Ginevra

Ginevra is the wife of Bernabo Lomellini, a woman falsely branded an adulteress whose survival depends on the very disguise that enables her eventual public vindication. After Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza fabricates proof of an affair, Bernabo orders her killed; she escapes by taking a man’s clothes and name, and spends six years moving through the world as Sicurano. Her rise from threatened wife to trusted officer at Acre makes the story’s reversal more than a rescue: Ginevra returns to the scene of her accusation with the authority to expose the liar and ask mercy for the husband who believed him.

Marriage and the wager

Ginevra enters the story as Bernabo’s wife, living in Genoa. Her danger begins in Paris, where Ambrogiuolo boasts that no woman can resist him and wagers five thousand florins that he can make Ginevra yield. He does not win her affection or enter into an affair with her. Instead, he gains access to her chamber by hiding in a chest, then steals objects from her belongings while she is unaware of his presence. The purse, night-rail, rings, and girdles he takes become false evidence designed to make his boast credible.

When Ambrogiuolo recounts the chamber’s appearance and displays the stolen possessions, Bernabo remains doubtful. The decisive lie is more intimate: Ambrogiuolo describes a mole beneath Ginevra’s left breast, surrounded by a few reddish hairs. Bernabo recognizes the detail and takes it as proof. His response is not to question his wife but to accept the wager’s loss and return to Genoa intent on killing her. The private fact that should establish her identity is made to serve a stranger’s fraud.

Escape and the assumed identity

Bernabo summons Ginevra to meet him at a country house. On the journey, his servant draws a knife in a lonely valley and tells her that Bernabo has commanded her death. Ginevra asks what wrong she has done, then pleads with the servant not to become a murderer for his master. She offers him a way to obey the order’s appearance without carrying out its violence: he can take her clothes back and report that she is dead, while she leaves the region and ensures that no news of her reaches either man.

The servant takes her clothes, gives her his doublet and hood, and leaves her with some money. After nightfall, Ginevra reaches a nearby village, alters the clothes to fit her, cuts her hair, and disguises herself as a sailor. At the shore she meets the Catalan gentleman Senor Encararch and enters his service under the name Sicurano da Finale. She earns his favor through capable service. When he travels to Alexandria, he presents peregrine falcons to Saladin, who asks for Sicurano to enter his own service. Ginevra’s adopted identity thus carries her from a precarious escape into a position of trust.

Authority at Acre and recognition

In time, Saladin appoints Sicurano governor and captain of the guard at the merchants’ fair in Acre. Ginevra has learned the language of the country and performs the duties of the office diligently. While inspecting the merchants’ stalls, she recognizes a purse and a girdle as her own. She asks about the objects without revealing who she is, and Ambrogiuolo claims them, laughing as he tells how he stole them and won his wager. He also says that Bernabo ordered Ginevra killed after believing his story.

Ginevra understands that Ambrogiuolo’s falsehood caused her persecution. Rather than expose herself at once, she keeps her composure, cultivates his acquaintance, and persuades him to accompany her to Alexandria after the fair. She also arranges for Bernabo to be brought before Saladin. In the ruler’s presence, Ambrogiuolo repeats his account, while Bernabo admits that he ordered the killing because he believed the allegation and wished to avenge the shame he thought he had suffered.

Only then does Ginevra reveal herself. Weeping, she kneels before Saladin, gives her name, and explains that she has spent six years wandering in men’s clothes after Ambrogiuolo slandered her and Bernabo sent a servant to kill her. She opens the front of her clothing and shows her breast, confirming the identity that her disguise had concealed. She then challenges Ambrogiuolo to say when he ever lay with her. Recognizing her, he is so overcome with shame that he cannot answer. The bodily detail he had used to make his lie persuasive becomes part of the proof by which she is restored to herself.

Judgment, return, and significance

Saladin praises Ginevra’s constancy and virtue, pardons Bernabo at her request, and orders Ambrogiuolo bound to a stake, smeared with honey, and exposed in a high place until he dies. The punishment reverses the fraud’s distribution of harm: the liar, not the innocent woman, bears the consequences of the false accusation. Saladin gives Ginevra Ambrogiuolo’s property, worth more than ten thousand ducats, and further gifts of jewels, gold and silver vessels, and money worth more than another ten thousand. He hosts a banquet in honor of Ginevra and Bernabo, equips a ship for their return, and sends them back to Genoa wealthy and reconciled.

Bernabo falls at Ginevra’s feet in tears and asks forgiveness. She grants it and embraces him as her husband, although the narration observes that he is scarcely worthy of her pardon. Their reunion does not erase the difference between the two responses that shaped her fate: Bernabo trusted a stranger’s claim over the truth he might have learned from long experience, while Ginevra chooses mercy after surviving the result of his credulity. At home she is received with honor, and those who had believed her dead now recognize her worth and virtue.

Ginevra’s assumed male identity is both a means of survival and the condition of her unusual access to authority. As Sicurano, she travels, enters service, wins the confidence of powerful men, and commands the guard at a major merchant fair; as Ginevra, she finally speaks in public and identifies the chain of deceit that injured her. The plot makes her return depend not on a private confession from her accuser but on her own deliberate arrangement of a public reckoning. Her story’s central reversal is that the woman once reduced to an object of a wager and a husband’s suspicion becomes the person who controls the confrontation, asks for the guilty man’s punishment, and secures her husband’s pardon.