Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 463

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Dante: A Life," by RWB Lewis:

The separation of powers between executive power and judicial power had not yet been invented. One of those judges, messer Paolo da Gubbio, was appointed to deal with barratry, which in its original medieval usage meant the illicit trade in Church or state appointments, and was the term generically used to indicate corruption, extortion and embezzlement of public funds. Barratry was a nightmare in Italian political life in the Middle Ages, and Dante denounces it furiously in Inferno, where he reserves a bolgia for barrators and obliges them to swim in boiling tar. In January 1302, however, he was the one on trial. Following the orders of his superiors, messer Paolo prepared a series of trials against the priors who had been in office since the end of 1299, and in one of these preliminary investigations he targeted five people, all in absentia. The first, Gherardino Diodati, was accused of having accepted 72 gold florins for freeing a magnate who had been detained for serious crimes, and was convicted separately. The others were messer Palmieri Altoviti, ‘Dante Alaghieri’, Lippo di Becca and Orlanduccio Orlandi.