Liberality and avarice

Liberality and avarice recur in the Decameron as opposing ways of using wealth, hospitality, and social power. A withheld meal or an unpaid guest can expose a person’s character; a deft story can make that failure visible and even change it. Yet the work does not equate generosity with indiscriminate expenditure: it contrasts courteous giving with waste, financial recklessness, and the purchase or manipulation of other people. Its comic rebukes make liberality a public virtue, while its religious stories sharpen the contrast between genuine spiritual beneficence and the greed or fraud of those who claim sacred authority.

Hospitality as a Measure of Character

In the story of Primasso and the Abbot of Cluny, generosity first appears as a reputation. The abbot is famed for keeping open house and for refusing neither food nor drink to visitors who arrive at mealtime. Primasso, a learned grammarian and accomplished verse-maker, hears of this welcome while he is poor and sets out on foot to see it for himself. He carries three cakes of bread for the journey, a small provision that becomes the measure of the welcome he expects.

The abbot delays his meal, and his servants report that Primasso is still waiting. When they add that the visitor is eating bread he brought himself, the abbot decides that the stranger may eat his own food but will receive nothing from the house. Primasso finishes one cake, then a second, then a third; each report makes the contrast more pointed. The host’s celebrated hospitality has narrowed into a refusal directed at one unknown guest.

Only then does the abbot ask who the visitor is. Learning that Primasso is a man of merit whose reputation he already knows, he is ashamed and makes amends: he entertains him, clothes him according to his standing, gives him money and a palfrey, and leaves him free to stay or go. Primasso returns to Paris on horseback after arriving on foot. The reversal makes recognition both the abbot’s excuse for giving and the story’s rebuke: a reputation for liberality means little if welcome depends on identifying a prestigious recipient. The three cakes turn an abstract question of avarice into a visible sequence of waiting, withholding, and belated generosity.

Tactful Rebuke and the Repair of Parsimony

Filostrato’s account of Bergamino transfers the problem of withheld hospitality from a great churchman to Cangrande della Scala, a celebrated nobleman. Cangrande has planned an elaborate entertainment in Verona, then abruptly abandons it and dismisses the assembled visitors. Bergamino, a renowned speaker and storyteller, receives neither a gift nor a dismissal. He remains in hope of a better turn, but his stay costs him: to pay his host, he gives up two of the three fine suits he brought for the festival and begins to live on the third.

When Cangrande sees him standing disconsolate at dinner and asks him to tell something, Bergamino answers with the story of Primasso. Its relevance is plain without an explicit accusation. Primasso’s three cakes, the abbot’s sudden reluctance to feed a guest, and the eventual gifts give Bergamino a way to describe his own predicament without directly challenging his lord. The parallel makes the story an instrument of counsel: it lets Cangrande recognize his conduct in another man’s failure.

Cangrande understands the rebuke. He acknowledges that Bergamino has represented both the wrong done to him and his own niggardliness, pays the host, gives Bergamino money and a palfrey, and provides him with fine clothing. Bergamino’s tale does more than secure immediate compensation. By recalling that generosity can be recovered through self-recognition, it turns a comic performance into a means of restoring the obligations between patron and guest.

Lauretta’s story of Guglielmo Borsiere makes the rebuke still more direct. Messer Ermino de’ Grimaldi possesses wealth said to exceed that of any other Italian, yet his avarice reaches beyond hospitality to his own necessities: he deprives himself of food, drink, and other comforts rather than spend. His reputation is so thoroughly defined by this conduct that people call him Messer Ermino Avarizia, as though avarice had displaced his family name.

Borsiere, a well-spoken and respected minstrel, visits Ermino in Genoa. Ermino shows him a fine new house and asks what he might have painted in its hall that has never been seen before. Borsiere answers that he knows of nothing unseen except sneezing and the like, but can name something Ermino has not yet beheld: Liberality. The answer turns a request for decorative novelty into an accusation about the host’s life. Ermino is so ashamed that he resolves to have Liberality depicted and, from then on, becomes the most liberal and courteous gentleman in Genoa, hospitable to strangers and citizens alike. The imagined painting gives visible form to a virtue absent from his household; the change in his conduct is the story’s proof that a sharp rebuke can do more than expose a vice.

Wealth, Exchange, and the Limits of Generosity

Other commercial stories distinguish liberality from the mere movement of money. Three Florentine brothers rebuild their fortune in London by lending at usance, return to Florence, and buy back much of their family property. Their fortunes then turn on spending and credit: they resume lavish expenditure, while their nephew Alessandro lends money to English barons against castles and other possessions. When war breaks out between the king and his son, those estates are taken from Alessandro, expected revenues fail to arrive, and the brothers continue borrowing. Their credit collapses; creditors seek repayment, their property proves insufficient, and the brothers are imprisoned. The sequence contrasts wealth acquired through lending with the stability of generosity: money accumulated or spent without regard to changing circumstances cannot secure lasting prosperity.

A gathering of Italian merchants in Paris presents a different failure in the language of exchange. The merchants joke that they take lovers while away from their wives and assume that their wives behave similarly. Bernabo Lomellini alone insists on his wife’s chastity and exceptional abilities. Ambrogiuolo of Piacenza mocks his confidence, wagers against it, and uses money to enlist a poor woman connected to the household. Hidden in a chest, he enters Ginevra’s bedchamber, observes its furnishings, and steals her purse, night-rail, rings, and girdles. He returns with those objects and a private physical detail, persuading Bernabo that he has won.

The episode is not an example of liberality but a counter-image: money here purchases access and supports deception rather than hospitality or care. Ambrogiuolo converts another person’s trust into an advantage, while the stolen belongings become false evidence in a wager over a woman’s character. Set beside the stories of Bergamino and Borsiere, the episode clarifies that giving, payment, and generosity are not interchangeable. What matters is whether wealth sustains a reciprocal social bond or is used to exploit someone within it.

Spiritual Beneficence and Its Counterfeits

The opening story of Ser Ciappelletto places human judgments of virtue beside the possibility of divine mercy. Its framing reflection holds that people cannot rely on their own merit to withstand the hardships of mortal life and that divine grace may answer a suppliant even when the person chosen as an advocate is, in truth, condemned. The story deliberately distinguishes God’s response from the judgment of people. In that frame, liberality is not simply a human virtue: divine compassion exceeds the moral worth of the intermediary through whom a prayer is offered.

The story of Abraham, a Jew urged by Jehannot de Chevigné to visit Rome, gives avarice a clerical setting. Abraham observes churchmen who are greedy for money and who buy and sell sacred things and church benefices. After returning to Paris, he tells Jehannot that the conduct he saw should have led him to reject Christianity. Instead, he reasons that if its leaders strive to ruin the religion but fail, while it continues to grow, its foundation must be the Holy Spirit rather than their example. He asks to be baptized and is named Giovanni. The conversion does not excuse the clergy’s conduct; its force lies in the contrast between their greed and the faith that survives it.

Two comic religious episodes further unsettle the appearance of spiritual generosity. Ferondo emerges from his tomb believing that the abbot’s prayers, those of Saint Benedict, and his wife’s prayers have released him from purgatory and restored him to life. He thanks the abbot and tells the villagers elaborate stories about the souls of their dead. His gratitude is sincere, but the supposed miracle is staged: the episode makes religious comfort depend on a deception and shows how readily a community may accept a performance of holiness as proof of divine favor.

Fra Alberto’s fate offers a harsher exposure. After pretending to be the angel Gabriel, he is unmasked before a crowd, recognized, abused, and carried back to his convent by fellow friars; the narrator reports that he is believed to have died in prison. Against these counterfeit claims to sacred authority, the opening account of divine compassion remains a different kind of liberality: it is not a reward for public reputation, wealth, or office. Across the stories, the contrast between genuine generosity and avarice therefore reaches beyond money. It tests whether a person uses power to welcome and sustain others, or turns hospitality, faith, and trust into instruments of self-interest.