ABSTRACT
Bandello got the story of a slave who kills his owner's wife and her three children from the Latin ofPontano. In his version the setting is Majorca, where lives a rich man Rinieri Ervizzano, with his wife and three small sons, the eldest seven years old. There is a tower beside the house, linked to it by only a little bridge. The father has chastized his Moorish slave. One day when the master has gone hunting the Moor binds the wife's hands and rapes her. Rinieri, coming back, hears her cries, and finds that the Moor has broken down the bridge. The Moor throws down the eldest son, who is killed on the
rocks. When the father begs him to spare the other two boys, the Moor says that he will do so if Rinieri will cut off his nose. This the father does, and the Moor then batters both children against the wall and throws their bodies down. 'The cruel Moor laughed, thinking he had done the finest thing possible' (cf. TA, V.I.III). He then cuts the mother's throat and tosses her corpse out through the window. 'I am only sorry that I could not do the same to you', he cries (cf. TA, V.r.I.t-3 etc.). Then he throws himself down from the lofty tower. At the end Bandello says that black slaves are in every way untrustworthy, 'but all these [vices] are nothing compared with the great cruelty that reigns in them'. Negroes, he asserts, are of 'the worst possible nature'. Belleforest also, in his Introduction, writes of the wickedness of black men.
