Torello’s presumed death

Torello’s presumed death is a false report that reshapes the lives of both the absent Messer Torello d'Istria and his wife, Madam Adalieta. A namesake’s death is mistaken for his; the news reaches home, where grief and family pressure begin to settle the future in his absence. Meanwhile, Torello, alive in Alexandria, comes to believe that his wife has remarried. The state ends only when he returns in person, still unknown to those who have accepted his death as fact.

The mistaken report

During the campaign, Saladin captured Messer Torello d'Istria. On the same day, a Provençal gentleman of little renown, Messer Torello de Dignes, died and was buried in the Christian host. Because the captured Torello was well known for his magnificence, people who heard that Messer Torello had died assumed the report referred to him, not to the man from Dignes. Some returning Italians even claimed to have seen his death and attended his burial. The capture prevented those who had been misled from correcting the error, allowing an accidental coincidence of names to pass as eyewitness certainty.

What the report does at home

When the news reached Madam Adalieta and Torello’s kin, it caused grievous sorrow. She mourned for months before her grief began to ease, and prominent men in Lombardy sought her in marriage. She repeatedly refused, but her brothers and other relatives pressed her to marry again. At last she consented on the condition that she would not go to her new husband until the period she had promised Torello had elapsed. Her choice preserves a pledge to her presumed-dead husband even as her family pushes her toward a new marriage.

Torello’s own mistaken belief

In Alexandria, Torello encountered a man he had seen board the galley carrying the Genoese ambassadors. The man recounted that the ship had met a violent northerly wind near Sicily, been driven onto the quicksands of Barbary, and lost everyone aboard; two of his own brothers had perished. Torello believed the account. Knowing that the time he had asked Madam Adalieta to wait was nearly over, he concluded that no one at home could know he was alive and that she must have married again. The report did not describe Torello’s own death, but it made his separation from home seem final to him.

Return and recognition

The belief plunged Torello into such distress that he lost sleep and appetite, took to his bed, and resolved to die. Saladin, who loved him, learned what was wrong and promised to get him to Pavia before the appointed time. A magician arranged for Torello, asleep on a bed, to be transported there in one night. When Torello awoke at his uncle the abbot’s lodging, the monks fled: they had believed him dead for months. The abbot then told him that Madam Adalieta, against her will and under pressure from her kin, had married again and was to go to her new husband that very morning. Torello asked that his return be kept secret while he went to see the wedding. Disguised by his great beard and Saracen clothing, he sat opposite her, but she did not recognize him; the scene makes plain that the false report has survived not only in rumor but in the couple’s altered lives.