Lovers’ Happiness After Adversity

Lovers’ Happiness After Adversity is the theme Fiammetta sets for the Fifth Day of the Decameron: after stories of lovers’ misfortune, the company is to hear how love fares well after cruel trials. The theme makes hardship more than a prelude to a happy ending. Separation, danger, social rank, and mistaken belief test whether lovers can reunite, while recognition, escape, healing, and marriage turn threatened attachment into a durable bond.

The Fifth Day’s Change of Fortune

At the close of the Fourth Day, Filostrato gives the laurel crown to Fiammetta and invites her to console the company after its sorrowful stories. She accepts the task and chooses for the next day stories of lovers who come to happiness after painful adventures. The transition establishes the emotional shape of the day: not an erasure of suffering, but a change in its direction. The lovers’ eventual good fortune matters because danger and grief have made it uncertain.

The opening story announces that pattern through Cimon and Iphigenia. Its heading traces a sequence from love to transformation and action: Cimon grows wise through love, carries off Iphigenia, and is imprisoned at Rhodes. Lysimachus frees him; the two men then carry off Iphigenia and Cassandra on their wedding day and flee with them to Crete. The women become their wives, and all four are later recalled home. The story’s promised happiness is therefore collective. Imprisonment and flight give way not simply to escape, but to marriages and a return.

Separation, Escape, and Reunion

Costanza’s story gives separation its starkest initial form: believing Martuccio Gomito dead, she embarks alone in a boat in despair. The wind carries her to Susa, far from her starting point and from the future she had imagined. The reversal comes when she discovers that Martuccio is alive in Tunis. His advice has won him the king’s favor; he marries Costanza, and the two return to Lipari rich. The reunion repairs more than distance: the man she mourned is alive, and the ending replaces lonely peril with shared prosperity and marriage.

Pietro Boccamazza and Agnolella also flee together, but their escape is interrupted by thieves. Agnolella gets away through a wood and is led by fortune to a castle, while Pietro is captured. He later escapes his captors, makes his way to the castle where she has arrived, and marries her; they return to Rome together. Their paths split under threat, and separate routes through danger converge in reunion. The resolution depends on both the woman’s escape and the man’s eventual arrival, rather than on a rescue that leaves one lover passive.

The account of Gianni di Procida and Restituta begins with the lovers’ mutual devotion and then abruptly turns to abduction. Restituta is seized while alone on the shore of Ischia by young men from Sicily, carried away by pinnace, and eventually presented to Frederick, King of Sicily. The tale’s heading supplies the further reversal: Gianni is found with her and the pair are bound to a stake for burning, but Ruggieri dell’Oria recognizes Gianni. The recognition saves them from execution, and Gianni becomes Restituta’s husband. Here the turn from peril to marriage depends on an identity recognized at the last moment.

Love Against Rank and Constraint

Alessandro’s encounter with the supposed abbot turns concealment into a sudden change in the terms of a relationship. The figure reveals that she is a woman, a daughter of the King of England who has left home on her way to the Pope to be married. She declares her love for Alessandro and offers marriage as the condition of their union. He accepts; she gives him a ring, and they plight their troth before an image of Christ. The scene’s promise of happiness is secured by mutual consent, but its marriage is specifically a formal betrothal, not a public wedding. The next morning Alessandro leaves the chamber without anyone knowing where he spent the night, and the pair continue on to Rome with her company.

Gillette de Narbonne’s story places love under the pressure of rank and royal obligation. She cures the king within the eight days she has proposed, and the king honors his promise to marry her to a husband of her choosing. She names Bertrand de Roussillon, whom she says she has loved since childhood. Yet the cure does not immediately settle the matter: Bertrand rejects the match, objecting to her lineage and describing her as a physician. The king insists that he must keep faith with the woman who restored his health. In the evidence for this episode, the promised happy outcome is still contested; the scene makes clear that love’s claim must contend with Bertrand’s pride and the king’s pledge.

Marriage, Recognition, and the Shape of a Happy Ending

The story of Caterina and Ricciardo Manardi turns a secret relationship into an acknowledged marriage through a moment of exposure. Messer Lizio da Valbona discovers the pair together in Caterina’s bed at daybreak. Ricciardo fears death and asks for mercy; Lizio offers him a way to save both his life and the family’s honor by taking Caterina as his lawful wife. Caterina pleads with her father to pardon Ricciardo and urges her lover to accept. Ricciardo agrees, and Lizio borrows a ring from Madam Giacomina so the two can marry immediately in the parents’ presence. A few days later, they marry again publicly among friends and kin, then live together in peace. The reversal is not escape from consequence but a change in the relationship’s standing: secrecy becomes marriage, and threatened shame becomes recognized family life.

Teodoro and Violante’s reunion likewise moves through recognition and a repaired family bond. After Teodoro is identified as Fineo’s son, Messer Currado halts the injustice against him, and Messer Amerigo, who had believed his daughter and grandson dead, sends word to stop the order he had given. Amerigo apologizes to Fineo and agrees to give Violante to Teodoro. Teodoro, newly reunited with his father, receives the prospect of marriage as a great happiness; Violante, who had been waiting in fear of death, says that becoming Teodoro’s wife would be her own greatest joy, while still submitting to her father’s command. The episode binds romantic reunion to recognition, the prevention of further violence, and reconciliation between the families.

Across these stories, a fortunate ending takes several forms: return from exile or peril, survival after presumed death, the recovery of a beloved, or the conversion of a private attachment into marriage. The Fifth Day’s theme is broad enough to include lovers whose adversity is resolved by courage, fortune, recognition, or the intervention of others. Its governing contrast remains precise: love is shown not in isolation from hardship, but in the changed condition that follows it.