Fortune

Fortune in the Decameron is the force of unstable circumstance: it can scatter a community, interrupt love, or turn an apparent disaster toward an unexpected recovery. The work does not treat every reversal as sheer chance. Its framing contrasts circumstances beyond human control with the choices people make in response, and with a providence that may remain difficult to read. The result is a recurring question about how far human beings can shape their own outcomes when the world refuses to hold still.

A passage from sorrow toward joy

The opening establishes this pattern in the shape of the book itself. The author warns that the account of the plague will be a painful beginning, but asks readers not to mistake that beginning for the whole work. He compares it to a rugged, steep mountain beyond which lies a fair and delightful plain: the pleasure of the destination becomes greater because of the hardship of the passage. Sorrow and gladness are presented not as separate conditions but as experiences whose contrast changes how each is felt. The initial distress is brief, while the stories that follow offer the promised pleasure and delight.

The plague that reaches Florence in 1348 makes that contrast more than a literary figure. Human wisdom and foresight prove insufficient to stop the calamity. People respond in different ways: some flee the city and seek refuge in country houses, while others remain. Flight offers no dependable protection. Many who leave fall ill elsewhere, and the sick are often left nearly abandoned. The disaster exposes how fragile the usual protections of home, kinship, and civic life have become. Fortune is therefore not simply a device for surprising an individual protagonist; it is also a pressure that can overturn the conditions on which an entire society relies.

The storytelling rules make reversals their subject

The company gives this instability a formal place in its storytelling. Under Pampinea's governance, the first day's subject permits each teller to speak about what seems most agreeable. Later, the queen of the second day frames the stories around people buffeted by varied turns of Fortune who finally arrive at a joyful outcome beyond their expectation. On the third day, the proposed theme shifts from being struck by circumstance to acting with diligence: tellers are to describe people who obtain a desired thing or recover a lost good through effort. The sequence matters. Reversal can be endured, but the stories also ask what attention, persistence, and practical action can accomplish within changing circumstances.

The themes do not reduce Fortune to a predictable reward for virtue. Instead, they place chance and agency beside one another. A person may suffer an unforeseen loss without having caused it; another may use judgment to improve a difficult situation without controlling every event. The distinction between the second day's hopeful change of outcome and the third day's emphasis on diligence makes room for both experiences: recovery that exceeds expectation and recovery pursued through deliberate work.

Tedaldo's return turns apparent loss into rescue

Tedaldo Elisei's story gives this pattern a sharply defined personal course. After Madam Ermellina, the wife of Aldobrandino Palermini, withdraws her affection, Tedaldo becomes deeply melancholy. His love had been concealed, so those around him do not recognize its cause. Having tried unsuccessfully to regain her favor, he secretly leaves Florence. In Ancona he takes service with a merchant, travels to Cyprus, and, through his conduct and diligence, becomes a prosperous and trusted associate. Yet success does not erase his attachment: for seven years he resists the desire to return.

A song he himself had composed reawakens that desire. Tedaldo arranges his affairs, sends his possessions toward Florence, and follows in disguise as a pilgrim returning from the Holy Sepulchre. On arrival, he discovers that a stranger has been mistaken for him and buried as though he were dead. Worse, Aldobrandino is in prison, accused of murdering Tedaldo and brought toward judgment by false appearances and testimony. Tedaldo's return, meant to bring him back to the woman he loves, thus reveals a crisis he could not have anticipated.

The decisive information comes by accident. At an inn, Tedaldo overhears three men admit that they, not Aldobrandino, killed the man identified as Tedaldo. This discovery changes the meaning of the apparent catastrophe: the man believed dead is alive, and the husband facing death is innocent. Tedaldo uses what he has learned to work for Aldobrandino's release. He also speaks with Madam Ermellina about her withdrawal from him and persuades her to promise that, if Tedaldo returns, she will restore her affection and intimacy. The turns of the plot are not interchangeable strokes of luck: mistaken identity creates the peril, the killers' careless disclosure makes its correction possible, and Tedaldo chooses to use the knowledge to save the accused man.

Fortune, providence, and appearances

The pilgrim's explanation to Madam Ermellina gives the crisis a moral interpretation. He links her unjust rejection of Tedaldo with the danger now facing her husband, presenting her distress as a consequence of her earlier conduct. That interpretation belongs to the story's account of divine justice; it should not be confused with a general rule that every misfortune is deserved. Elsewhere, the opening narration emphasizes how little people can know of divine intention, even as it describes divine aid as a source of strength and foresight beyond human merit. Fortune's turns and providence are thus related but not identical: events may appear arbitrary to human observers, while religious characters attempt to read a larger purpose in them.

The stories also show why appearances cannot always be trusted as evidence of what has happened. Ferondo wakes after nearly ten months in a tomb and believes that he has been restored from purgatory through the prayers of the abbot, Saint Benedict, and his wife. The abbot presents the return as a miracle; Ferondo then supplies an elaborate account of the afterlife to the people who question him. His apparent passage from death to life is produced by human contrivance, not by the supernatural explanation he accepts. The episode places a false appearance of providence beside genuine uncertainty about divine purposes, and makes the ability to interpret events part of the struggle with Fortune.

Abraham's conversion offers a different collision between expectation and outcome. Jehannot de Chevigné urges him to visit Rome, expecting that the visit will strengthen his case for Christianity. Abraham instead sees the clergy's greed, gluttony, and sexual misconduct and returns to Paris convinced that their conduct should destroy the religion they represent. What changes his judgment is the opposite: despite the clergy's efforts, as he understands them, Christianity continues to grow. He concludes that the faith must rest on the Holy Spirit rather than on the character of its corrupt ministers, and asks to be baptized. The episode makes the outcome depend not on the virtue Abraham expected to find, but on the startling discrepancy between institutional failure and the religion's continued flourishing.

Across these episodes, Fortune marks the gap between what people expect and what circumstances reveal. The plague shows the limits of flight; Tedaldo's story converts apparent death and false accusation into a chance for rescue; Ferondo's return demonstrates how easily a human scheme can masquerade as a miracle; and Abraham discovers a reason for faith in the very evidence that seemed likely to defeat it. The Decameron's governing emphasis is not that every reversal can be mastered, but that its meaning and consequences depend on what people notice, how they act, and how cautiously they judge what they cannot know.