# Master Ciappelletto — The Decameron character guide

> Master Ciappelletto in The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio.

**Role:** major

**Also known as:** Ciappelletto

**First appearance:** 0004-the-first-story

## Snapshot

A notary so thoroughly wicked that his dying lie — a saintly false confession — earns him a shrine and a feast day.

## Who they are

Ciappelletto is a perjurer, forger, and blasphemer whose reputation is so foul that no one in France will trust him, which is precisely why a pair of Florentine bankers bring him along to collect debts. Stricken mortally ill in a Burgundian household, he refuses the sacraments unless a holy friar attends him, then spins a confession of such exquisite false piety that the friar weeps. His deathbed performance turns a career of fraud into a posthumous miracle, launching the Decameron's running argument about whether the Church can tell a saint from a scoundrel.

## In the story

### [The First Story](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/chapters/the-first-story)

The central figure of the story, a wicked scrivener who falsely confesses to a friar and dies, later being mistaken for a saint.

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters/master_ciappelletto
- Book: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se
- All characters: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_decameron_se/characters