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Dante and the Love’s Lieges as a Ghibelline Militia

The Templars’ battle cry was “Long Live God Holy Love!” In Jacques de Baisieux, the lord of the “land of love” was called Holy Love, who was one and the same with God himself, since the land of love was identified with the inalienable “heavenly region,” which was opposed to all contingent earthly lands. Moreover, the Love’s Lieges displayed the traits of a fighting militia, as they were endowed with weapons and secret accords of their own. Ricolfi, after saying that “they must not reveal the secrets of Love, but conceal them as best as they can,” added that “they must cooperate in their wills, words, and deeds.” In Francesco da Barberino, the Court of Love was represented as a heavenly curia of the elect, arranged in a hierarchical fashion, with angels in correspondence to each degree; considering what I have already mentioned about the bird as a symbol, this figuration (which recalls the castle of the Grail as a “spiritual palace” and “castle of souls”) does not have a different meaning from that of the Court of Love that is composed entirely of birds, which from time to time speak there. Moreover, da Barberino was a soldier and an ardent supporter of the Ghibelline cause, who joined the army of Henry VII (1308–13). The most characteristic Italian love poets were either moderate or radical Ghibellines, some with the scent of heresy, others undoubtedly heretics; and although they exalted women and spoke of love, they were men of action, of struggle, of war and faction.

Troubadours such as Guillaume Figueira and Guillaume Anelier, who survived the Crusade against the Cathars, sided enthusiastically with the Emperor, launching bitter attacks against the Church. Even Andrea Cappellano’s treatise was solemnly condemned by the Church in 1277, despite a visible lack of good reasons.¹ Dante, who in his Divine Comedy used as a central symbol the seal of the Templars’ Grand Master (i.e., the eagle and cross), traveled to Paris just when the great tragedy of the Templars unfolded, without telling anyone and without anyone ever learning the reasons for this trip.

From these elements, and from many other similar ones, one can suppose that the Love’s Lieges, besides constituting an initiatory chain, also had their own organization, which supported the cause of the Empire and opposed the Church. Not only were they the custodians of a secret doctrine, which was not compatible with the more exoteric Catholic teachings, but they were also people who militated against the hegemonistic claims of Rome’s Curia.

This was the thesis endorsed by Rossetti and Aroux, taken up by Valli and to a degree by Ricolfi and, more recently, by Alessandrini, though with a heavy emphasis on the merely political dimension. On this basis, the abovementioned symbolism could allow a further interpretation. The symbol of the woman as the safekeeper of the doctrine must be applied to the same organization. Laws of love, such as the one stating that “the woman who has received and accepted from the perfect lover the gifts of Massenia, namely, gloves and mystical cordon,² must give herself to him, least she be regarded a prostitute” are supposed to be formulas of faithfulness or militant solidarity, and so forth. The woman who according to Dante usurps Beatrice’s (that is, Holy Wisdom’s) role, forcing her to go in exile, is the Catholic Church’s exotericism, which has forcibly replaced the “true doctrine”; this is the meaning of the “petrifying stone” that encloses the woman Petra alive.

In this regard, there are some significant figurations by da Barberino. In that figuration with the fourteen figures who, arranged in couples, form seven hierarchical degrees, we can see that the lower degrees are constituted by the “religious” element, corresponding to a “cadaver,” which reproduces Dante’s view of the stone as synonymous with death. The representatives of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, compared to the Love’s Lieges, are secular and far from possessing a vivifying knowledge, or the true woman, or the Widow, who corresponds to the higher degrees, or to the “deserving knight” who has the “rose” and “life” while the former know only “death.”³ We may suppose that these higher degrees constituted the same suprareligious mystery to which the Templars were admitted only after rejecting the cross, and which in the cycle of the Round Table was represented by the Grail as a super and extraeucharistic mystery.

In the same literature are some reliable references to historical events about the Love’s Lieges as a militia and as a Ghibelline organization. One of the most significant documents is another illustration by da Barberino, in which we find the representation of the tragic victory of Death over Love. Death shoots an arrow at a woman, who is portrayed in the act of falling down, pierced. Next to her is Love, divided in two parts, the left one whole, the right one fragmented. Here I subscribe to Valli’s interpretation according to which Death is the Church and the pierced woman is the organization of the Love’s Lieges.⁴ As far as the bipartite figure of Love is concerned, its broken part corresponds to the wounded woman, that is, to the external and persecuted part of the organization, while its left side represents the invisible part of the organization, which, despite all, continued to exist. Moreover, in traditional symbolism, the left side was often related to what is occult and unmanifested.

At this point I will briefly consider the ultimate and general meaning of the movement of the Love’s Lieges in relation to the spirit of the Grail cycle and of the other traditions connected with it.

We may allow for a certain continuity or interference between the plane of an organization’s secret, initiatory doctrine and the plane of its militant Ghibelline orientation. However, as I have already said about the Love’s Lieges, this may well be an already dissociated form, mainly for two reasons. First, the action they promoted was militant and political, and not an action assumed as the basis for a spiritual or initiatory realization, as in the knightly and heroic path in general and as in the ideal orientation of the Templar movement. I have noted that, in regard to the initiatory dimension, the members of that tradition and organization were supposed to follow the “path of love.”

Second, as we analyze the background of the Love’s Lieges’ initiation, we notice that the woman, in her appearance in the form of Holy Wisdom, Lady Intelligence, or gnosis (as Valli and others have noted), suggests an essentially sapiential and contemplative plane, which is not disjoined from an ecstatic element; Dante’s intellectual horizon confirms this. Thus we may think that if in these groups the religious attitude of those who merely “believe” was overcome, one nevertheless remained in the sphere of a sort of Platonizing initiation and did not orient himself in the sense of a “regal” initiation that included the warrior and the sacral elements in a unity, as in the symbols of the Lord of the Two Swords, of the resurrection of the imperator and the king of the Grail. This is to say that the Ghibellinism of the Love’s Lieges lacked a spiritual counterpart that was truly congenial; this I why I have referred to it as a “dissociated form,” even though in some regards it perpetuated, as a secret organization, the previous or parallel tradition.

This consideration leads us to the historical plane; we may wonder if the antiecclesiastical character of this organization was merely contingent and not really connected to a true overcoming of Catholicism. In fact, within orthodox Catholicism there was room for a realization of a contemplative and more or less Platonic type; moreover, many dogmas and symbols of the apostolic tradition were susceptible to be vivified on its basis.⁵ Moreover, there are reasons to believe that the Love’s Lieges were quite open, at least in principle, to a purified and dignified Catholicism and that Dante’s stone had nothing to do with the Grail, but that it merely alluded to the Catholic Church of which Peter was the cornerstone. When he said that this stone, which was previously white, had turned black, apparently he alluded to its corruption, owing to which the Church had become some kind of tomb of Christ’s live doctrine, of which she was supposed to be the pure repository. Thus the Love’s Lieges opposed the Church not because they represented an essentially different tradition but because, according to them, the Church was no longer worthy of the pure Christian doctrine.⁶

If this is true, then Dante and the Love’s Lieges should not be put on the same level as the Grail’s knights. The Widow whom they talked about would not have been the solar tradition of the Empire, but an already weakened and lunar tradition, which therefore would not have been totally irreconcilable with the premises of a renewed Catholicism. An indirect proof of this is Dante’s view of the relationship between the Church and the Empire.

As I have said before, Dante’s view is centered on a limiting dualism and on a polarity between contemplative life and active life. Now, if starting from this dualism Dante bitterly attacked the Church for those aspects in which it did not confine itself to the pure contemplative life, becoming greedy for earthly powers and goods, denying in the process the Empire’s supreme right in the dimension of active life, and worse yet, attempting to usurp the Empire’s prerogatives, then it logically follows that on the basis of the same premises, Dante should have cultivated an equal aversion for the opposite tendency, namely, for any attempt on the part of the Empire to totally affirm its own dignity in the same spiritual domain to which the Church laid exclusive claims; a right, we should recall, that Dante granted it. In other words, Dante should have opposed radical Ghibellinism and the transcendent view of the imperium in the same way he opposed Guelphism, and this because of an initial theory that is “heterodox,” not so much from the point of view of a purified Catholicism but from the point of view of the primordial tradition of “regal” spirituality.

Therefore, against the tendency of some people to overvalue Dante’s “esotericism,” and despite the effective presence of this esotericism in many of his views, on the plane that I am discussing, Dante emerges much more as a poet and a fighter than as a man upholding an uncompromising doctrine. He displays too much passion and too much factionalism in his militant temporal views, while he tends to be much too Christian and contemplative in the spiritual domain. Hence, many of his confusions and oscillations, such as his confining Frederick II in hell, while at the same time defending the Templars against Philip the Fair. Generally speaking, everything seems to suggest that, in spite of everything, Dante used the Catholic tradition as his starting point, which he endeavored to elevate to a relatively initiatory (i.e., suprareligious) plane instead of being directly connected to the representatives of traditions that were superior to and predated both Christianity and Catholicism. Some of these traditions, for instance, would include the main sources of inspiration in the cycle of the Grail and of the Hermetic tradition.

Thus, when we consider the Love’s Lieges, we should see in it a Ghibelline group with an initiatory character, and as such endowed with a higher knowledge than the Church’s orthodox doctrine, yet upholding an already weakened and compromised view of the Imperial idea. Thus the most positive aspect of the current is that the Court of Love assumes the character of an immaterial kingdom and that the Lieges are individual personalities committed to a suprarational and ecstatic realization. In a certain way, this ideally corresponds to a pessimistic conclusion of the Grail legend, namely, to the Grail that becomes invisible again and to the Percival who abdicates to become an ascetic. It is especially in this form that tradition was preserved in the following period, increasingly divesting itself of the militant aspect and sometimes revivifying deeper and more original currents.

As far as the movement of the Love’s Lieges is concerned, in Italy it lasted up to the time of Boccaccio and Petrarch, though it assumed increasingly humanistic traits, until the artistic aspect eventually prevailed over the esoteric one. Then the symbols were transformed into mere allegories, their meaning no longer understood even by those who continued to employ them in their poems. During the early seventeenth century the vital principle of tradition appears to have been totally extinguished, not only overall, but also in individual authors. For a relative continuation one must refer to other groups and to other currents.