Dante's Inferno and Judas Iscariot

Pier dell Vigna, Logothete of the Kingdom of Sicily, earned a place in Dante's Hell through his avarice.

Della Vigna was disgraced and blinded for his betrayal of the emperor's trust through his avarice. Dante's pilgrim found him in the seventh level of the Inferno, reserved for suicides. Like Judas Iscarot, he died by hanging.

Judas, and Pier della Vigna and Ahithophel, the ambitious counsellor of Absalom, are linked in Dante by the avarice he saw in them and by their subsequent death by hanging.

Avarice and hanging are linked in the ancient and medieval mind. St Jerome writes that's Judas' surname "Iscariot" means "money" or "price", while Father Origen says Iscariot is derived from the Hebrew "from suffocation", that his name means "Judas the Suffocated".

Camicion de Pazzi is in Hell for murdering a kinsman.
He awaits the arrival of another kinsman, Carlino de Pazzi, who will be placed even further down down in Hell for treachery and betrayal of the White Guelphs, the party of Dante himself.

Avarice and hanging have been linked since antiquity, and the image appears again and again in art.

The earliest known depiction of the Crucifixion is carved on an ivory box in Gaul, c4AD. It includes the death by hanging of Judas, his face upturned to the branch that suspends him. On a reliquary casket of Milan, fourth century, and an ivory diptych of the ninth century, we again see Judas hanging, still looking up.

In a plate from the doors of the Benevento Cathderal, we see Judas hanging with his bowels falling out. This is how he is described by St Luke, whose author was, of course, a physician, in the Acts of the Apostles. He hangs beset by harpies. Above him in the sky is the face of Cain-In-The-Moon.

Giotto also depicts him eviscerated.

In a 15th century edition of the Inferno, we see Pier della Vigna's body hanging from a bleeding tree. There is an obvious parallel with Judas. Dante, in a typical act of genius, makes Vigna, now in Hell, speak in strained hisses and coughing sibilants, as though he is still hanging. He tells us about how he, and the other damned, have to drag their own dead bodies to hang upon a thorn tree.

This is in parallel to the innocent Christ carrying his own cross to Golgotha. Christ, in Paradise, is free of the cross. Judas, like Vigna, must still drag his body to the tree in Hell.

Dante recalls, in sound, the death of Judas in the death of Vigna, for the same crimes of avarice and treachery.

Ahithophel, Judas, Pier della Vigna.
Avarice, hanging, self destruction.
Avarice counts as much for self destruction as hanging.

This is summed up at the end of the canto, not by one of these infamous three, but by an anonymous Florentine suicide:

"And I - I made my own house be my gallows."