Currado Malespina—Giusfredi

The relationship between Currado Malespina and Giusfredi is remade through a sequence of concealment, betrayal, recognition, and reconciliation. Giusfredi first enters Currado’s household under the assumed name Giannotto, as a young servant whose noble identity is hidden. When Currado discovers that he has secretly loved and slept with Spina, his daughter, master and servant become jailer and prisoner. Their eventual reconciliation depends not simply on Giusfredi’s recovered lineage, but on his refusal to flatter Currado or deny the love that caused the rupture.

Service Under a Hidden Name

Giusfredi is the elder son of Arrighetto Capece and Madam Beritola, but after the family’s fortunes collapse he grows up separated from his parents. His nurse changes his name to Giannotto to keep his identity from endangering him. He and his younger brother spend years in Messer Guasparrino’s household, poorly clothed and shod and occupied with menial work. At sixteen, unwilling to accept a servant’s condition as his whole future, Giusfredi leaves by galley for Alexandria and wanders without success. Several years later, hearing that his father may still be alive but is imprisoned by Charles I of Anjou, he reaches Lunigiana and enters Currado’s service.

Currado receives him as a capable and useful young servant. The relationship is, at this point, governed by the difference in their positions: Currado is the master, and Giusfredi serves him with aptitude and wins his acceptance. Neither recognizes the other connection running beneath that arrangement. Madam Beritola is living with Currado’s lady, yet the passage of years has altered both mother and son so much that they do not recognize one another when they meet. Giusfredi’s concealed name thus keeps him safe, but also leaves him unknowingly close to his own family.

Love Turns the Household Against Him

The balance of the household changes when Spina, Currado’s widowed daughter, returns to her father’s home. She is a little over sixteen, and she and Giusfredi fall passionately in love. Their meetings remain secret for several months, but growing confidence leads them to take less care. While they are together in a secluded part of a wooded place, Spina’s mother finds them, and Currado follows. He has the pair seized by three servants and taken in bonds to one of his castles, determined in his anger to put them to a shameful death.

Spina’s mother intervenes. Although she condemns her daughter’s conduct, she understands from Currado’s words that he intends to kill the lovers. She follows him and pleads that he should not become the murderer of his own daughter and a servant in his old age. Her intervention turns Currado from execution to imprisonment: he orders the lovers confined separately, heavily guarded, poorly fed, and left in hardship until he decides what to do. For a year they remain in confinement, apart and weeping. Currado’s authority, which had first offered Giusfredi a place in the world, now holds him and Spina at his mercy.

The Prisoner’s Identity Is Revealed

A change in Sicily gives Giusfredi a reason to reveal who he is. King Pedro of Aragon has raised the island against Charles I of Anjou and taken it from him. Giusfredi hears the news from a guard and laments that, after fourteen years of wandering in poverty in search of just such an opening, he is trapped in prison with no hope of release. Pressed by the gaoler, he explains that his father, Arrighetto Capece, had ruled in Sicily during the lifetime of King Manfred, and that he is not Giannotto but Giusfredi. If freed, he believes, he could regain high standing there.

The gaoler reports this disclosure to Currado. Though Currado does not reveal his reaction to the messenger, he goes privately to Madam Beritola and asks whether she once had a son named Giusfredi by Arrighetto. Her answer—that her elder son, if alive, would bear that name and be twenty-two—confirms the possibility. Currado then questions the prisoner about his life and finds unmistakable signs that he is indeed Giusfredi, son of Arrighetto and Madam Beritola. The discovery changes the meaning of the servant’s place in his household: the young man Currado had employed and then imprisoned is the son of a noble family, and also the missing son of someone close to his own household.

From Master and Prisoner to Son-in-Law

Currado offers Giusfredi release from his misery and an end to both men’s dishonor: Spina, who has been Giusfredi’s lover, can become his lawful wife, and he can remain in the household as Currado’s son. The offer is both a remedy for the lovers’ situation and a reconciliation between master and servant. Yet Currado does not demand submission without hearing Giusfredi’s account of himself.

Giusfredi answers candidly. He denies that ambition, greed, or a plot against Currado’s life ever motivated him. He admits that he loved Spina and behaved toward her in a way that public opinion might condemn, but describes the offense as one bound up with youth and committed as a friend, not an enemy. He welcomes the marriage Currado offers, while making clear that false hope would be worse than a return to prison. His honesty does not erase the breach between them; it shows Currado that Giusfredi’s attachment to Spina and his respect for Currado have survived even when he was powerless.

Currado is astonished by Giusfredi’s generosity of spirit and by the constancy of his love. He embraces and kisses him, then has Spina brought to the castle. The lovers, both made lean and weak by imprisonment, marry in Currado’s presence. After providing for the newlyweds, Currado tells his lady and Cavriuola, Giusfredi’s mother, the joyful news. His settlement of the affair makes the former servant his son-in-law and restores him to the family from which he had been separated. Their relationship ends not with the restoration of the old master-servant order, but with Currado’s acceptance of Giusfredi as kin.