Christian History Home > Issue 70 > The Root of All Kinds of Evil
The Root of All Kinds of Evil
The Inferno is crammed with greedy Florentines receiving their due.
Elesha Coffman | posted 4/01/2001 12:00AM
Dante proclaims in De Monarchia, "Greed is the extreme opposite of justice, as Aristotle says in the fifth book of his Nicomachean Ethics. Take away greed completely and nothing opposed to justice remains in the will."
As a Catholic and a son of the Roman Empire, Dante believed passionately in justice. But as a Florentine, he knew firsthand how much greed, graft, and gluttony stood in the way of his ideal.
Like many Italian cities, Florence boasted a well-developed economy by Dante's day. It also featured a system of government, codified in 1293 in the ironically titled "Ordinances of Justice," where money translated directly into political power.
In theory, the Florentine system was a popular regime, because neither popes nor nobles held sway. In practice, though, the city lay in the grip of seven commercial guilds: judges and notaries, bankers and cloth traders, money changers, silk merchants, doctors and apothecaries, wool merchants, and fur dealers. A handful of families dominated the ...
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