Fortune and chance

Fortune and chance in the Decameron are forces that redirect human lives without making human action meaningless. A chance encounter can open a path toward reunion, while jealousy, a poisoning, or an unforeseen confession can turn love and security into catastrophe. The stories also challenge the assumption that worldly rank reliably reflects merit: Guiscardo argues that Fortune may raise the unworthy and leave the worthy low. Together, these episodes present contingency not as a tidy system of reward and punishment but as an unstable condition in which intention and circumstance continually meet.

Fortune and Social Worth

In defending his relationship with Tancred’s daughter, Guiscardo insists that he did not become her lover by accident. He says that he chose her deliberately, drew her to him with care, and sustained their relationship through mutual perseverance and discretion. His account distinguishes the intentional course of their love from the social judgment brought against it: Tancred reproaches his daughter not only for loving, but for choosing a man of low condition.

Guiscardo turns that reproach into an argument about Fortune. Rank, he maintains, is not proof of virtue: Fortune may advance those who do not deserve high standing while leaving the most worthy in low estate. He then appeals to a more fundamental equality, arguing that all people share a common human origin and that souls were created with equal capacities and virtues. Nobility, in this account, is demonstrated by conduct rather than inherited position. Fortune can distribute status unevenly, but that distribution cannot establish who is truly noble.

Contingency and Deliberate Action

The countess’s journey shows chance opening a possibility that her own decisions make usable. After Bertrand imposes two nearly impossible conditions for her return, she considers how she might meet them. She gathers the leading men of the county, asks them to govern in her absence, declares that she is leaving Bertrand free to possess the county, and sets out as a pilgrim with a cousin and a chamberwoman. Her departure is not a random drift: she is well supplied with money and jewels, and she means to learn whether the required conditions can be fulfilled.

She reaches Florence and takes lodging with a widow. By chance, Bertrand rides past the inn the following day. Although she recognizes him, she asks the hostess who he is; from the answer, she learns that he is pursuing a poor, unmarried young woman who lives with her mother. The encounter supplies information she could not have gained simply by planning her route, but she listens, makes inquiries, and resolves on a course of action. The episode therefore places chance at a hinge in the plot: circumstance presents an opening, while attention and intention determine what can be made of it.

Fortune’s Reversals

On Crete, the lovers’ escape initially appears to have secured a lasting happiness. Ninetta and her sisters leave their father’s house with money and jewels, join their lovers aboard a brigantine, and reach Genoa. Before the eighth day, the party arrives in Crete, where they acquire estates and houses and live amid servants, banquets, hounds, hawks, and horses. The material abundance that seems to confirm their good fortune becomes the setting for a reversal.

With Ninetta available to him without hindrance, Restagnone grows weary of her and begins courting a noble young woman of the country. Ninetta’s suspicions and reproaches intensify; rather than restoring their former intimacy, they sharpen Restagnone’s desire for the other woman. Her love turns to hatred, and she arranges for an old Greek woman skilled in poisons to prepare a deadly drink. Ninetta gives it to Restagnone one evening, and he dies before morning. The change from shared prosperity to murder does not arrive as an impersonal stroke alone: jealousy and deliberate choices drive it. Yet discovery comes through a separate contingency. The poison-maker is tortured for another misdeed and confesses to the poisoning; the Duke of Crete then surprises Folco’s palace and takes Ninetta prisoner, from whom he obtains a confession without torture. An unrelated arrest exposes the secret that had remained hidden.

Chance, Consequence, and Loss

The death of Guillaume de Guardestaing’s beloved produces another sudden reversal. After she falls from a high window and dies, Guillaume is dismayed and recognizes that he has acted wrongly. Afraid of the country people and the Count of Provence, he has his horses saddled and flees. The next day, the two bodies are taken up amid grief and lamentation by the people of the two households, and buried together in the chapel of the woman’s castle, with verses recording who they were and how they died.

Across these episodes, chance is neither a reliable benefactor nor a moral judge. The countess’s accidental sighting gives her useful knowledge; a confession prompted by torture for another crime brings Ninetta’s hidden act to light; and fortune’s distribution of rank becomes the target of Guiscardo’s defense of virtue. Meanwhile, the characters’ choices remain consequential: the countess makes a plan, Guiscardo claims responsibility for a considered love, and Ninetta’s jealousy leads to poisoning. The stories draw their force from this tension. Events may arrive unpredictably, but people still act within them, and their responses shape what follows.