Rinaldo d’Asti Is Robbed

Rinaldo d’Asti Is Robbed is the violent reversal at the center of Rinaldo’s journey: three rogues turn a stretch of road into an ambush, and he is left exposed to the cold with no horse, clothes, or money. The episode, narrated by Filostrato within the larger storytelling frame, makes the promised security of travel collapse at a lonely river crossing and sends Rinaldo into a second danger, the winter night.

The Ambush at the River

As Rinaldo and the three rogues travelled together, they conversed while watching for a place and moment suited to their criminal purpose. Late in the day, just beyond Castel Guglielmo, they reached a river ford in a solitary, enclosed spot. There the three fell upon him and took his money, clothes, and horse. They left him on foot and wearing only his shirt, then crossed the stream and went on their way.

Their parting taunt sharpened the betrayal: they invoked Rinaldo’s trust in St. Julian, the patron to whom travellers prayed for a safe lodging, while implying that their own patron would provide for them. A devotional assurance that might have comforted a traveller thus became, in the robbers’ mouths, a cruel joke at the moment they abandoned him.

The Servant’s Flight

Rinaldo’s servant saw the attack but did nothing to defend his master. He turned his horse around, rode to Castel Guglielmo, and took lodging there without making any further effort to help. The contrast is stark: the robbers openly abandon Rinaldo after taking his possessions, while the servant’s failure leaves him alone despite the duty implied by their association.

Cold, Darkness, and Closed Gates

The robbery leaves Rinaldo with immediate physical peril as well as material loss. It is bitterly cold and snowing hard; barefoot and trembling, he looks for shelter, but the surrounding country offers none because a recent war has left everything burned. He sets off running toward Castel Guglielmo, not knowing whether his servant has reached it, and hoping that entry into the town will bring relief.

Darkness overtakes him when he is still nearly a mile from the town. By the time he arrives, the gates are shut and the drawbridges raised, so he cannot get in. The theft therefore develops into an ordeal of exposure and exclusion: stripped of the means to continue his journey, Rinaldo also finds the nearest refuge closed against him. At this point in the episode he is despairing and disconsolate, looking for somewhere to pass the night without freezing.