Endless Concatination of Murder in Boccaccio’s Decameron

Two more examples in late medieval literature, which I can touch upon only briefly, confirm how much the literary discourse in the premodern world was already concerned with violence as breaking of laws, and as physical acts intended to hurt or even kill people in a domestic or private setting.

In the seventh tale of the second day, the sultan of Babylon, Beminedab, sends his daughter, Alatiel, as a bride for the king of Garbo, but she experi­ences a shipwreck, and is rescued by a nobleman, Pericone da Visalgo, who is immediately enthralled by her appearance yet does not know how to com­municate with her. After some time, Pericone convinces her to sleep with him, but soon his brother Marato wants to conquer her for himself, so he murders Pericone and escapes with the lady (127). However, the two Genoese merchants who had taken the couple on board likewise fall in love with the lady, so they murder Marato by throwing him into the sea. However, in their fight over who should sleep with Alatiel first, they kill each other. This train of murders continues for quite some time, one man after the other lusting after this Oriental beauty and paying for it with their own lives. Alatiel has no real concern for any of these men and can be easily consoled when another one appears, but Boccaccio was apparently more interested in studying the consequences of unbridled sexual passion and the phenomenon of subjectively motivated violence.

Curiously, there are no comments about the string of violent acts them­selves, and when Alatiel is finally united with her original fiance, King Garbo, the narrator only remarks: ‘she, who had lain perhaps ten thousand times with eight different men, went to bed with him as if a virgin and made him think she was one' (138). Each man had committed murder, so Boccaccio continued with the tradition that I have outlined above of presenting cases of ‘private' violence, here resulting from love and lust. Alatiel can never speak with any of her new ‘owners' and simply enjoys the sexual pleasures, which take the men to their own death. The global context confirms, however, that Boccaccio strongly objected to this violence and thus also criticised its cause, the physical desire for this woman. However, he also reflected on a world obviously filled with violence, which makes it actually possible for the audience of this tale to laugh about the comico-tragic development of the events, with Alatiel being the plaything for the men, although she is the only one who survives.^[1167]