Who He Is
Manfred, whom tradition makes king of Sicily, is the fair, handsome, gentle-looking figure who, at the foot of the mountain in Ante-Purgatory, identifies himself to Dante by showing a wound high on his chest and smiling, and says whose descendant he is: grandson of Empress Constance. One of his eyebrows is split by a blow, and the pilgrim, who does not recognize him, denies having seen him. What the poem makes of him is a lesson in mercy given by an excommunicate: struck by two deadly points, he surrendered weeping to the one who pardons willingly, and that is why he is there and not in Hell. The image of his body, which the text narrates in detail, shows the other face of the scene: his bones, which would be at the head of a bridge under a heap of stones had the shepherd of Cosenza read that face of God well, were scattered by rain and wind, outside the kingdom, beside the Verde. Rome's condemnation took his tomb, not his salvation, and it is on that difference that the canto rests.
Trajectory
All of it happens in Canto III of Purgatory. Virgil has just spoken of the limit of human reason, and the two poets reach the foot of the mountain, where a people walks so slowly it seems to stand still. When the souls see that the light on the ground falls to Dante's right, they draw back, and the guide confesses that what they see is a human body. One of them asks him, alive, to look at him and say whether he saw him in the world. Dante, humbly, denies it, and then the stranger shows the wound and gives his name, and goes on to speak of his daughter, mother of the honor of Sicily and of Aragon, to whom Dante must tell the truth, if another tells it otherwise. The central sentence does not diminish what he did: it calls his own sins horrible and sets the scale on the other side, an infinite goodness with arms so wide that it takes in all that turns to it. The verb that decides is the verb of one who turns: goodness has arms so wide that it takes whatever turns to it, and Manfred turned after he was wounded. The next scene is the end of the body. The shepherd of Cosenza, sent by Pope Clement to hunt him down, did not read that face of God well, and so the bones, which would be at the head of a bridge near Benevento under a heap of stones, are now bathed by the rain and moved by the wind, outside the kingdom, beside the Verde, where they were carried with the candles put out. The Church's curse does not, however, decide the fate of the soul: eternal love can return while hope keeps a thread of green, and hope is spoken of as a plant that either has leaves or does not. The wait of one who dies in contumacy against the Church is measured in numbers: thirty times the span of his presumption, unless good prayers shorten it. That is why Manfred asks Dante to comfort him, telling his fair Constance how he saw him and of the prohibition that holds him, for much is gained here by those who are still there.
Themes Embodied
Manfred embodies boundless Mercy, and says so in Ante-Purgatory, where the time of waiting is the theme. The poem uses two opposed instruments to do it: a mercy with arms so wide that no guilt refuses them, and a rule of waiting that multiplies time by thirty. Redemption here does not lie in the penalty, which is long, but in the fact that it was possible: an excommunicate, surrendered at the last instant, is on the road up. Politics crosses the canto through the hand of Pope Clement and his shepherd, through Rome's curse that takes away the tomb, and through the daughter Manfred sends them to find, mother of kings.
The canto reconciles the two things by changing subject, not tone. Mercy speaks of God, the rule of waiting speaks of the Church. Whoever turns at the end is forgiven, and the Church that had excommunicated him goes on measuring his time until the prayers of the living shorten it. What the poem leaves out is who decides when the wait ends; it only says that prayer is the currency.
Divergent Readings
The text supports two readings of the sentence of waiting. In the first, the rule is part of mercy, because it gives the living a means of helping those who have gone. In the second, the rule is a severity that infinite goodness would not need, and the poem voices it through the mouth of a king who suffers because of it. The canto does not choose, and the order in which it lays out its sentences, first goodness, then the rule, lets the first speak louder.
Relationships
- Dante: the living man to whom Manfred introduces himself, asking that he carry the true news to his daughter.
- Virgil: the guide who, in the same canto, fixes the limit of reason, which is to hold the fact without the why, and who witnesses a mercy that goes beyond him.
- Cato: the guardian who sends them up the mountain, and whose impatience Manfred's wait measures.