Belfagor arcidiavolo

Within Machiavelli's novella, Belfagor is an infernal official — a former archangel now an archdevil — who is named and ranked in a bureaucratic Hell. Pluto summons a parliament to address the complaint that many male souls blame their wives for their misery; the assembly decides to send Belfagor to Earth as an investigator. Scholarly and popular summaries trace Machiavelli's narrative to an older family of folktales (credited in the provided sources as deriving from Medieval Slavic folklore) and to later German/Northern variants (e.g., Friar Rush), situating Machiavelli's treatment as a literary adaptation of a circulating motif rather than as an original ethnographic entity.

Machiavelli's tale presents Belfagor primarily through his offices in Hell and through the human identity he adopts on Earth. In the novella he assumes a human persona — presented as Roderigo of Castile — and lives among Florentine citizens; the provided summaries do not record distinct monstrous or infernal physical traits beyond his status as an archdevil and his disguised human form.

In the narrative Belfagor functions as an infernal emissary capable of assuming human form and living undercover as a mortal. He comes to Florence bearing wealth (a hundred thousand ducats) supplied for his mission, marries, suffers domestic and financial disaster, and ultimately returns to Hell. The tale also relates that Belfagor grants a peasant (Gianmatteo) the power to drive devils out of possessed women — a narrated conferral of exorcistic capacity — but the sources do not specify the mechanism, words, or material form of that grant. Abilities as described in the supplied materials are therefore limited to: official infernal rank/authority, shapechanging into a human identity, possession or provision of wealth, and the narrative capacity to empower a human to expel spirits.