Salabaetto

Salabaetto is a young Florentine merchant whose vanity and credulity first make him the victim of a skilled swindler, then whose recovery depends on turning the same arts of deception back upon her. In Dioneo’s story, the loss of five hundred florins in Palermo becomes the beginning of a calculated counterplot: Salabaetto stages a prosperous commercial return, secures fifteen hundred florins from Madam Biancofiore, and leaves her with cargo that is nearly worthless. His change from trusting victim to practiced deceiver ends not in a return to business but in his decision to give up commerce altogether.

Identity and Arrival in Palermo

Salabaetto is the more familiar name of Niccolo da Cignano, a young Florentine sent to Palermo by his masters with woollen cloths left over from the Salerno fair. The goods were worth about five hundred gold florins. After declaring them to the customs officers, he stored them in a warehouse and did not hurry to sell them, instead spending time going about the city. This combination of merchandise, ready money, and leisure brought him into the attention of Madam Biancofiore, a woman practiced in making money from merchants who came to Palermo.

The story makes Salabaetto’s appearance part of the circumstances that ensnare him. He is fair-complexioned, yellow-haired, lively, and personable. When he notices Madam Biancofiore looking at him, he mistakes her for a great lady and decides that she is drawn to him because of his looks. He then begins passing back and forth before her house, keeping his supposed romance secret from everyone. His reading of the situation is already mistaken: he believes he is pursuing an admirer, while she has identified him as a merchant whose goods and resources can be exploited.

The First Deception and Its Cost

Madam Biancofiore lets Salabaetto become more deeply interested before sending a woman from her household to speak for her. The messenger presents her mistress as sleepless with longing and proposes a secret meeting at a bathhouse, giving Salabaetto a ring as a token. Delighted by what he takes for proof of love, he kisses the ring and agrees to meet her. The elaborate preparation of the bathhouse and the warmth of their encounter strengthen his belief that the affair is genuine. He does not recognize the performance as the opening of a financial scheme.

At their next meeting, Madam Biancofiore feigns distress over a crisis involving her brother. She claims that she urgently needs a thousand florins and suggests that, if she cannot obtain the money, she may have to sell an estate. Salabaetto believes her tears and explanation. Although he says he cannot provide a thousand florins, he offers five hundred, explaining that he has only just sold his cloth. Her answer turns his offer into another proof of his supposed importance: she says she would have lent him money herself had he asked, then accepts his help as evidence of his devotion. Salabaetto leaves the money with her on the strength of her promise to repay it within a fortnight.

The change in her behavior follows as soon as the money is secured. Where Salabaetto had previously been admitted freely, excuses now keep him away; when he is received, the greeting and affection are diminished. A month or two after the promised repayment date, he asks for his money and receives only evasive words. He has no written agreement or other evidence of the loan, and his shame at having ignored warnings makes him reluctant to complain. He understands that he has been deceived, but recognition does not restore what he has lost. His masters’ later letters, requiring him to procure bills of exchange and remit the money, sharpen the danger: his private folly now threatens to become an accountable failure in his work.

Advice and the Counterplot

Rather than return to Florence and expose his default, Salabaetto leaves by ship for Naples, though that is not the destination he should have taken. There he confides his actions and losses to Pietro dello Canigiano, a close friend of his family who serves as treasurer to the Empress of Constantinople. Canigiano rebukes him for disobeying his masters and spending a large sum through his own foolishness, but treats the damage as something that must now be managed. His advice gives Salabaetto a way to recover his position by making Madam Biancofiore believe she has encountered a far richer opportunity than the one she previously exploited.

Salabaetto raises some money himself and borrows more from Canigiano. Together they prepare bales and buy twenty oil casks. The bales are packed and corded; the casks are filled with seawater, with only a small quantity of oil near each opening. He takes this cargo back to Palermo, declares it to the customs officers, and has it entered in the customs book. He then stores it and says he will leave it untouched until other merchandise he is expecting arrives. The official declaration and the apparent scale of the shipment give his fiction the outward form of a merchant’s legitimate business.

The deception works because Madam Biancofiore hears that Salabaetto’s current merchandise is worth more than two thousand florins and that goods valued at more than three thousand are expected. She decides that returning the original five hundred florins may enable her to obtain much more. Salabaetto, now alert to the workings of her fraud, accepts her warm welcome without disclosing that he knows why it has changed. He tells her that he has sold most of his possessions, brought valuable goods to Palermo, and intends to establish a warehouse there so he can remain near her. The renewed promise of access to a wealthier merchant draws her back into the apparent affair.

The Reversal and Its Consequences

Madam Biancofiore explains her earlier coldness as the result of hardship and says that she eventually recovered the five hundred florins but did not know where to send them. She produces the money and returns it to Salabaetto. He accepts it, allowing her to take the repayment as proof that he trusts her again. He says he would still help her if she needed money, a pledge that prepares the next stage of his plan. Their intimacy resumes, but Salabaetto is now directing the performance rather than being directed by it.

When she invites him to supper and to spend the night, he arrives looking so distressed that she asks what has happened. He invents a crisis: the ship carrying his expected merchandise has supposedly been seized by corsairs from Monaco and held for a ransom of ten thousand gold florins, of which he must pay a thousand. He claims that the five hundred she returned has already been sent to Naples to buy cloth, that his Palermo goods cannot now be sold at a worthwhile price, and that he has no one else there to help him. The story makes her fear that he may leave, while its details give her an apparent reason to offer financial aid.

Madam Biancofiore says that she does not have the money herself but can arrange a loan through a trusted broker. She offers her goods and even herself as security, and Salabaetto agrees to pledge the merchandise listed at the customs house while insisting that he keep the warehouse keys. The broker advances a thousand gold florins, with the goods entered in the broker’s name at the customs house and the necessary documents exchanged. Salabaetto now has the five hundred florins she returned and the thousand advanced through the broker. He boards a small ship and returns to Naples, where he repays Canigiano and everyone else to whom he owes money, and sends his masters a full account of the business entrusted to him.

Madam Biancofiore waits in Palermo for his return. After two months, she has the broker force open the warehouse and discovers what the declared cargo concealed: the casks contain seawater with only a little oil at the top, and the bales are filled with tow except for two that contain cloth. The whole stock is worth no more than two hundred florins. She has been outwitted and laments both the five hundred florins she returned and the thousand she lent. Her discovery completes Salabaetto’s reversal of their first encounter: the merchant who once lacked proof of a loan has made her rely on a false picture of his wealth and secure her advance against deceptive goods.

Change and Narrative Role

Salabaetto’s success is practical rather than restorative. He recovers money, settles his obligations, and avoids returning to his masters with an unexplained shortfall, but he does not resume his former occupation. After celebrating the trick with Canigiano for several days, he resolves never again to be a merchant and goes to Ferrara. The ending registers the cost of his first error as well as the effectiveness of his second plan: he escapes the consequences of his credulity, but commerce itself has become an occupation he refuses to continue.

His story turns on competing appearances of credit. At first, a ring, a bathhouse prepared for a meeting, and a display of affection persuade Salabaetto that Madam Biancofiore’s interest is sincere. Later, customs records, packed bales, oil casks, and claims about future cargo persuade her that he is a prosperous merchant worth lending to. Neither appearance guarantees what it seems to guarantee. The reversal depends on Salabaetto learning to use the material signs of trade—declared goods, a warehouse, a broker, and written security—as elements of a fiction. His escape is therefore both a comic counterstroke against a practiced swindler and a portrait of how easily trust can be made to follow the appearance of value.