Master Mazzeo della Montagna

Master Mazzeo della Montagna is an elderly and celebrated surgeon in Salerno whose medical preparation becomes the accidental instrument of a domestic crisis. In the tale of his unnamed wife and Ruggieri da Jeroli, his departure to treat the wounded leaves behind a draught intended for surgery; Ruggieri drinks it, falls into a deathlike sleep, and is caught in a scheme that ends with him mistaken for a thief. Mazzeo’s professional expertise thus drives the plot even while he is away from its central confusion.

Identity and Household

Master Mazzeo is introduced as a very famous doctor of surgery, already advanced in age. He marries a fair, gentle young woman from Salerno and provides her with sumptuous clothing, jewels, and other comforts. Material provision, however, does not answer her dissatisfaction: she is said to spend much of her time cold because he keeps her poorly covered in bed, and his explanations for avoiding intercourse leave her discontented.

The story presents a sharp contrast between his public distinction as a physician and the private arrangement of his marriage. Mazzeo tells his wife that lying with a woman requires many days of study to restore his strength. The account treats this as an excuse rather than a medical fact, and her response is to seek pleasure elsewhere, eventually choosing Ruggieri da Jeroli. Her decision and her subsequent efforts to assist him belong to her, not to Mazzeo’s knowledge or consent.

Medical Practice and the Draught

The plot’s medical crisis begins with a patient whose leg is gangrened. After examining him, Mazzeo tells the patient’s relatives that a decayed bone must be removed; otherwise the whole limb will have to be amputated, or the patient will die. He is willing to undertake the bone-removal procedure only on the understanding that the patient may not survive it. The relatives agree and entrust the patient to his care.

Expecting that the patient could not endure the pain or submit to the operation while conscious, Mazzeo prepares a water-based sleeping draught. He intends it to keep the patient asleep for the period needed to perform the procedure. He distils it himself that morning and brings it home, but leaves it in his chamber without telling anyone what it is. That omission makes an item of medical preparation available to someone who mistakes it for ordinary drinking water.

The Night of His Absence

When the time comes to attend the patient, a messenger arrives from Mazzeo’s influential friends in Malfi, urgently summoning him because many people have been wounded in a serious affray. Mazzeo postpones the operation until the next morning and travels by boat to Malfi. His departure is the immediate circumstance that gives his wife an opportunity to bring Ruggieri into the house without Mazzeo’s presence.

Ruggieri, waiting in the chamber, becomes thirsty and sees the flagon by the window. Believing its contents to be drinking water, he empties it. The draught soon overwhelms him, and he falls asleep. When Mazzeo’s wife returns and tries to wake him, nudging and shaking him, he does not respond. Her efforts grow more forceful: she pinches him and burns his flesh with a lighted taper, but he remains motionless, appearing to be dead. The drug intended to make a patient unconscious for surgery has made the lover look like a corpse.

Consequences and Narrative Irony

The story’s heading supplies the outcome of the chest episode that follows: two usurers carry away the chest containing Ruggieri, who later wakes and is mistaken for a thief. The physician’s wife’s maid declares before the authorities that she placed him in the chest that the usurers stole, allowing Ruggieri to escape the gallows; the usurers, in turn, are fined. Mazzeo’s draught has not been intended for Ruggieri, and the evidence does not say that Mazzeo learns what happened. Its accidental use nevertheless sets off the chain that brings the lovers, the chest, and the authorities into collision.

Mazzeo functions less as an active participant in the deception than as the absent professional whose ordinary medical precautions become the story’s hinge. The draught is precisely made for a serious operation, yet its placement in an unguarded chamber and the doctor’s unexpected summons redirect it into an intimate household plot. The resulting reversal depends on a gap between intended use and mistaken use: a medicine meant to suspend a patient’s consciousness makes a living man seem dead, and that appearance exposes him to the danger of being treated as a criminal.