Salabaetto’s counter-swindle against Biancofiore

Salabaetto’s counter-swindle against Biancofiore turns a merchant’s costly credulity into a carefully staged reversal. Having lost five hundred florins to Biancofiore in Palermo, Salabaetto uses false cargo, customs-house records, and a fabricated maritime emergency to recover the money and take a further thousand from her. The deception succeeds because he understands both the value she assigns to his supposed merchandise and the financial arrangement she hopes to control.

The first loss and the decision to retaliate

Salabaetto’s reversal begins in embarrassment and danger, not triumph. Biancofiore’s welcome had cooled after she received his money: he found it increasingly difficult to gain admission, and the intimacy between them no longer had its former warmth. When the agreed repayment date passed by a month or two, she answered his requests with excuses. Salabaetto had no written evidence of the loan, had been warned against the risk, and felt unable to complain without inviting ridicule. His credulity had cost him both money and the confidence to seek redress.

A demand from his masters made the private loss a commercial problem. They required him to change the money and remit it, and he feared that failure would expose his default. Rather than sail to Pisa as he was supposed to, he went to Naples. There he confided in Pietro dello Canigiano, treasurer to the Empress of Constantinople and a trusted friend of Salabaetto and his family. Canigiano rebuked him for disobeying his masters and spending a large sum on pleasure, but treated the damage as something that now required a practical remedy. He devised a plan, lent Salabaetto part of the money needed to carry it out, and helped him turn his mistake into a counterplot.

A cargo built to be believed

Salabaetto assembled goods that looked valuable in the aggregate but were designed to disappoint anyone who inspected them. He packed and corded a number of bales, bought twenty oil casks, and filled the casks. He then embarked the cargo and returned to Palermo. At the customhouse he presented the bill of lading and declared the value of the casks, placing everything on record and storing it in the magazines. He claimed that he would leave the goods untouched until other merchandise he expected had arrived.

The paperwork and the delay worked together. The goods were entered under Salabaetto’s account, and the stored cargo offered a visible basis for the value he later claimed. Yet he did not need to sell it or allow anyone to examine it closely. The story’s later inspection reveals the fraud’s precise construction: the casks held seawater, with only a small runlet of oil near each bunghole, while the bales contained tow apart from two that held cloth. The cargo’s actual total value was no more than two hundred florins. Its apparent worth depended on what Biancofiore heard and believed before she opened it.

Biancofiore lends against the apparent fortune

Biancofiore learned that Salabaetto had returned with merchandise supposedly worth more than two thousand florins, besides further goods from the west valued at over three thousand. She had come to think that her first gain had been too small and chose to restore the five hundred florins, hoping to keep access to a far larger fortune. She summoned him and greeted him with conspicuous affection, presenting her earlier refusals and failure to repay as the result of distress and difficulty finding money. She produced a purse containing the same five hundred florins and returned it to him.

Salabaetto accepted the repayment without revealing that he suspected her motives. He told her that he had sold most of his possessions, brought more than two thousand florins’ worth of merchandise to Palermo, and expected further goods worth over three thousand. He claimed that he intended to establish a warehouse and settle in the city so he could remain near her. This declaration turned Biancofiore’s supposed repayment into an invitation to invest in his future prosperity. Salabaetto also promised that she could ask him for whatever sum he was able to command once he was established.

When she later invited him to supper and to stay the night, he arrived looking so distressed that she pressed him to explain. He invented a second shipment, supposedly seized by corsairs of Monaco and held for a ransom of ten thousand gold florins. He said that he had to contribute a thousand, had no cash available, and could not sell the Palermo goods quickly without taking a ruinous price. The five hundred florins she had just returned, he claimed, had already gone to Naples to buy cloth. The invented crisis made a loan appear necessary and urgent while giving Biancofiore a chance to secure the cargo she believed lay in the magazines.

The loan, departure, and discovery

Biancofiore said that she would help if she had the money, then described a person who could lend it at heavy interest: thirty florins for every hundred. She offered to pledge her own goods and person, while asking how Salabaetto would secure the rest. He accepted the proposed arrangement and offered the merchandise entered at the customhouse as security, on the condition that the key to the magazines remain with him. That condition allowed him to preserve access to the goods while making the cargo seem available for inspection and collateral.

The next day Biancofiore brought in a trusted broker. Through him, she supplied a thousand gold florins, which were lent to Salabaetto and secured by an entry in the customhouse records assigning the stored goods to the lender. The parties completed and exchanged the necessary writings. Salabaetto thus obtained the thousand florins while retaining the key and control of the cargo. He soon embarked with the fifteen hundred florins—the five hundred returned by Biancofiore and the thousand raised through the broker—and went back to Naples. There he repaid Canigiano and his other creditors, gave his masters a full account, and celebrated with Canigiano the deception he had carried out. He then resolved to give up commerce and went to Ferrara.

Biancofiore discovered the counter-swindle only after Salabaetto had been gone for two months. She had the broker force open the magazines and tested the casks first, expecting oil; she found seawater and only a little oil at the top of each. When she opened the bales, almost all proved to be stuffed with tow. The apparent fortune that had persuaded her to lend against the goods collapsed into a cargo worth no more than two hundred florins. She lamented both the five hundred florins she had returned and the thousand she had lent, and repeated a proverb about the danger of dealing with a Tuscan without clear sight. Her discovery confirms that Salabaetto’s victory depended not on genuine wealth but on managing what she could see, what she could verify, and when she was allowed to verify it.

Reversal and commercial wit

The counter-swindle changes the direction of the story’s financial power. Salabaetto first appears as the lover who has trusted Biancofiore, accepted her excuses, and been left without written proof of his claim. In the second transaction, however, he uses formal records and security documents to make his own representation appear dependable, while ensuring that the underlying goods cannot support it. Biancofiore, who had withheld repayment when he lacked evidence, now advances money against evidence whose appearance he has engineered.

The reversal is also carefully bounded. Salabaetto does not restore an honest commercial balance: he deceives Biancofiore, takes her money, and leaves Palermo. But the story gives his scheme an intelligible sequence of causes and consequences. His earlier loss, the masters’ demand, Canigiano’s counsel, the return of the five hundred florins, and the broker’s thousand-florin loan all feed into the final discovery of seawater and tow. In the tale told by Dioneo, the falsified cargo is the concrete measure of the contest: Biancofiore sees a fortune where there is almost none, and Salabaetto escapes with real money because he has made that false appearance persuasive.