you to play me yet another in order to judge how far your ingenuity can carry you. If you can manage tonight to steal my light grey horse – the finest and most pleasing I ever owned – I’ll give you another hundred florins to add to the hundred I’ve already promised you.’

Cassandrino, on hearing of this fresh task which was put upon him, pretended to be greatly troubled and loudly lamented that the Provost should so discredit him, begging him at the same time not to be his ruin. The Provost, deeming that Cassandrino refused assent to his request, grew angry and said, ‘Well, then, if you won’t do as I bid you, look for no other fate than to be hanged by a halter from the city wall.’

Cassandrino now saw how dangerous his case had become, no mistake about it, and so he replied, ‘I’ll do all I can to gratify you in what you ask, but believe me the task you propose is well beyond my powers,’ and with those words he departed.

No sooner was he gone than the Provost, more resolved than ever to put Cassandrino’s ingenuity to the severest test, called one of his servants and said to him, ‘Go to the stable, and when you’re there saddle and bridle my fine grey horse, then mount him and keep on his back all night, taking every precaution all the while that he isn’t stolen.’ Then he gave orders to another to make certain that all the doors of the palace and stables were well secured with bolts.

When the dark of night had come, Cassandrino took all his gear and made his way to the principal gate of the palace, where he found the porter quietly dozing. But because he knew all the secrets of the edifice, he let the porter sleep on. Taking another passageway, he gained the courtyard and from there passed on to the stables, which he found locked fast. With the help of his implements, he easily broke open the door and, once done, there to his amazement he perceived a man sitting on the Provost’s favourite horse with the reins in his hand. But upon approaching him, he saw that he was sound asleep. Then the crafty rascal, noting that the sleeping lackey was as senseless as a statue, suddenly hit upon the cleverest plan the world had ever seen. Carefully, he measured the height of the horse and then stole away into the garden. From there he brought back four stout poles – the kind used to support vines on a trellis. Having sharpened them at the ends, he cunningly cut the reins which the sleeping servant held in his hand, and then the martingale, the cinch, and the crupper, and everything else that stood in his way. Then, after fixing one of the poles in the ground with the upper end dexterously inserted under one corner of the saddle, he did exactly the same on the other side, and repeated the operation at the two remaining corners. Next, he raised the saddle off the horse’s back – its rider fast asleep all the while – and let it rest entirely on the four poles all firmly fixed in the ground. With no further obstacles in his way, he haltered the horse and led it away.

The Provost was astir early the next morning and went immediately to the stables, where he expected to find his horse all safe. But the sight which met his eyes was that of his servant, still fast asleep on the saddle, propped up by the four poles. Once the Provost had awakened him, he loaded him with abuse, and then, astonished by all he had seen, left the stables and returned to the palace. At the usual hour in the morning, Cassandrino made his way there and gave the Provost a merry salute as soon as he appeared.

‘Cassandrino,’ said the latter, ‘assuredly among robbers, you carry off the palm. I could dub you, “King of Thieves.” Yet I would still like to know, once and for all, whether you’re as clever and ingenious as you appear to be. I presume you know Father Severino, rector of the church of San Gallo, not far from the city? Well, if you bring him here to me tied up in a sack, on my faith I promise to double the number of gold florins you have already earned. But if you fail in this, be assured I’ll hang you up by the neck.’

Now this priest, Severino, was a man of the holy life and of the best repute. Yet he knew nothing of worldly affairs, having devoted his entire life to the service of his church. Cassandrino, seeing that the Provost had set his mind on working him an injury, said to himself, ‘This man, I plainly see, is bent upon seeing me dead, but in this he’ll find himself deceived, because I swear that if it can be done, I’ll bring off this task as well as I did the others.’ Once he’d made up his mind to do the Provost’s bidding, Cassandrino began casting about how he might play a trick upon the priest that would serve the purpose he had in mind, and ultimately he came up with the following stratagem. He borrowed a priest’s alb from one of his friends, one long enough to come down to his heels, along with a white stole all embroidered in gold. These he took home to his lodging. Then he got ready a beautiful pair of wings all painted in different colours which he manufactured out of pasteboard, and also a tinsel diadem that shone radiantly.

At nightfall, he crept out of town with all his trappings and headed for the village where Father Severino lived. There he hid in a thicket of sharp thorns, remaining until daybreak. Then Cassandrino donned the sacerdotal vestment, placed the stole around his neck, set the diadem on his head, and fixed the wings on his shoulders. This done, he hid himself again and wouldn’t stir till the time came for the priest to go out and ring the bell for the Ave Maria. But Cassandrino was scarcely dressed before Father Severino, with his altar boy, arrived at the church door, which he left standing open as he went in to do his morning office. Cassandrino was on the watch, and seeing that the church door was wide open while the good priest was ringing the bell, he crept out of his hiding place and made his way softly into the church. Once inside, he went up to the altar and stood there bolt upright, holding open a great sack in his hands. Then he spoke in a soft, low voice, ‘Whosoever would enter into the joys of paradise, let him climb into this sack.’ These words he said over two or three times. While he was performing this mummery, the altar boy came out of the sacristy. When he saw the snow-white alb, the diadem shining like the sun, and the wings as gorgeous as a peacock’s – to say nothing of the words he heard – he was altogether amazed. Once he had recovered himself, he went off to find the priest, saying, ‘Sir, sir, I have just seen in the church an angel of heaven holding a sack in his hands and saying, “Whosoever would enter into the joys of paradise, let him climb into this sack,” and Father, I want to go with him.’

The priest, who was fairly weak in the gourd, gave full credence to the acolyte’s tale, and as soon as he walked through the sacristy door he saw the angel standing there in his celestial garb and heard the words for himself. So anxious he was to arrive safely in paradise, and fearful that the altar boy might forestall him by climbing into the sack first, he pretended to have left his breviary behind him at his lodging and said to the boy, ‘Hasten back home and search my chamber diligently and bring back my breviary which I left somewhere on the couch.’

Now while the acolyte was gone to search for the breviary, the priest approached the angel, made him a deep bow, and crept into the sack. Cunning and mischievous as he was, and seeing that the game was going just as he had hoped, Cassandrino at once closed up the mouth of the sack and tied it firmly. Then he removed the alb, the diadem, and the wings, tied them into a bundle which, together with the sack, he hoisted onto his shoulders. Then he set out for Perugia, arriving as soon as it was clear daylight, and at the customary hour he presented himself before the Provost with the sack on his back. Having untied the mouth, he lugged out Severino the priest, who found himself in the presence of the Provost in a state more dead than alive, and fully aware that he was the butt of a knavish trick. Then and there he made a weighty charge against Cassandrino, crying out at the top of his voice that he had been robbed and inveigled into the sack by craft, to his great loss and humiliation. He begged the Provost to make an example of the villain and not to let so great a crime go without severe punishment, at the same time giving a clear warning to all other malefactors. The Provost, who had already fathomed the business from beginning to end, could no longer contain his laughter and, turning to Father Severino, thus addressed him, ‘So, my little bumpkin priest, be quiet and don’t torment yourself further; you won’t lack for favours or for justice, for in this business, as far as I can see, you’re the butt of a mean prank.’ It took all his best efforts to pacify the priest, after which he took out a little packet in which there were several pieces of gold; these he placed in the priest’s hands with instructions to have him escorted out of town. Then, turning to the thief, he said, ‘Cassandrino, Cassandrino, it’s true as can be that your knavish deeds exceed your knavish reputation, which is known to everyone. Wherefore, take these four hundred gold florins which I promised you, for you have won them fair and square. But take care that you conduct yourself more honestly in the future than you have in the past, for if I hear any more complaints about your rascally tricks, most assuredly you’ll be hanged without pity.’

With that, Cassandrino took the four hundred gold florins and, having duly thanked the Provost, went his way. With this money he traded skillfully and successfully so that in time he became a man of wisdom, and in his business dealings was highly respected of all.

The company was greatly pleased with Alteria’s story – the ladies above all – and commended her heartily. But Molino, with an admiring look and a merry smile, said, ‘Mistress Alteria, the way I see it, you are a little thief yourself, for by the admirable way you see through their roguish slights, I’m convinced you’ve worked out an understanding with these fellows.’

To this Bembo replied, ‘No, not at all. She is no thief of other men’s worldly goods, but with her flashing eyes she steals away the hearts of those who look upon her.’

Blushing red at the words, Alteria turned towards Molino and Bembo and said, ‘I’m no thief of other folk’s goods, nor a robber of hearts; I’m only telling this story of Cassandrino exactly as I heard it from others.’

At this point, the Signora, seeing that the dispute might turn into a lengthy one, intervened and called them to silence, asking Alteria to proceed to her enigma. Her pique and excitement somewhat calmed, she offered the following lines.

While I my nightly vigil kept,

A man I spied, who softly crept

Adown the hall, whereon I said,

‘To bed, Sir Bernard, get to bed.

Two shall undress you, four with care

Shut fast the doors, and eight up there

Shall watch, and bid the rest beware.’

While these deceiving words I said,

The thievish man in terror fled.

This ingenious enigma gave no less pleasure to the company than the tale she had previously recited. And though each and every one present hazarded a guess, no one could discover and reveal it. At last, Alteria, seeing that the hour was late and that no one was likely to solve her riddle, rose to her feet and gave this explanation. ‘A gentleman had gone into the country with his entire household, as he often did, especially in summer time, and had left an old woman to guard his palace, who prudently made a practice of going about the house at nightfall to see if she might espy any thieves. One evening the good woman, going about the house as if on household business, spied a robber on a balcony who was watching her through a hole. The good old woman refrained from crying out and wisely made believe that her master was in the house, and a throng of servants as well, by saying “Go to bed, Messer Bernardo, and let two servants undress you, and four shut the doors, while eight go upstairs and guard the house.” And while the old woman was giving these orders, the thief, fearing to be discovered, stole away.’ When Alteria’s clever riddle had been solved, Cateruzza, who was seated next to her, remembered that the third story of this first night was to be told by her, so with a smile on her face she began her tale.

I.2 Commentary

This story is set in Perugia in Umbria, a university town belonging to the papacy. San Domenico is south-west of the city. The exploits of ‘master-thieves’ – the story type to which Cassandrino belongs – like those of tricksters in general, depend upon a special and admirable brand of intelligence. By definition, such practitioners inhabit a social space outside the law and are therefore vulnerable to apprehension and incarceration or worse. Nevertheless, even those who are responsible for upholding law and order may find themselves attracted to the outlaw personality, or at least fascinated by his consummate skills of enactment or evasion, leading to negotiations between them according to the rules of a contest or wager. Straparola’s Cassandrino is a man who has not only aggravated the populace in general by his repeated thefts and avoidance of the law, but paradoxically has won for himself the highest reputation for his expertise. By conventions of the story type, we are to imagine that such a robber has been invited by a magistrate to demonstrate the extent of his powers through a gaming structure that entails the performance of seemingly impossible tasks. In short, the magistrate sets the objectives, which, if achieved, bring to the thief exoneration, material rewards, and even marriage to the magistrate’s daughter, while failure to meet them entails death. In a sense, this is merely an oriental-style framing tale surrounding an engaging micro-repertory of fanciful performance riddles and their witty solutions. Yet the psychology of the gaming relationship between the amused magistrate and the daring criminal is a feast for the imagination, given the subtle communication between the two of them that lies just below the words. Out of their transactions there emerges both a display of the indomitable trickster’s skills and the recovery of a social exile who wagers his life to regain a lawful place within society. In a unique way, this tale hovers between the mythos of the clever and evasive outlaw and the mythos of the riddle-solver who thereby gains a sudden rise in status in quasi-fairy-tale fashion, while, on another level, it represents on the part of the Provost a brilliant scheme for the rehabilitation of a criminal mind by financially investing in his mercantile future, while threatening execution for any trace of recidivism.

It is notable in this regard that Straparola’s version is lacking the making-of-the-robber-apprentice prologue that is attached to so many of its analogues. The return to society is rather more prepared for when the extenuating circumstances that initially make the thief are a part of our moral calibrations. A generic version of that preamble might tell of a poor mother’s three sons who are compelled to wander out into the world to learn their trades. The first two will find mundane but respectable occupations, while the third meets up with robbers and, in the exchange, sees his advantage in joining the band and learning their profession – something he so entirely masters that he becomes their leader. Then, in due course, according to a prior pact, the three must meet together to return home, each with his new trade. The transition into the skill-testing contest follows when someone in a position of authority – a member of the family or community – calls the third son to account.23 The story is altered to the extent that the boy is both a victim and a clever survivor, further contextualizing his redemption. Arguably such a combined tale was in circulation in Straparola’s time, for they are legion in later centuries. Straparola (and presumably his source) begins in medias res with a committed thief, a scourge of the surrounding regions, who is virtually beyond the reach of the law. This rebalancing may have to do with the pragmatic fact that Straparola intended to tell a story elsewhere in the collection so closely resembling the apprenticeship prologue that he did not wish to repeat it here, namely ‘The Three Brothers’ (VII.5), in which the third son does not become a thief, but a wild man who learns the language of animals. In fact, Straparola’s version may actually gain in force and intrigue through the omission of this opening sequence.

The salient feature of Cassandrino’s character is that he pretends to honesty and dignity by protesting the Provost’s accusations, murmuring against the harshness of the conditions of the game and the impossibility of the tasks, even while, in his hidden thoughts, he embraces the challenges with alacrity and sets to work immediately in planning what will prove to be an incrementally brilliant performance in imaginative problem solving and execution. That is as much as we have of his interiority. Yet in structural terms, their face-off is rich in motivic connotations, for while the demanded goals involve thievery, the issue is no longer crime but the terms of play and the pitting of skills, one player seeking to protect, the other to remove the designated objects.

Tales of thieves and their remarkable exploits have been collected over centuries. Outlawry was sometimes the result of class warfare, or of an unacceptable change of regimes in which civil disobedience to the new order led to exile in the greenwood.24 In the case of Gamelyn, dispossessed by his brothers, a man of talent is driven into hiding until he can successfully challenge the corrupt legal system by which he is deprived of his rightful possessions.25 Behind the tale of Cassandrino, we may see a much reduced version of the exiled son who engages in dangerous play through which he can regain a rightful place in society. English writers in the last decades of the sixteenth century invented a new form of underworld literature ostensibly based on the roving, low-life practitioners of confidence games, petty theft, rigged gambling and dicing, pickpocketing, and the sale of compromised merchandise. Greene, Chettle, and Dekker, as writers of imaginative fiction and plays, could not resist expanding the descriptions of their manners, canting jargon, and techniques into confidence-game narratives, the better to expose their swindling tactics.26 Such writing was also highly entertaining and popular. The double rationale that includes the cautionary pertains only marginally to such a fanciful creation as Straparola’s, yet his story remains remotely linked to that class of literature that anatomizes the range of criminal activity such as François de Calvi’s Histoire générale des larrons (1623), which is partly a documentary account of the most outrageous and elaborate swindles on record.27 The exploits of Cassandrino pass over the line that separates the imaginatively implausible from the proto-historical. Yet therein consists the essence of the fable – the subtle play between flights of invention and the margins of probability.

There are hints of individual motifs from this story tradition borrowed by authors as early as the late fifteenth century, such as Matteo Maria Boiardo’s allusion to the horse-stealing trick as practiced by Brunello upon Sacripante.28 But Straparola’s version is the earliest full literary rendition of the folk tale of ‘the master-thief,’ followed by a tale by Master Skelton, and another by Nicolaus Remigius, all three published between 1550 and 1598. Straparola’s predates the Englishman’s by a scant seventeen years, and the German’s by forty-eight. Their appearances in regions geographically separated, each story imbued with narrative features characteristic of the oral culture, each different in detail while sharing the same narrative motifs, suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century, ‘the master-thief’ type (ATU 1525) was sufficiently disseminated throughout European folk culture to allow for the differentiation from a common ancestor represented in these stories. How far back the date must be pushed to allow for such widespread diffusion is complicated by the near certainty that the story type originated in Eastern sources which became known in the West at an unspecified date, but potentially any time from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. It is not an untypical profile. In sum, these three early modern renditions of the ‘the master-thief,’ Straparola’s leading the way, provide the earliest literary records of a tale that must have enjoyed up to eight centuries of unbroken oral recitation in the West after its arrival from the East. Skelton treats the tale as a popular one, widely familiar to his audiences. Moreover, insofar as versions closely resembling these were found in the nineteenth century, not only throughout Europe but in Russia and the Near East, adds further weight to the presumption of a longstanding folk tradition, not to mention the versions from Persia, Bengal, Tibet and Mongolia described below in which many of the familiar motifs are to be found, such as stealing objects from a ruler’s bedroom or leaving the guards straddling walls instead of their horses.

The thirteenth of the Merry Tales Made by Master Skelton (1567) is entitled ‘How Master Skelton’s miller deceived him many times by playing the thief, and how he was pardoned by Master Skelton after stealing away of a priest out of his bed at midnight.’29 The tale opens with a miller pilfering grain in good English fashion using tricks profiled by Chaucer in ‘The Reeve’s Tale.’ This miller, to gain a pardon, is compelled to show himself the master-thief he thinks he is or be hanged. First he must steal the master’s cup, then the sheets off his bed, which he does by covering them with yeast. The effect was to make the occupants accuse each other of befouling the bed themselves. The priest is finagled into the sack by the use of snails in the church with candles fastened to their backs to create an unearthly sight. The thief puts on vestments and stands behind the altar with a book, tolling the bell and playing St. Peter. Even after the priest is hung up in Skelton’s chimney, Skelton is not satisfied, but demands the horse stealing as well. Already, the features of the tradition have found an English ethos, derived, no doubt, from jest book type materials of uncertain provenance, or directly from a folk raconteur. By implication, given the apparent absence of prior literary models, Straparola, for his template, must have relied upon the same oral tradition from which Skelton’s story is drawn.

That tradition was likewise available to Nicolaus Remigius who, less than fifty years after Straparola, preserved yet another version of the magistrate who would test a thief by putting him up to impossible missions, certain of them surviving in later folk tales, such as stealing the bed sheets from under him. This thief likewise creates a dummy which he hoists up to the bedroom window and which falls to the ground when shot, thereby distracting the magistrate while his bed is stolen. The repertory of such tricks was destined to grow throughout the following three centuries, so that by the nineteenth century the story could be found in many diversified forms throughout Europe. Henry Mayhew would offer a version, one of many to appear in the British Isles, in London Labour and the London Poor.30

The perdurability of ‘the master-thief’ design can be demonstrated by leaping forward nearly 250 years to the Grimm brothers’ tale in the Kinderund Hausmärchen, no. 192, in which the gentleman master-thief is compelled by his noble godfather to steal first his horse, then his bed sheets, and finally the local priest, having for his reward merely a chance to go free without punishment.31 The points of comparison with Straparola, Skelton, and Remigius are already patent. This version of the tale, Jacob and Wilhelm found in the Zeitschrift für deutsches Alterthum 3 (1843), from a folk source collected by Friedrich Stertzing. Another had been found in those same years by Christen Asbjørnsen and published in his Norske Folke-eventyr in 1841.32 The inevitable conclusion is that such stories were derived from the same story type, preserved through an oral tradition, the same from which the three Renaissance versions were generated.

One further version from northern Europe merits mention, not only for preserving so many of the features familiar from Straparola, but for having established itself in far-away Iceland by the early nineteenth century. Grey-man is caught stealing the king’s sheep and is offered a chance to escape death by performing seemingly impossible feats involving his talent. As the king’s men lead the prize royal ox through a forest, the hero seeks to distract them by hanging himself first in one place and then farther along by running ahead of them through the trees. When they abandon the beast to confirm the illusion, the thief has his opportunity. As for stealing the king’s own sheets, Grey-man gains entry to the palace by stealth and pours warm mush into the royal bed (in the tradition of Skelton some centuries earlier), bringing the couple to cross accusations over who was responsible for fouling the bed. His second opportunity was thus created. The king now orders that he himself, together with his queen, must be stolen. By staging the sack trick in the chapel with a costume covered in candles, this ‘angel of good tidings’ lures their majesties into the sack, whereupon he drags them about until their fear elicits from them promises of marriage into the royal family and half the realm. Despite the variations, the persistent frame is in clear evidence, again confirming the astonishing stability of such traditions over time and across wide spaces. Together, these many tales of ‘the master-thief’ type presuppose an early oikotype, or ‘forme internationale’ to use Propp’s term, which may be teased out by computational inference from the many surviving versions, including the cognate tales known in Eastern countries.

There are numerous additional folk analogues available for investigation, which, for our purposes, must be confined to a scant few. ‘Jack the Cunning Thief’ was an Irish favourite in the nineteenth century. Three sons go into the world to learn trades, although the youngest was only interested in amusement and trickery. He takes lodging in the house of six robbers and the contest begins for becoming the master of the thieves. First he performs the shoes-on-the-road trick, dropping first one and later the other, causing the peasant to tie up his sheep to retrieve the first shoe. The farmer is cheated of another animal when Jack leads the farmer into the forest with his feigned bleating. Then the thieves themselves are lured out of the house and their treasure stolen. Once back home, Jack plays the grandee, demands the neighbour’s daughter in marriage, and demonstrates to his prospective father-in-law the sleights of his trade. The burgher challenges the boy to steal meat off the spit, then six horses, then his own horse, then the sheets on his bed, which concluded the contest and won him the wedding. The story has the combined elements of cheating the thieves and cheating the magistrate, epitomizing one major branch of the story type.33

Calvino, in his Italian Fables, no. 117, ‘The Art of Franceschiello’ (collected originally in the Abruzzi), tells of the boy lured into a gang of thieves who returns home to give an account of his apprenticeship in the ‘respectable trade.’34 The two parts are present, as in the Irish tale. He enters into a contest with a priest who challenges him to steal a lamb from his own flock, then to bring a certain hermit to him in a sack. The priest bets money that he will fail, simply to find out how well he has mastered his calling. By promising paradise to anyone willing to crawl into his sack, Franceschiello captures the holy man and wins his 200 ducats. So the story ends a mere skeleton of what it was in Straparola. Another, collected after the mid-nineteenth century in Lorraine, is more elaborate but less coherent in its retention of fragments and details no longer understood. In ‘Le franc voleur,’ Pierrot, the thief, also an apprentice in the trade, steals a horse by plying the guards with strong drink before absconding with a herd of steers bound for market.35 In the closing episode, the kidnapping of the priest, he takes crabs or crayfish with him, which he leaves in a dish on the altar before luring the priest into the sack by promising him entry into heaven. The Grimm tale, among many analogues, explains the original use of the crabs, for the thief, intent upon playing the role of Saint Peter on the Day of Judgment to the fullest, first sets the crabs loose in the cemetery with candles fixed to their backs to imitate the stirring of the resurrected souls.36 It is an elaborate ruse, but only marginally more imaginative than the disguise assembled by Cassandrino to impersonate an angel. The horse theft sequence, carried out by hoisting up the saddle with the sleeping rider, is nearly universal to this narrative group. Cosquin finds it in tales from Norway, Ireland, Germany, Tuscany, Lorraine, Brittany, Scotland, Flanders, the Basque country, Catalonia, Serbia, and Russia (but not in the Icelandic version cited above).37 Clearly, this story has a history of success that covers many centuries and that spreads out geographically. Straparola’s tale assumes value as a snapshot of that tradition at an early point between its medieval origins and the rich gathering of variants in the nineteenth century. These folk analogues include the twenty examples located in Spain by Aurelio M. Espinosa, the tale of ‘Ladrón y picaro’ telling of three sons who set off from home and part ways, with the third becoming a master-thief. He steals coins from the king, eggs from an eagle, and animals guarded by the king’s servants, as well as the bed sheets of the queen, while in another variant he places the sacristan in a sack.38 This sampling could be extended to include dozens more examples.

There are potentially two remote literary sources for the tale of Cassandrino. The first may be called the ‘Rhampsinitus’ type and the second the ‘Bakhtishu’ type, although the second is altogether more germane. Bakhtishu is the name of the doctor who takes Caliph Mutawakkil’s wager that within three days the master-thief known as Al-Uqab or ‘the Eagle’ could steal something from him before his very eyes. This tale occurs in the Muruj al-Dhahab (Golden Meadows) written before 947 by the Islamic geographer and historian Abu al-Hasan ’Ali al-Mas’udi, who was born in Baghdad in 896.39 According to the terms of the bet, if al-Uqab succeeds, the doctor would pay 10,000 dinars to the Caliph, but if the thief fails, the Caliph would give the doctor a country estate. The first challenge is to steal sheep, closely guarded, which Al-Uqab manages by fraternizing with the shepherds in order to share with them his drugged wine. Then he disguises himself as an angel, in the manner of Cassandrino, and appears to Doctor Bakhtishu himself as an emissary of the Christ offering him a shortcut to heaven, all of which prevails upon the doctor’s compromised judgement. So many of the markers are present in Al-Mas’udi’s tale that it warrants consideration as the prototype for the entire thief-and-magistrate-contest group. It was such a tale as this that carried ‘the master-thief’ design to the West where it left few literary traces before Straparola, Skelton and Remigius, but where it must have circulated widely in the oral cultures in order to have generated the rich harvest of tales of the ‘Bakhtishu’ type in the nineteenth century.

Altogether more speculative are the means whereby tales from the East possessing common narrative structures and motifs arrived in the West, where, and at what times. The Cassandrino or ‘master-thief’ group is a prime case in point, insofar as several tales from the Orient of indeterminate age tell of just such heroes who, with incredible bravura, steal objects from the royal palace to prove their consummate skills. These derive from the same early tales that provided the template for the motif of the clever thief in the Occidental stories. W.A. Clouston relates one from Mongolia concerned with a man of great reputation for his cleverness who is challenged to steal the Khán’s talisman. He first gets the palace guards drunk and removes their horses, leaving them straddling walls. He then disables the palace staff in various ways, enters the Khán’s room, takes the talisman before his eyes, and completes his escape. The guards awake and find themselves ridiculously stranded. The following day the thief, having made his point, offers to return the talisman, but the Khán does not accept it. That was a foolish move, for it contained the secret of his life force. Hence when he orders the death of the thief, the latter breaks the talisman on a stone. With blood pouring from his nose, the ruler sinks into death.40

In tracing the Oriental stories there are extensive gaps, but enough hints have come to light to posit a running tradition of ‘master-thief’ tales going back to the end of the first millennium. The Bahar Danush (The Garden of Knowledge) of Inayat Allah Kanbu (Einaiat Ooolah), completed in Delhi in 1651, is a collection of tales about faithless wives and the tricks they played on their husbands, all of them taken from earlier Indian sources. Among them is the tale of a master-thief who is intent upon stealing a jewel-studded golden fish kept under the king’s pillow.41 By using ropes he clambers up to the roof after eluding the guards and enters the bedroom of the king. He must wait for a slave girl to fall asleep who had been rubbing the king’s feet, a task which the thief takes up until the king turns in his sleep and the precious object can be seized. This he wraps in a veil and decorates with white flowers as though it were his dead child which he then carries past the sentries to bury outside the city. Another thief follows him, however, and watches where he buries the treasure. Certain he has been observed, the first thief looks about and sees the second playing dead on one of the execution stakes. He does all he can to determine whether the other is alive or dead by holding his nose and mouth and running him through the cheek with his sword. But the second thief had perfect discipline and thus remained behind to bury the treasure elsewhere. The daring exploit is announced the next day and a reward is offered for the jewel. The first thief now has the option of going to the palace and negotiating a pardon by revealing the actions of the second thief, all of which he could prove by the inflicted wound. The king then has all the medical practitioners interrogated and thereby finds the wounded culprit who is brought in for execution, while the first escapes with his reward. The profile of the story speaks for itself as a variant somewhat removed from Straparola, for it deals with one trick only, although the perpetrator tricks guards and scales walls as in several of the Western analogues. Moreover, he targets royal residences and attempts the seemingly impossible as an artist more taken with the execution than with the object itself, which is but material proof of his virtuosity and finesse – a spirit common to all these stories.

Because so many of Straparola’s past editors and translators have also mentioned ‘The Treasury of King Rhampsinitus’ as a probable source (ATU type 950), it merits a moment’s consideration, particularly because certain of its features and episodes find their way into the master-thief stories in the Bakhtishu group. The story hails from the second book of Herodotus, Sect. 121, which tells of an ancient architect who knew the design of the king’s treasury – information that was passed along to his son, who, with a friend, made use of it to commit the perfect robbery.42 Missing his goods, however, the king turned sleuth, took counsel, burned green wood inside the building to find the chinks in the structure, then strategically placed a cauldron of hot pitch beneath the hidden entry on the assumption that the thieves would return. When the friend falls into the pitch and cannot get out, the only means for the architect’s son to hide his identity is to behead his unfortunate colleague. The king becomes obsessed with catching the felon, not so much to punish the crime or retrieve the goods as to identify the clever fugitive. The cadaver of the beheaded friend becomes the principal means for detection, but the architect’s son also manages to steal it for burial. Defeated at last, the king offers complete amnesty and marriage to his own daughter if the thief would only identify himself, at which time the boy comes forward to claim his reward. The beheading of the partner whose body is left in the treasury is a distinct marker of the narrative, together with the canvassing of the city door-to-door in search of the culprit, who must escape by subterfuge. The two story types share common materials in the cheating of the king’s guards and related forms of trickery. Herodotus appears to have generated this now famous ‘history’ out of a somewhat compromised version of an ancient Eastern folk tale.43 The differences separating his version from Somadeva’s in the Katha sarit sagara are considerable, but must be explained in terms of substitutions and alterations to a sprawling common story tradition.

This story circulated widely in medieval and Renaissance Europe, appearing early as one of the stories of The Seven Sages of Rome, a collection that appeared in many languages in prose and in verse, one of which is the Dolopathos, translated from the Greek Seven Sages by Johannes de Alta Silva, a Cistercian monk active between 1184 and 1212.44 Perhaps the most accomplished literary recension of the Rhampsinitus type appears in the Pecorone (IX.1) of Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, a work completed by 1390, and one that Straparola could have consulted. Giovanni transfers the tale to Venice where it is the Doge’s treasury that is robbed by a father and his son, Ricciardo – the son now compelled to behead his own father mired in the pitch and begging him to act to save his honour.45 The Doge has the body displayed throughout the city, causing the boy’s mother to expose emotions which he must disguise by cutting off his own thumb. Beggars are sent from door to door looking for clues. After exhausting all other means of detection, the Doge resorts to a sleepover in the palace for the city’s most notorious lechers, placing his daughter in bed in the midst of them on the curious assumption that the thief would also be the first to attempt her virtue. But Ricciardo was equal to this test as well, for in detecting that the girl had marked him with dye, he took the pot and marked all the others in the room, some of them several times. Baffled to the end, the Doge, in nearly fairy tale fashion, calls for a truce and offers his daughter in marriage to the man who could prove himself the master escape artist. The story is retold by Prato in La leggenda del tesoro di Rampsinite and it likewise made its way into the oral culture.46 Calvino, in his Fiabe italiane (Italian Fables), no. 17, offers a folk version entitled ‘Crack and Crook,’ which repeats not only elements of the well-worn Rhampsinitus story, but incorporates the sheet-stealing episode from the Cassandrino group, at last associating the two traditions in a modest way.47 For those interested in pursuing the Rhampsinitus type in modern folk tale versions, there are several with which to begin, including another located in Sicily by Pitrè, one in Bologna by Coronedi-Berti, and one in Monferrato by Comparetti.48

The two story groups share only broad generic features: they deal with thieves and magistrates, involve skill-testing episodes, and conclude with leniency and even rewards for men who are otherwise malefactors. To be sure, both protagonists exercise their genius in ready and creative thinking. But Ricciardo and Cassandrino perform under contrasting circumstances, the one demonstrating his prowess as an escape artist, the other as a break-in artist. Their stories do not share common episodes, initially, and it matters that the former protagonist plays cat-and-mouse with a pursuing magistrate who is the trickster-manqué in trying to catch him, whereas the latter is in constant negotiation with the games-master who drives the action.

Nevertheless, the stories have been associated and occasionally blended into a single narrative, particularly by the folk raconteurs of Eastern Europe. F.H. Groome relates just such a tale in his Gypsy Folk-Tales which begins with the master-thieves in contest, the one stealing bird’s eggs without disturbing the mother while the other steals the pants of the first thief. But then, instead of following the pattern of the fabliau in the pork stealing contest, recounted above, they go to the king’s treasury, the one of them falling into the king’s molasses trap and the other cutting off his head to hide his identity. Once the beheaded thief’s body is recovered, however, the story returns to the Bakhtishu type, now with the king as the magistrate testing the clever thief. He sends him out to steal the oxen from the peasant, a feat he manages by cutting off the tail of the one he steals and placing it in the mouth of the other to make the peasant think the one ox had eaten the other. Then he is sent to steal the priest out of the church, which to accomplish is to win the king’s daughter for good and all. Tellingly, the story contains the crabs and candles trick coherently remembered, culminating in the sack trick, a sack in which the priest thought he would make his way to heaven but in which he only gets as far as the palace. The story represents a narrative creation conceived by intermingling these long-associated stories.49

Both story types appear among those collected by J.F. Campbell in the West Highlands. In ‘The Son of the Scottish Yeoman who stole the Bishop’s Horse and Daughter, and the Bishop Himself,’ a Scots boy takes employment with the chief magistrate of London and preys upon the Bishop of London, first by wagering he can steal his brown horse – which he does by lowering a hanged man down the chimney – then the bishop’s daughter and her maid, and finally the bishop himself by impersonating a holy man preaching from the bishop’s own pulpit, having dressed himself in the eerie silver of fish scales. The bishop finds himself the subject of the homily, comes to repentance, and follows the light-giving stranger directly into the trap. In the end, the bishop is urged to marry his daughter to such a crafty chap. The second tale, that of ‘The Shifty Lad, The Widow’s Son,’ is less like Straparola’s, but is remarkable for having joined into one long story the clever exploits of an apprentice thief who defeats his master and the theft of the king’s treasury and the decapitation of the trapped thief in imitation of the story of Rhampsinitus.50

In Straparola’s story, there appears the first of a number of brief citations lifted directly from Boccaccio’s Decameron. The full passage in question is that in which Cassandrino goes into a churchyard to disinter a dead body: ‘At last he hit on the following scheme. A poor beggar of the city had recently died and was buried on that very day in a vault outside the church of the preaching friars. After midnight, Cassandrino stole to the place of the burial and, once he had opened the vault, pulled the dead body out by the feet. Then, after he had stripped it, he dressed it again in his own clothes, which fitted so well that anyone would have taken him for Cassandrino and not for the beggar. He hoisted the corpse upon his shoulders as best he could’ and headed for the palace. In Boccaccio’s story, Madonna Francesca wishes to get rid of two lovers by having one disguise himself as a dead man and the other fetch him out of the tomb. In conceiving her plan, she uses a sequence of words and phrases which Straparola borrows in describing Cassandrino’s quite different grave-robbing mission. Boccaccio’s ‘Era, il giorno che questo pensiero le venne, morto in Pistoia uno il quale …’ who was ‘sotterrato in uno avello fuori della chiesa de’ frati minori …’ in Straparola becomes, ‘Era, il giorno che questa imaginazione li venne, morto in Perugia un mendico, lo quale era stato sotterrato in uno avello fuori della chiesa de’ frati predicatori.’ Further instances of common diction are scattered through the next few lines: ‘e in su le spalle levatoselo verso la casa’ becomes ‘e levatoselo su le spalle meglio che ei puoté, verso il palagio,’ which concludes the passage cited above. The larceny is petty to be sure, but may be a secret homage, or merely a harmless little intertextual game which emerges when a playful mind, imbued with an intimate knowledge of the novellieri, simply cannot resist a citation where the words of another can coincidentally supply his own text.

I. Fable 3
How Scarpacifico Swindles the Swindlers

CATERUZZA

Father Scarpacifico, having been duped once by three robbers, dupes them three times in return. Thus he comes out victorious and lives on happily with his Nina.

The end of Alteria’s story, which she set forth with such wise skill, supplies me now with a theme for my own, which by chance may please you no less than hers. But there will be a difference on one point. Her story pictured to us Father Severino neatly entrapped by Cassandrino, while here, Father Scarpacifico throws the net just as adroitly over a group of rogues who were trying to get the better of him, as the plot of my fable will fully reveal.

Not far from Imola, a city always plagued by factious quarrels which in our own time nearly reduced it to extinction, there once lived a priest named Scarpacifico, who served the village church of Postema. He was well to do, but miserly and avaricious beyond measure, and he had for a housekeeper a shrewd and clever woman named Nina, who was so alert and pushy that she wouldn’t hesitate to tell anyone, whatever their rank, just what came into her mind. Yet she was faithful and prudent in her administration of his affairs, for which he held her in high esteem.

Now when this goodly Father Scarpacifico was young, he was as lusty and lively a priest as could be found in the whole countryside. But now that his advanced age had made walking on foot irksome to him, the attentive Nina was forever coaxing him to buy a horse so that he might not shorten his life with too much fatigue. At last, Scarpacifico, overborne by her persuasive arguments, one day went to the market and there, seeing a mule which appeared to suit his exact needs, bought it for seven golden florins.

Now by chance there were three merry fellows at the market that day of a mind to live off the goods of others rather than on their own earnings – as it happens even in our own times. So as soon as they saw the bargain struck, one said to the others, ‘Comrades, I’m of a mind that the mule over there should belong to us.’

‘How can we manage that?’ said the others.

Then the first replied, ‘We have to post ourselves along the road he’ll take on his journey home about a half kilometre apart from each other, and as he rides by, each one of us must swear firmly that the mule he’s bought isn’t a mule at all, but a donkey, and if we’re brazen enough in our declarations, the mule will be ours.’

Accordingly, they left the market and stationed themselves separately along the road, just as they had planned, and as Scarpacifico passed by, one of the rogues, feigning to be on his way to market, shouted out, ‘God be with you, sir!’

To which Scarpacifico replied, ‘Good day to you, brother.’

‘Whence come you, sir?’ said the thief.

‘From the market,’ answered Scarpacifico.

‘And what good bargains have you picked up there?’ the scoundrel asked.

‘This mule,’ said Scarpacifico.

‘What mule?’ exclaimed the robber.

‘Why, the mule I’m riding,’ returned Scarpacifico.

‘Are you speaking in sober truth, or do you mock me?’ asked the thief.

‘Why?’ the priest replied.

‘Because it seems to me to be a donkey and not a mule.’

‘What do you mean, a donkey?’ Scarpacifico retorted, and without another word he went on his way. He had not ridden two bowshots before he met the next robber, who likewise greeted him.

‘Good morrow, sir, and where may you be coming from?’

‘The market,’ answered Scarpacifico.

‘And was there anything worth having?’ asked the robber.

‘You bet,’ said the priest.

‘So did you come up with any good buys?’

‘Sure,’ answered Scarpacifico, ‘I bought this mule which you see.’

‘How, my good man, do you mean to say that you bought that for a mule?’

‘I certainly did,’ replied the priest.

‘Well, I hate to tell you, but it’s a plain ass,’ the robber persisted.

‘What do you mean, an ass?’ the priest repeated. ‘If somebody tells me this one more time, I’ll make him a present of the stupid beast.’

Then going along, he soon met the third thief, who said to him, ‘Good morrow, sir. I’d guess you’re coming from the market?’

‘I am,’ replied Scarpacifico.

‘And what may you have bought there?’ asked the robber.

‘I bought this mule which I’m riding.’

‘Mule?’ said the fellow. ‘Are you telling me straight or just kidding around?’

‘It’s the truth and no joke,’ replied the priest.

‘Poor fellow, can’t you see it’s an ass, not a mule? O, those dirty traders; they’ve really bamboozled you.’

When he heard this tale, Scarpacifico said to the fellow, ‘Two other men I’ve met told me the same story and I refused to believe them.’ So climbing off the beast, he said, ‘Here, take it, I make you a present of it.’ The blackguard took charge of it right off, thanked the priest for courtesy, and went off to join his companions, leaving the good Father to make his way home on foot.

As soon as he came to his house, he told Nina how he had bought a nag at the market thinking it to be a mule, but that it had proved to be a donkey, and how, having been told that he had mistaken one for the other by several people he’d met on the road home, he had given the beast to the last of them.

‘Ah, you poor simpleton!’ cried Nina. ‘Can’t you see they’ve played a trick on you? I thought you were cleverer by far. I can tell you, by God, they wouldn’t have fooled me like that.’

‘Well, there’s no use to grieve over it,’ said Scarpacifico. ‘They may have played me a trick, but see if I don’t play two in return on them. You can rest assured that after fooling me once, these fellows won’t be satisfied with that. You watch, they’ll soon be weaving a new scheme to plunder me.’

Now in the same village not far from the priest’s house there lived a peasant who, among his goats, had two that were so much alike that it was impossible to tell them apart. These two goats the priest bought, and the next day he ordered Nina to prepare a good dinner, because he planned to invite in a few of his friends, specifying a repast of boiled veal, some roasted fowls, together with a loin in a savoury sauce, plus the tart she so often served to him. Then he took one of the goats and tied it to a hedge in the garden, and once he had given it some fodder, he put a halter around the neck of the other and led it off to market, where he was at once accosted by the three companion swindlers.

‘Well, if it isn’t our friend! And what brings you here today? No doubt, you’ve come to make another good purchase?’

To this Scarpacifico replied, ‘I’ve come to buy various provisions for a supper I’m having for a few of my friends. If you’d care to join in, it would please me greatly.’

The cunning bounders willingly accepted Scarpacifico’s invitation, and when he had bought everything he required, he attached all his purchases to the back of the goat, right there in front of these three rogues, and said to the beast, ‘Now go home and tell Nina to boil this veal, and to roast the fowls and the loin, and tell her, moreover, to make a savoury sauce with these spices, and a fine dessert pie just the way I like it. Do you understand? Now get along with you.’ With these words, he sent the laden goat packing, which, being left to its own devices, wandered away, and what became of it nobody knows. Meanwhile, Scarpacifico and his companions, along with a few other friends, strolled about the marketplace till the hour of dinner, and then they all made their way to the priest’s house. There, the first thing they saw on entering the garden was the goat which Scarpacifico had tied to the hedge calmly ruminating after its feed of grass. The three adventurers at once took it for a truth that it was the same goat that Father Scarpacifico had dispatched home with his purchases, at which they were greatly amazed.

When they had all entered the house, the priest said to Nina, ‘Have you prepared everything the way the goat told you to?’

She, taking his meaning, replied, ‘Yes, sir, and in a few minutes the roast loin, the fowls, and the boiled veal will be ready, and the sauce made with the spices, and the tart as well – just as the goat explained to me.’

‘Well done,’ said the priest.

Now when they saw the roast, the boiled veal, and the tart placed before them, and heard what Nina said, they were more bewildered than ever and at once began to figure out how they could get this goat into their possession. But when the dinner was over and they were still far from their goal, they said to Scarpacifico, ‘That goat of yours, you must agree to sell it to us.’

Scarpacifico replied that he had no desire to part with it, for it was worth more money than there was in the whole world. Then, after a little while, he reconsidered his thoughts and offered to accept in exchange for it fifty golden florins. Then the knaves, thinking they had made a killing, right away paid out the fifty gold pieces.

‘But take heed,’ Scarpacifico added, ‘and don’t blame me afterwards if the goat doesn’t obey you at the first as it does me. It’ll take him a little time to get used to you and your manner.’

Hardly listening and without adding a word, the three adventurers carried off the goat, rejoicing in their bargain. When they came to their house, they said to their wives, ‘Don’t bother to make any food for tomorrow except what we’ll send home to you by this goat.’ The next day they went to the marketplace and purchased fowls and other kinds of meats, packed them all on the goat’s back, and ordered it to go back home with instructions to the wives concerning the preparations. The goat, all loaded up, once it was set at liberty, ran away into the country and was never seen again.

When dinner time rolled around, the three confederates went straight back home and demanded of their wives whether the goat had come back safely with the provisions, and whether they had cooked them all up according to their directions. The women, amazed at what they heard, yelled at them, ‘What a bunch of fools and numbskulls you are to think that a beast like that would do your bidding! Have you ever had the wool pulled over your eyes. What with all your cheating of people every day, it had to happen that you’d be caught in the end.’

As soon as the three robbers realized what fools Scarpacifico had made of them, besides lightening their pockets by fifty golden florins, their anger got the best of them. Seizing their arms, they set forth to find him, swearing they would have his life. But the cunning priest, fully expecting the robbers would seek vengeance upon him as soon as they discovered how he had tricked them, took counsel with his housekeeper.

‘Nina, take this bladder which is full of blood and wear it under your dress. When these robbers come, I’ll put all the blame on you, and in my rage I’ll pretend to stab you, but I’ll only thrust the knife into this bladder and you must fall down as if you were dead. Then, leave the rest to me.’

Scarpacifico had scarcely finished speaking when the confederates turned up and at once set upon him to slay him.

‘Hold off, brothers,’ he shouted, “what you’re accusing me of is none of my doing, but the work of this servant wench of mine, and all over some wrong or other I know nothing about.’ Turning towards Nina, he stuck his knife into the bladder which he had previously filled with blood, and instantly she feigned to fall down dead while the blood gushed in streams all around where she lay. Then the priest, looking upon his deed, made a great show of repentance and howled out loudly, ‘O, what a wretched man I am! In my folly I’ve killed the woman who was the prop of my old age. How shall I ever live without her?’ Then, after a short spell of time, he fetched a bagpipe made according to a fancy of his own. Lifting up her clothes, he stuck it between her buttocks and blew so strong a blast into it that soon after Nina came back to life and got up on her feet again as hale and healthy as before.

Astonished at seeing this, the robbers forgot their anger and, after a little haggling, they bought the bagpipe for two hundred florins and returned home hugely delighted with their bargain. A day or two after, it happened that one of them had a falling out with his wife and in his state of rage he stabbed her in the breast with his knife and killed her. Then immediately he took the bagpipe they had bought from Scarpacifico, slid the tube between her buttocks, and blew away, just as the priest had done, in hopes of reviving her, but he spent his breath in vain, for the poor woman had indeed passed from this world to the next.

When the second thief saw what his comrade had done, he cried out, ‘What a fool you are! You have bungled the whole affair. Wait and see how I do it.’ With these words, he seized his own wife by the hair and cut her throat with a razor. Then, taking the bagpipe, he stuck it right up her arse and blew with all his might, but for all of that, the wretched woman wouldn’t come back to life again. The third fellow, who was standing near, by no means daunted by the failure of the others, served his own wife in the same way, but to no better purpose, so that now all three of them were deprived of their wives. Their rage against Scarpacifico was now at a white heat, so they hurried to his house, this time resolved to pay no attention to his seductive tales. They seized him and thrust him into a sack, planning to drown him in a neighbouring river. But as they bore him along, something alarmed them and they ran to hide themselves, leaving Father Scarpacifico tied up in his sack by the roadside.

They had not been gone many minutes before a shepherd came along, driving his flock to pasture. As he drew close, he heard a plaintive voice saying, ‘They want me to take her, but I’ll have none of her, for I’m a priest and have no interest in such matters.’

The shepherd stopped short, somewhat afraid, because he couldn’t discover where the voice was coming from, which kept repeating the same words over and over. Having looked all around, here and there, his eye at last fell on the sack in which Scarpacifico was tied up. The shepherd opened it and let the priest crawl out, demanding why he had been tied up like that and what he meant by the words he kept repeating. At that, Scarpacifico declared that the Lord of that region had insisted on marrying him to one of his daughters, but that he had no stomach for the match because, not only was he a priest, but he was too old to take a wife.

Like a simpleton, the shepherd believed every word the clever cleric told him and spoke up directly, ‘Good father, do you think he would give her to me?’

‘I believe he would,’ said Scarpacifico, ‘provided you get into this sack and let me tie you up.’ The silly shepherd at once crept in and Scarpacifico, having fastened the sack, got away from the place as quickly as he could, driving the poor shepherd’s flock in front of him.

Before an hour had passed, the three thieves returned to the place where they had left the priest in the sack and, without looking inside, they bore it to the river and threw it in, thus sending the wretched shepherd to the doom they had intended for Father Scarpacifico.

Thinking themselves well avenged, the robbers set out for home, and as they were talking together they perceived a flock of sheep grazing hard by and at once began to scheme up the easiest way to make off with a couple of the lambs. But when they drew closer, imagine their astonishment at seeing Scarpacifico, whom they believed to be lying at the bottom of the river, now tending his flock like a shepherd. Once recovered from their shock, they asked him how he had managed to get out of the river, and he answered them right back, ‘Get away with you! You’ve all got the brains of idiots! If you’d thrown me a little farther out into the stream, I’d have come back with ten times as many sheep as you see here.’

When the robbers heard this, they said in chorus, ‘O, Sir, will you do us a good turn? Will you put us into sacks and throw us into the river? Then, you’ll see that we’ll no longer need to be highwaymen and rogues, but will live as honest shepherds.’

‘Well,’ answered Scarpacifico, ‘I’ll do this much for you. In fact, there’s no favour in the world I wouldn’t do for you, loving you all as I do.’ Then, having gotten hold of three good sacks of strong canvas, he tied the three thieves so firmly inside there was no chance of their getting out and threw them into the river. Thus they went to the pitch-black place where eternal sorrow reigns, and Scarpacifico went back to his house rich in money and sheep, and there with his Nina he lived on for a number of years in happiness and prosperity.

Cateruzza’s tale gave great pleasure to all the company and won high praise, above all for the great wit and cunning of this ingenious priest who, in exchange for the mule he gave away, gained so much money and a such fine flock of sheep, to say nothing of the revenge he had of his enemies for the wrong they did him, and the merry life he afterwards lived with his Nina. Then, to maintain the established order of events, she set forth her riddle in these words:

A sturdy blacksmith and his wife,

Who lived a simple honest life,

Sat down to dine, and for their fare

A loaf and a half of bread was there.

But ere they finished came the priest,

And with his sister joined the feast.

The loaf in twain the blacksmith cleft,

So three half loaves for the four were left.

Each ate a half, each was content.

Now say what paradox is meant.

Thus ended the ingenious riddle propounded by Cateruzza. But although each and all listened to it with great attention and admiration, no one in all that noble company could extract the true kernel from the hard shell. Seeing this, Cateruzza said, ‘Charming ladies, the sense of my enigma is that a blacksmith took for his wife the sister of a priest, so that when the husband and wife had sat down to their meal and the priest came in to join them, it seemed they were four in all, which is to say, the blacksmith and his wife, and the priest and his sister. But in reality there were only three. Thus, as each one had a third of the bread (half a loaf), they were all contented.’ After Cateruzza had explained her subtle enigma, the Signora gave the signal to Eritrea to give them her story, and she forthwith began.

I.3 Commentary

This tale is set in Imola, about thirty kilometres south-east of Bologna, a city annexed into the Papal States by the beginning of the sixteenth century. The story of Scarpacifico the trickster priest carries the reader into a vision of reality all its own in which there are only sharp rascals, gulls deserving their losses, and the innocent victims of their contest. It is also a tale of ‘turn about is fair play,’ because in Straparola’s telling, the priest is first victimized and provoked by those upon whom he later plays his tricks in revenge. To achieve this symmetry of action and counter-action, three distinct narrative units or motifs had been conjoined: the robbers who swindle Scarpacifico out of his mule; his retaliatory tricks involving the speaking goat and the life-resuscitating bagpipe; and his final escape from the sack in which he was to have been drowned. The effect is a miniature trickster cycle which has grown up around a set of common antagonists. The tricks are micro-plots conceived in the mind of a perpetrator and tailor-fitted to the susceptibilities of his victims, whether to ridicule their naïveté, to make material gains at their expense, to seek revenge, or in extreme cases to lure the victims into collaborating in their own destruction. This story features an ‘endgame’ scenario in which all adversaries perish, leaving the trickster hero alone and at peace in his new-found prosperity. Scarpacifico is a trickster made, not born, but once established in his new role he might have continued indefinitely, were there victims available. His spree is short-lived because the robbers grow impatient, refuse to be further gulled, and determine to kill him. To turn the priest into a trickster like Tyl Eulenspiegel, he too would have to travel, seeking out new victims to draw out the cycle.

Because we are led by design to see events from his vantage point, we participate in the light comedy of a successful prankster sufficiently sinned against to annul any sense of unfairness – discounting, of course, the collateral slaughter of three innocent wives and a silly shepherd. The point is that the three robbers ‘went to the place they deserved.’ Psychological interiority hardly comes into play. The reader is thereby free to revel in the novelty of the pranks themselves and to concentrate on the quid pro quos in this tale of primitive justice and survival. All such trick-oriented narratives are inevitably reminders of the strategies of deception predicated on the weaknesses of others by which humans may pursue their own advantage, whether by gossip, by planting misleading evidence, or acting out false scenarios.

The materials for this four-trick cycle derive from two distinct sources, the one going back twelve to fourteen hundred years, the other at least five hundred. The idea of confusing the victim by placing interlocutors with a common lie at intervals along a route may be found in the third book of the Panchatantra, a collection of Hindu tales originating in the earliest centuries of the Christian era.51 This jest type will be referred to as ‘The Brahmin’s Goat.’ The second part involves selling ‘wonder’ implements at high prices to gullible purchasers who, in the third part, retaliate by placing the trickster in a sack or barrel to be cast into the water. This compound configuration we may call ‘One-Ox,’ because its earliest surviving written version is found in the Latin verse fabliau ‘Unibos,’ an eleventh-century creation that survives in a single manuscript in the Brussels Bibliothèque Royale.52 These two stories comprising the three parts were destined to be conjoined into a single folk tale by the middle of the sixteenth century in accordance with the explicit evidence in the present story.

In the first, a holy man on his way to sacrifice a goat is met by three rogues spaced out along the way, who, one by one, assure him that his goat is a dog and hence an animal unfit for religious rites. How this story arrived in Europe is open to speculation, but once in circulation it became the prototype for endless variations upon the confusion of object classification that is provoked by having one’s convictions contradicted by several ostensibly independent and disinterested observers. In precisely this way, with little variation upon the ancient formula, Scarpacifico loses his mule to those who conspire to convince him it is an ass. One means of entry to the West may have been the eleventh-century Byzantine physician Symeon Sethi’s translation of the Kalila wa Dimna (known in the West as The Fables of Bidpai), or more plausibly the translation of that same work by Johannis de Capua as the Directorium vitae humanae, translated circa 1270.53

The tale of ‘One-Ox’ provides the template for the second and third parts of Straparola’s tripartite structure. The folk protagonist is the only poor farmer among his many rich neighbours. His fortune turns when, after selling the hide of his ox for a pittance, he finds a bag of coins. Harassed by the mayor, the provost, and the priest over his new wealth, he reports that it came from the lucrative sale of the hide and that if they too wished to prosper in the same way, they need only slaughter all their animals and take the hides to the neighbouring market. This goading by his betters is the prompt that makes a trickster out of the lowly farmer. When the three high stakeholders find themselves ridiculed and deprived of their prize animals, they seek their revenge. To distract them, Unibos stages the murder of his wife, having attached to her collar the blood-filled bladder that will leave her ‘caked with blood.’ Of course, at the proper moment, he brings out the magic willow flute that not only resuscitates but rejuvenates and beautifies his wife. According to formula, the triumvirate purchases the flute at a very high price and each of them slays his wife with the intent of making her young and attractive. The failure of the flute puts them in a rage that can only be diverted by more astonishing prospects. There follows the prank of the coin-excreting horse which Unibos had prepared in advance, again leading to a costly purchase and the anticipated failure. The three men then return to slay the jokester, and like Marcolphus, Unibos asks merely to choose the manner of his death, which is to be placed inside a barrel and thrown into the water.54 The protagonist’s escape and the counter trick by which he lures his oppressors to their deaths are closely imitated by Straparola. All that remains, in a sense, is to substitute the story of the ox hides for the episode of the smart goats, eliminate the tale of the coin-emitting horse, and add on the Hindu preamble to arrive at the present story. But how and when those substitutions were made is open to speculation. Presumably it was brought about through the usual evolutionary processes in the creation of folk tales.

What remains clear is that in the interim five centuries, materials from these sources circulated widely throughout Europe, were borrowed variously for literary purposes, and continued to circulate in both literary and folk forms down to the nineteenth century. Only a few may be mentioned out of the hundreds possible to illustrate the fortunes of these literary motifs as coherent identifiable structures and simple forms. The tale of the Brahmin and his goat passed in ancient times from the Panchatantra to the Hitopadesa of Narayana, bk. IV, fable 9, in which a priest is again talked out of his sacrificial goat by three rogues encountered at intervals who ask him repeatedly why he is carrying a dog on his shoulders.55 The history of this motif then leaps forward to the Fabula moralis contra cupidos et divites by the Anglo-Norman monk Nicole Bozon (Borzon), a work written by 1320.56 It is memorable largely because the three rogues who execute the trick are called Croket, Hoket, and Loket. But the motif was known in the Latin West at least a century earlier in the Exempla or Illustrative Stories, no. 20, from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry wherein five rogues connive to convince an unsuspecting rustic that his lamb is a dog.57 Perhaps the motif made its way to the West through de Vitry, who was, during the final years of his life, the cardinal-bishop of Acre (Akko in Northern Israel). The motif also turns up in the Summa praedicantium of John de Bromyard (d. 1352),58 and in the Anecdotes historiques, legends et apologues tirés du recueil inédit d’Étienne de Bourbon.59

By the time of Bromyard’s death, however, the little plot had already received literary elaboration in Boccaccio’s tale of Calendrino (IX.3). Three companions agree to deceive this notorious dimwit by meeting him at intervals to read the symptoms of disease into his appearance. With so much insistence, the victim takes to his bed and is finally diagnosed as being pregnant, for which reason he reviles his wife for assuming the superior position during sex, thinking he now inherited the woman’s part in everything to follow.60 One last example nearer to Straparola’s own time may be cited as perhaps one of several more. When Eulenspiegel was at the fair in Ueltzen he saw a farmer buying green fabric. To get the cloth for himself he picked up a tramp and a ‘Scottish priest’ and stationed them along the road ahead of the farmer, telling each to greet him and compliment him on the purchase of such fine blue fabric. Eulenspiegel met him first and said he would bet him twenty guilders it was blue, and the farmer was certain enough of his interpretation of colours (a matter of qualia still discussed among cognitive philosophers!) that he took the bet. The priest, the third in the line-up, was the clinching witness, for otherwise the farmer would have called them all rogues. He turned the fabric over to Tyl.61

Returning now to the second and third parts derived from ‘One-Ox,’ we need look back only as far as the anonymous fifteenth-century Storia di Campriano contadino, known exclusively from the first printed edition in 1521.62 This may well have been Straparola’s immediate source, although variations separate them that are perhaps best accounted for by oral versions in concurrent circulation. Campriano has motifs from the ‘One-Ox’ group not found in Straparola, such as the gold-excreting donkey and the self-boiling kettle. The instrument that allegedly resurrects the slain wife is a trumpet, and the animal that carries messages is a rabbit (a motif with an independent life of its own). At the end, the herdsman is lured into the sack with promises of marrying a noble maiden. This tale circulated widely, left popular phrases in Tuscany, and influenced Italian folklore down to the nineteenth century when tales of the Peasant Campriano (Capriano) could still be heard in several regions of the country.

The most perplexing pre-Straparolan version occurs in the Baldus of Teofilo Folengo – its earliest appearance dating to 1517.63 Here for the first time the opening trick from the Brahmin tradition is conjoined with materials from the ‘One-Ox’ group, but the sequence lacks the closing motif of the drowning sack or barrel. Moreover, these materials are incorporated into a more elaborate plot appearing only in Books 8 and 9 of this sprawling work. Nevertheless, the borrowing is entirely apparent. In the manner of the Brahmin with his goat, Zambello, the foolish peasant, is duped of his cow, Chiarina, by being convinced that it is a goat. But then he is induced to go along to a monastery where he joins in with thirty monks in the consumption of his own cow. Cingar, his trickster friend, then arranges to kill Berta by attaching the bladder full of blood to her collar.64 The implement of resuscitation is now a magic knife which the farmer Zambello purchases at a high price in anticipation of trying it out on his own wife, Lena. There is to be a trial for his crime, but the tale modulates into a new plot to liberate Baldo from prison. That Straparola extracted his far more schematic usage of these materials from the fanciful elaborations of Folengo is inconceivable. Both undoubtedly derived the materials for their respective purposes from popular stories in the oral tradition, but Straparola may claim the credit for having first presented the three parts of the tale in written form, although that invention was likely the work of a folk raconteur.

Following the publication of the Piacevoli notti, the materials found many new venues both in jest collections and fairy tales, as well as in the oral traditions of the folk. Giulio Cesare Croce, in Le sottilissime astutie di Bertoldo, first published in 1606, fills out his version of the Solomon and Marcolphus heritage by adding tricks from the repertory of literary jests.65 In his story of the trickster hero who exasperates a royal court, it is the queen whose impatience propels her to have the protagonist drowned in a sack. He borrows the motif, perhaps directly from Straparola, but alters the episode by allowing the substitute victim to escape. More of these materials turn up in Claude Du Moulinet’s Les facétieux devis et plaisans contes.66 In addition, Valentin Schumann, in his Nachtbüchlein, Nos. 5 and 6, tells stories of a wife revived with a fiddle and peasants who drowned themselves.67 But just how widely these motifs circulated can be seen even more clearly through the folk tale gathering efforts of the nineteenth-century ethnographers, not to mention the adaptations of the Unibos tale by the northern fairy-tale writers, including both the Grimm brothers and Hans Christian Andersen.

Emmanuel Cosquin found the tale in Lorraine entitled ‘René et son Seigneur,’ in which a medley of motifs appear, as though selected at random from the great coffer of interchangeable parts that constitute the generic story, including the sale of hides, the money-pooping donkey sold at a high price, the self-cooking bean pot which must be prodded into action by whipping it, the bladder of blood and the resuscitation of his slain wife with a magic whistle, and the final exchange of places with a passing shepherd. Of note is that René explains to his potential replacement that he is being forced to become a priest, a calling welcomed by the shepherd who knew how to read and write.68

A more elaborate version combining two story types was collected by Gherardo Nerucci and published under the name ‘Manfane, Tanfane e Zufilo.’ It is the last of the three brothers, the runt of the family, scorned by the older two, who makes good through his trickery. In the Unibos tradition, his one wretched cow is slaughtered and the hide is to be sold, but before he gets to market, he wraps himself up in the skin, climbs a tree, and then by accident falls into a band of robbers below (ATU type 1654). Taking him for the devil, they flee and leave him their pelf. Representing this money as profit from the sale of the hide, he is able to induce his brothers to slaughter their cattle in hopes of similar gains. Like Scarpacifico, he is now targeted for revenge and must turn up new get-rich schemes to stall those who want his skin. His next exploit is to cover with honey the tops of barrels filled with excrement and induce his two brothers to take them to market. Disgraced once more, they are now prepared to kill their brother, opting to put him in a sack and leave him on the beach for the fish or the tide to deal with. Zufilo, however, in the manner of Scarpacifico, dupes a passing shepherd, then appears to his brothers with the flock, thereby luring them to their deaths in their vain hope of finding sheep at the bottom of the sea.73

Turning now to Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Little Klaus and Big Klaus,’ the story tradition looks back not only to ‘Unibos’ but to the tales of ‘Peasant Kibitz’ and to the ‘Little Fairly’ group – somewhat more removed from the Straparola’s sources, but squarely within the general tradition of the tale. Little Klaus gets into a row with Big Klaus over the ownership of Big Klaus’s horses, another tale of the little guy against the powerful big guy.74 The deceptions work, as they do in Straparola, by inducing the gullible Big Klaus to imitate what Little Klaus does, but always to his detriment, namely selling hides at market for high prices and selling his grandmother’s corpse, which entails first the senseless slaughter of his herd and then the murder of his own grandmother. The retaliation comes in the form of the sack exchange, but ends in reverse with Big Klaus’s ultimate request to be thrown into the river to increase his cattle holdings.

In the Grimm brothers’ tale of ‘The Little Farmer,’ no. 61 of the Fairy Tales, it is again the underdog who seeks to increase his store by trickery.75 With a wooden calf, he deceives a cowherd and wins from him a living animal. This he slays for lack of provender in order to sell the hide. As in the Andersen tale, there is the inset story at the hotel where Little Farmer overhears the preparations by the hostess for meeting her priest-lover and sees where the provisions are hastily hidden when the husband arrives early.76 All this he turns to advantage by pretending that his little raven can reveal secrets, including those of the clergyman hiding in the closet, who is later taken for the devil because of his black clothes. The trickster sequence continues by inducing all the townsfolk to slaughter their herds of cattle to sell the hides at high prices. Their deception leads them to an attempted execution of Little Farmer by placing him in a barrel and rolling him into a lake. But again he escapes when a shepherd agrees to take his place in order to become mayor. In the end, the entire village is wiped out by leaping into the water to find their fortunes in sheep.

As a final example of the fortune of folk motifs emanating from a central tradition, consider ‘The Story of Sigurdur, Sack-Knocker,’ collected in Iceland in the middle years of the nineteenth century.77 Sigurdur is a blacksmith so clever that he becomes the envy of the king’s sons, who burn down his forge. An honest man is thereby made a trickster in a world order in which deception alone will enable him to regain his losses. His first trick is to turn the ashes of his forge to gold whereby he induces the princes to attempt the same by first burning down the royal forge. The derision following their failure provokes the race for retaliation and the blacksmith’s countermanding fourberie. To deflect their anger, Sigurdur sells to them a coin-excreting horse, only to blame the purchasers for not following precise instructions. (This routine appears in many other versions of this tale and is the central feature of Straparola’s tale of ‘Adamantina,’ V.2, with its many analogues.) He then convinces them that his cudgel can beat hillocks into butter, once again relieving them of their money in exchange for a hoax. At this point, only the procedures of this tale coincide with Straparola’s. But the next episode involving the king himself is more familiar, because the blacksmith dresses his mother in rags, blows her over with a set of bellows, then causes her to rise as the rags fall off making her appear rejuvenated. This episode resonates with the blood-bladder trick and its various instruments of resuscitation leading to the trial slaughter of wives. The princes purchase the equipment and perform similarly upon their foster mother who dies, beaten inside a sack. They then kill Sigurdur’s mother in retaliation, which inaugurates a trick with an independent history of tying dead persons to horses and driving them into places where others can be blamed for their deaths. In keeping, the blacksmith ties his mother to a horse, and by frightening the royal oxen with this apparition, he positions himself to accuse the king’s employees. In the final episode, the blacksmith is placed in a sack and suspended over the sea from a cliff, but as in the Straparola tale, he lures a passing rustic into the sack with false promises and escapes with his sheep. Seeing this, the king’s sons are induced to seek herds of their own from the bottom of the sea and so perish, leaving the realm to their excluded sister and to Sigurdur, whom she marries for having served as her agent in ridding her of these despicable siblings. It is fascinating that a romance dimension has been found even for this configuration of trickster routines and that the inherent narrative structure persists intact after so many borrowings from parallel stories.

Straparola’s tale is clearly part of this lengthy tradition, but the contribution it makes to its elaboration is less sure. It would appear that the folk repertory was fully fitted out with motifs from popular sources and did not need to fall back on written versions to revitalize the narrative of the clever thief. Given the absence of the ‘Brahmin motif’ in all subsequent folk versions, it would appear that Straparola’s tripartite design did not find imitators in the oral tradition. It was nevertheless replicated in a literary retelling of the tale by Thomas Simon Gueullette in the ‘Adventures of the Young Kalandar’ in his Thousand and One Quarters of Hours (Tartarian Tales), a work first published in French in 1723. At least five of the tales in this collection have direct alignments with stories in the Piacevoli notti, further confirming the presumption that this creator of ‘oriental’ tales had the Louveau translation of the Notti frequently before his eyes, making him perhaps second in the magnitude of his dept to Straparola after the Comtesse d’Aulnoy.78 Gueullette (sometimes Gueulette), under the influence of Galland and Count Hamilton, situates his tales in Eastern settings. Thus the Kalandar buys his mule in Shiraz before meeting the three rogues along the road. He plays upon them the trick of the goat sent home with provisions and commands. The blood bladder trick is now played upon the cook who had failed to explain to the rogues the precise secret for managing the goat, while a magic hunting horn replaces the scatological bagpipes as the instrument of resuscitation. All along, in fact, Gueullette adds novelistic detail and draws out the episodes. When the three murder their wives, two are taken and executed, while one escapes to carry forward the attempted revenge. The sack episode follows and it is now a jinn (genie) at the bottom of the river who will supply the three robbers with sheep in abundance – Gueullette having forgotten that two of the robbers had already been killed off. It is a lively retelling and a small monument to Straparola’s part in the transmission of this popular narrative cluster of folk materials.79

The First Night

Proem

I. Fable 1
The Disobedience of Salardo

I.1 Commentary

I. Fable 2
Cassandrino the Master-Thief

I.2 Commentary

I. Fable 3
How Scarpacifico Swindles the Swindlers

I.3 Commentary

The First Night

Proem

I. Fable 1The Disobedience of Salardo

I.1 Commentary

I. Fable 2Cassandrino the Master-Thief

I.2 Commentary

I. Fable 3How Scarpacifico Swindles the Swindlers

I.3 Commentary

I. Fable 1
The Disobedience of Salardo

I. Fable 2
Cassandrino the Master-Thief

I. Fable 3
How Scarpacifico Swindles the Swindlers