Charles I Resists Desire and Arranges Marriages for the Sisters

Charles the Old’s encounter with Ginevra the Fair and Isotta the Blonde turns royal desire into a test of rule: rather than seize the sisters, he uses his power to secure their marriages and restrains himself. The episode measures a king’s greatness not only by victory over enemies, but by his capacity to govern his own appetite.

Background and the Garden Supper

After Charles the Old’s victory over Manfred, the Ghibellines had been expelled from Florence and the Guelphs had returned. Messer Neri degli Uberti, a gentleman of the defeated party, left Florence with his household and much money, seeking refuge under the king’s protection. He settled at Castellamare di Stabia, where he bought an estate among olive, walnut, and chestnut trees and built a comfortable house beside a garden. A clear fishpond, supplied with running water and stocked with fish, became the center of the garden’s beauty.

While Charles was resting at Castellamare in the heat of summer, he heard of Neri’s garden and arranged to sup there privately with four companions. Knowing that Neri belonged to the opposing political party, the king considered it all the more important to approach him familiarly. Neri welcomed him with elaborate hospitality: the tables stood beside the fishpond, Count Guy de Montfort sat at the king’s side, and the meal was served quietly and with evident care. The king praised the order of the supper and the garden that surrounded it. That welcome matters to the later conflict: Neri receives the king not as an enemy to be exploited, but as an honored guest, placing a claim of hospitality and trust alongside the king’s political power.

The Sisters at the Fishpond

The supper’s carefully ordered hospitality was interrupted by a spectacle prepared within the garden itself. Two young women, about fifteen years old and so alike that the king could scarcely decide which pleased him more, entered with fishing and cooking equipment: one carried hand-nets and a long pole, the other a frying-pan, firewood, a trivet, oil, and a lighted torch. Their golden hair hung loose in ringlets beneath wreaths of periwinkle, and each wore a fine white linen garment. They bowed modestly to the king before going down into the fishpond, where the water rose to their breasts.

A servant kindled a fire beneath the trivet and set the pan over it. One sister probed the places where the fish hid with the pole while the other waited with her net; soon they had caught plenty. At Neri’s instruction, they tossed fish to the servant, who cooked them almost alive, and then cast some onto the table before the king and his companions. The fish writhed across the table. Charles and the others watched, and the king playfully threw the fish back toward the sisters until the servant had cooked enough to serve. The meal’s elaborate courtesy thus gave way to a staged, lively exchange between the water, the table, and the guests.

When the sisters emerged, their wet, thin garments clung to them, and the king and his companions watched them pass before returning to the house. Neri identified them as his twin daughters, Ginevra the Fair and Isotta the Blonde. They later returned in fine gowns carrying silver platters of fruit, then stood apart and sang a song. Charles listened with rapt attention; after they had knelt and asked leave to depart, he let them go, though their departure grieved him. He continued to think especially of Ginevra, and, because the sisters were so much alike, his desire for her extended to Isotta as well.

Desire, Hospitality, and Self-Government

As his visits to Messer Neri’s garden grew more frequent, Charles the Old could no longer keep his desire for Ginevra the Fair from governing his thoughts. He also found himself drawn to Isotta the Blonde, whose likeness to her sister blurred the distinction between them in his imagination. At last, believing he had no other way to satisfy his longing, he considered taking both young women from their father. He confided this passion and intention to Count Guy de Montfort, making private desire a matter of counsel between king and companion.

Guy answered not by treating the king’s passion as a harmless indulgence, but by setting it against the responsibilities of rule. Charles was still wearing his armor in a newly won kingdom, among a people unfamiliar to him and, Guy warned, full of treachery; grave affairs remained unsettled. To make room for appetite amid such obligations was, in Guy’s judgment, unworthy of a magnanimous king. More gravely, Charles was contemplating the seizure of the daughters of the man who had entertained him beyond his means and had shown them to his guest in trust. Neri’s welcome made the contemplated act not merely an abuse of royal power but a betrayal of hospitality.

Guy also recalled the political history that sharpened the offense: the violence Manfred had done to women had helped open the way for Charles’s entry into the kingdom. To repeat that kind of injury against a trusting host would stain the very victory that had made Charles powerful, even if the victim belonged to the Ghibelline party. The distinction between conquering an enemy and violating a guest’s trust became the moral hinge of the episode. Charles recognized the force of Guy’s reasoning and acknowledged that defeating one’s own appetites was harder than overcoming an external enemy; he promised to show in action that he could master himself.

Restraint Made Public

Charles’s promise to Count Guy de Montfort becomes consequential only when desire is translated into a different use of royal authority. Returning to Naples, he resolves both to remove the occasion for dishonoring Messer Neri and to repay the hospitality he had received. With Neri’s agreement, he gives the sisters substantial dowries and arranges marriages for them: Ginevra the Fair to Messer Maffeo da Palizzi, and Isotta the Blonde to Messer Guglielmo della Magna, both noble cavaliers and great barons. The king relinquishes the women he had wanted for himself and secures their futures through an arrangement made with their father, rather than taking them by force.

The decision costs Charles what he most desires. He consigns the sisters to their husbands with profound grief and goes into Apulia; there, amid continual exertions, he disciplines the appetite that had threatened to overrule him. The story says that he breaks free of love’s chains and remains free of that passion for the rest of his life. His self-command is therefore not presented as an easy or momentary refusal: it requires a change of conduct, separation from the object of desire, and sustained effort after the immediate decision.

The episode measures this act against Charles’s military success. His victory over Manfred had won him a kingdom, but Guy’s rebuke makes the sisters’ threatened seizure a test of whether conquest has become license. Charles’s response repairs, as far as the story shows, the danger his intention posed: he honors Neri’s trust, rewards his hospitality, and arranges marriages for the daughters whose beauty had awakened his desire. The narration calls this magnanimity precisely because he gives up what he covets without claiming a reward in return. It concludes that overcoming himself is a greater glory than overcoming another—making mastery of appetite, rather than possession, the decisive proof of royal greatness.