Chapter I: Dante in His Times

1. _The End of the Middle Ages_

FROM GREGORY VII. TO FREDERICK II.--The twelfth and thirteenth centuries cover the last and more familiar portion of the Middle Ages. They are the period of chivalry, of the crusades and of romance, when the Neo-Latin languages bore fruit in the prose and poetry of France, the lyrics of the Provençal troubadours, and the earliest vernacular literature of Italy; the period which saw the development of Gothic architecture, the rise of scholastic philosophy, the institution of the Franciscan and Dominican orders, the recovery by western Europe of the works of Aristotle, the elevation of Catholic theology into a systematic harmony of reason and revelation under the influence of the christianised Aristotelianism of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. The vernacular literature of Italy developed comparatively late, and (until the time of Aquinas and Bonaventura) her part in the scholastic movement was secondary to that of France, but she had led the way in the revival of the study of Roman law and jurisprudence, which centred at Bologna, where the great Irnerius taught at the beginning of the twelfth century. It was thus that the first European university, _studium generale_, came into being, and Bologna boasts the proud title _alma mater studiorum_.

There are two predominant political factors in Italy which appear at the end of the twelfth century, and hold the field up to the time of Dante’s birth. Out of the war of investitures between Pope and Emperor, the struggle which we associate mainly with the name of Hildebrand (Gregory VII.), emerged the Italian city-states, the free communes of northern and central Italy, whose development culminated in the heroic resistance offered by the first Lombard League to the mightiest of mediaeval German Caesars, Frederick I. (Barbarossa), which won the battle of Legnano (1176) and obtained the peace of Constance (1183). In the south, the Normans--conquering Apulia and Calabria, delivering Sicily from the Saracens--consolidated their rule into a feudal monarchy, making their capital Palermo one of the most splendid cities of the mediaeval world. The third and last of these Norman kings of Sicily, William II. (_Par._ xx. 61-66), died in 1189. The son of Barbarossa, Henry VI., claimed the kingdom in the right of his wife Constance (_Par._ iii. 115-120), and established the Suabian dynasty on the throne. His son, Frederick II., continued the cultured traditions of the Norman kings; but the union in his person of the kingdom of Sicily with the Empire led to a continuous struggle with the Italian communes and the Papacy, which embittered his closing years until his death in 1250. The reign of Frederick II. is the period of the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, and the beginning of the rise of tyrants in the Italian cities, tyrants of whom the most terrible example was Ezzelino da Romano (_Inf._ xii. 110).

THE BATTLE OF BENEVENTO.--The policy of Frederick II. was continued by his son Manfred (crowned King of Sicily in 1258), against whom Pope Clement IV., claiming the right to dispose of the kingdom as a fief of the Church, summoned Charles of Anjou, the brother of St. Louis of France. Charles entered Italy (_Purg._ xx. 67), encountered and defeated Manfred on the plains of Grandella near Benevento, in February 1266, and the papal legate refused the rites of Christian burial to the fallen king (_Purg._ iii. 124-132). This battle of Benevento marks an epoch in Italian history. It ended for the time the struggle between the Roman Pontiffs and the German Caesars; it initiated the new strife between the Papacy and the royal house of France. Henceforth the old ideal significance of “Guelf” and “Ghibelline,” as denoting adherents of Church and Empire respectively, becomes lost in the local conflicts of each Italian district and city. The imperial power was at an end in Italy; but the Popes, by calling in this new foreign aid, had prepared the way for the humiliation of Pope Boniface at Anagni and the corruption of Avignon. The fall of the silver eagle from Manfred’s helmet before the golden lilies on Charles’s standard may be taken as symbolical. The preponderance in Italian politics had passed back from Germany to France; the influence of the house of Capet was substituted for the overthrown authority of the Emperor (_Purg._ xx. 43, 44). Three weeks after the battle Charles entered Naples in triumph, King of Apulia and Sicily; an Angevin dynasty was established upon the throne of the most potent state of Italy.

ART AND LETTERS.--This political transformation was profoundly felt in Italian literature. A new courtly poetry, that of the so-called “Sicilian School,” had come into being in the south, partly based on Provençal models, in the first quarter of the thirteenth century. Its poets--mainly Sicilians and Apulians, but with recruits from other parts of the peninsula--had almost given to Italy a literary language. “The Sicilian vernacular,” writes Dante in his _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, “seems to have gained for itself a renown beyond the others; for whatever Italians produce in poetry is called Sicilian, and we find that many native poets have sung weightily.” This he ascribes to the fostering influence of the imperial rule of the house of Suabia: “Those illustrious heroes, Frederick Caesar and his well-begotten son Manfred, showing their nobility and rectitude of soul, as long as fortune lasted, followed human things, disdaining the bestial; wherefore the noble in heart and endowed with graces strove to cleave to the majesty of such great princes; so that, in their time, whatever the excellent among Italians attempted first appeared at the court of these great sovereigns. And, because the royal throne was Sicily, it came about that whatever our predecessors produced in the vernacular is called Sicilian” (_V. E._ i. 12). The house of Anjou made Naples their capital, and treated Sicily as a conquered province. After Benevento the literary centre of Italy shifted from Palermo and the royal court of the south to Bologna and the republican cities of Tuscany. Guittone d’Arezzo (_Purg._ xxvi. 124-126) founded a school of Tuscan poets, extending the field of Italian lyrical poetry to political and ethical themes as well as love (which had been the sole subject of the Sicilian School). The beginnings of Italian literary prose had already appeared at Bologna, with the first vernacular models for composition of the rhetoricians, the masters of the _ars dictandi_. Here, within the next eight years, St. Thomas Aquinas published the first and second parts of the _Summa Theologica_; and the poetry of the first great singer of modern Italy, Guido Guinizelli (_Purg._ xxvi. 91-114), rose to spiritual heights undreamed of in the older schools, in his canzone on Love and true nobility: _Al cor gentil ripara sempre Amore_; “To the gentle heart doth Love ever repair.” And, in the sphere of the plastic arts, these were the years that saw the last triumphs of Niccolò Pisano, “the Father of Sculpture to Italy,” and the earliest masterpieces of Cimabue, the teacher of Giotto (_Purg._ xi. 94-96), the shepherd boy who came from the fields to free Italian painting from Byzantine fetters, and who “developed an artistic language which was the true expression of the Italian national character.”

2. _Dante’s Childhood and Adolescence_

BIRTH AND FAMILY.--Dante Alighieri, in its Latin form Alagherii, was born at Florence in 1265, probably in the latter part of May, some nine months before the battle of Benevento. His father, Alighiero di Bellincione di Alighiero, came of an ancient and honourable family of that section of the city named from the Porta San Piero. Although Guelfs, the Alighieri were probably of the same stock as the Elisei, decadent nobles of supposed Roman descent, who took the Ghibelline side in the days of Frederick II., when the city was first involved in these factions after the murder of young Buondelmonte in her “last peace” in 1215 (_Par._ xvi. 136-147). Among the warriors of the Cross, in the Heaven of Mars, Dante meets his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida. Born probably in 1091, Cacciaguida married a wife from the valley of the Po, a member of one or other of the families afterwards known as the Aldighieri or Alighieri at Ferrara, Parma, and Bologna, was knighted by Conrad III., and died in battle against the infidels in the disastrous second crusade (_Par._ xv. 137-148). None of Cacciaguida’s descendants had attained to any distinction in the Republic. Brunetto di Bellincione, Dante’s uncle, probably fought for the Guelfs at Montaperti in 1260, where he may have been one of those in charge of the _carroccio_, the battle-car which accompanied the army. Besides Cacciaguida and his son Alaghiero, or Alighiero, the first to bear the name, who is said by his father to be still in the purgatorial terrace of the proud (_Par._ xv. 91-96), the only other member of the family introduced into the _Divina Commedia_ is Geri del Bello, a grandson of the elder Alighiero and cousin of Dante’s father, a sower of discord and a murderer (_Inf._ xxix. 13-36), whose violent and well-deserved death had not yet been avenged.

THE FLORENTINE REPUBLIC.--As far as Florence was concerned, the real strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines was a struggle for supremacy, first without and then within the city, of a democracy of merchants and traders, with a military aristocracy of partly Teutonic descent, who were gradually being deprived of their territorial and feudal sway, which they had held nominally from the Emperor in the _contado_, the country districts of Tuscany included in the continually extending Florentine commune. Although the party names were first introduced into Florence in 1215, the struggle had virtually begun after the death of the great Countess Matilda in 1115; and had resulted in a regular and constitutional advance of the power of the people, interrupted by a few intervals. It was in one of these intervals that Dante was born. The popular government (_Primo Popolo_), which had been established shortly before the death of Frederick II. in 1250, and worked victoriously for ten years, had been overthrown in 1260 at the disastrous battle of Montaperti, “the havoc and the great slaughter, which dyed the Arbia red” (_Inf._ x. 85, 86). The patriotism of Farinata degli Uberti saved Florence from total destruction, but all the leading Guelf families were driven out, and the government remained in the power of a despotic Ghibelline aristocracy, under Manfred’s vicar, Count Guido Novello, supported by German mercenaries. After the fall of Manfred, an attempt was made to effect a peace between the Ghibellines and the people; but a revolution on St. Martin’s Day, November 11th, 1266, led to the expulsion of Guido Novello and his forces, and the formation of a provisional democratic government. In January 1267 the banished Guelfs--many of whom had fought under the papal banner at Benevento--returned; on Easter Day French troops entered Florence, the Ghibellines fled, the Guelfs made Charles of Anjou suzerain of the city, and accepted his vicar as podestà. The government was reorganised, with a new institution, the _Parte Guelfa_, to secure the Guelf predominance in the Republic.

The defeat of young Conradin, grandson of Frederick II., at Tagliacozzo in 1268, followed by his judicial murder (_Purg._ xx. 68), confirmed the triumph of the Guelfs and the power of Charles in Italy. In Florence the future conflict lay between the new Guelf aristocracy and the burghers and people, between the _Grandi_ and the _Popolani_; the magnates in their palaces and towers, associated into societies and groups of families, surrounding themselves with retainers and swordsmen, but always divided among themselves; and the people, soon to become “very fierce and hot in lordship,” as Villani says, artisans and traders ready to rush out from stalls and workshops to follow the standards of their Arts or Guilds in defence of liberty. In the year after the House of Suabia ended with Conradin upon the scaffold, the Florentines took partial vengeance for Montaperti at the battle of Colle di Valdelsa (_Purg._ xiii. 115-120), where the Sienese were routed and Provenzano Salvani (_Purg._ xi. 109-114) killed. It is said to have been Provenzano Salvani who, in the great Ghibelline council at Empoli, had proposed that Florence should be destroyed.

DANTE’S BOYHOOD.--It is not clear how Dante came to be born in Florence, since he gives us to understand (_Inf._ x. 46-50) that his family were fiercely adverse to the Ghibellines and would naturally have been in exile until the close of 1266. Probably his father, of whom scarcely anything is known, took no prominent part in politics and had been allowed to remain in the city. Besides the houses in the Piazza San Martino, he possessed two farms and some land in the country. Dante’s mother, Bella (perhaps an abbreviation of Gabriella), is believed to have been Alighiero’s first wife, and to have died soon after the poet’s birth. Her family is not known, though it has been suggested that she may have been the daughter of Durante di Scolaio degli Abati, a Guelf noble. Alighiero married again, Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffi, the daughter of a prominent Guelf popolano; by this second marriage he had a son, Francesco, and a daughter, Tana (Gaetana), who married Lapo Riccomanni. Another daughter, whose name is not known, married Leone Poggi; it is not quite certain whether her mother was Bella or Lapa. Dante never mentions his mother nor his father, whom he also lost in boyhood, in any of his works (excepting such indirect references as _Inf._ viii. 45, and _Conv._ i. 13); but, in the _Vita Nuova_, a “young and gentle lady, who was united to me by very near kindred,” appears watching by the poet in his illness. In the loveliest of his early lyrics she is described as

Adorna assai di gentilezze umane,

which Rossetti renders:

Exceeding rich in human sympathies.

This lady was, perhaps, one of these two sisters; and it is tempting to infer from Dante’s words that a tender affection existed between him and her. It was from Dante’s nephew, Andrea Poggi, that Boccaccio obtained some of his information concerning the poet, and it would be pleasant to think that Andrea’s mother is the heroine of this canzone (_V. N._ xxiii.); but there are chronological difficulties in the identification.

SOURCES.--Our sources for Dante’s biography, in addition to his own works, are primarily a short chapter in the Chronicle of his neighbour Giovanni Villani, the epoch-making work of Boccaccio, Filippo Villani’s unimportant sketch at the end of the fourteenth and the brief but reliable life by Leonardo Bruni at the beginning of the fifteenth century. In addition we have some scanty hints given by the early commentators on the _Divina Commedia_, and a few documents, including the _consulte_ or reports of the deliberations of the various councils of the Florentine Republic. Boccaccio’s work has come down to us in two forms: the _Vita di Dante_ (or _Trattatello in laude di Dante_) and the so-called _Compendio_ (itself in two redactions, the _Primo_ and _Secondo Compendio_); the researches of Michele Barbi have finally established that both are authentic, the _Compendio_ being the author’s own later revision. The tendency of recent scholarship has in a considerable measure rehabilitated the once discredited authority of Boccaccio, and rejected the excessive scepticism represented in the nineteenth century by Bartoli and Scartazzini.

BEATRICE.--Although Leonardo Bruni rebukes Boccaccio, “our Boccaccio that most sweet and pleasant man,” for having lingered so long over Dante’s love affairs, still the story of the poet’s first love remains the one salient fact of his youth and early manhood. We may surmise from the _Vita Nuova_ that at the end of his eighteenth year, presumably in May 1283, Dante became enamoured of the glorious lady of his mind, Beatrice, who had first appeared to him as a child in her ninth year, nine years before. It is not quite certain whether Beatrice was her real name or one beneath which Dante conceals her identity; assuredly she was “Beatrice,” the giver of blessing, to him and through him to all lovers of the noblest and fairest things in literature. Tradition, following Boccaccio, has identified her with Bice, the daughter of Folco Portinari, a wealthy Florentine who founded the hospital of S. Maria Nuova, and died in 1289 (_cf._ _V. N._ xxii.). Folco’s daughter is shown by her father’s will to have been the wife of Simone dei Bardi, a rich and noble banker. This has been confirmed by the discovery that, while the printed commentary of Dante’s son Pietro upon the _Commedia_ hardly suggests that Beatrice was a real woman at all, there exists a fuller and later recension by Pietro of his own work which contains a distinct statement that the lady raised to fame in his father’s poem was in very fact Bice Portinari. Nevertheless, there are still found critics who see in Beatrice not a real woman, but a mystically exalted ideal of womanhood or a merely allegorical figure; while Scartazzini at one time maintained that the woman Dante loved was an unknown Florentine maiden, who would have been his wife but for her untimely death. This can hardly be deduced from the _Vita Nuova_; in its noblest passages the woman of Dante’s worship is scarcely regarded as an object that can be possessed; death has not robbed him of an expected beatitude, but all the world of an earthly miracle. But, although it was in the fullest correspondence with mediaeval ideals and fashions that chivalrous love and devotion should be directed by preference to a married woman, the love of Dante for Beatrice was something at once more real and more exalted than the artificial passion of the troubadours; a true romantic love that linked heaven to earth, and was a revelation for the whole course of life.

POETRY, FRIENDSHIP, STUDY.--Already, at the age of eighteen, Dante was a poet: “I had already seen for myself the art of saying words in rhyme” (_V. N._ iii.). It was on the occasion of what we take as the real beginning of his love that he wrote the opening sonnet of the _Vita Nuova_, in which he demands an explanation of a dream from “all the faithful of Love.” The new poet was at once recognised. Among the many answers came a sonnet from the most famous Italian lyrist then living, Guido Cavalcanti, henceforth to be the first of Dante’s friends: “And this was, as it were, the beginning of the friendship between him and me, when he knew that I was he who had sent that sonnet to him” (_cf._ _Inf._ x. 60). In the same year, 1283, Dante’s name first occurs in a document concerning some business transactions as his late father’s heir.

There are no external events recorded in Dante’s life between 1283 and 1289. Boccaccio represents him as devoted to study. He certainly owed much to the paternal advice of the old rhetorician and statesman, Brunetto Latini, who had been secretary of the commune and, until his death in 1294, was one of the most influential citizens in the state: “For in my memory is fixed, and now goes to my heart, the dear, kind, paternal image of you, when in the world, from time to time, you taught me how man makes himself eternal” (_Inf._ xv. 82). Of his growing maturity in art, the lyrics of the _Vita Nuova_ bear witness; the prose narrative shows that he had studied the Latin poets as well as the new singers of Provence and Italy, had already dipped into scholastic philosophy, and was not unacquainted with Aristotle. At the same time, Leonardo Bruni was obviously right in describing Dante as not severing himself from the world, but excelling in every youthful exercise; and it would seem from the _Vita Nuova_ that, in spite of his supreme devotion for Beatrice, there were other Florentine damsels who moved his heart for a time. Dante speaks of “one who, according to the degrees of friendship, is my friend immediately after the first,” and than whom there was no one nearer in kinship to Beatrice (_V. N._ xxxiii.). Those who identify Dante’s Beatrice with the daughter of Messer Folco suppose that this second friend was one of her three brothers, probably Manetto Portinari, to whom a sonnet of Guido’s may have been addressed. Casella the musician, and Lapo Gianni the poet, are mentioned with affection in the _Purgatorio_ (Canto ii.), and in one of Dante’s sonnets respectively; Lippo de’ Bardi, evidently like Casella a musician, and a certain Meuccio likewise appear as friends in other of his earliest lyrics. Cino da Pistoia, like Cavalcanti, seems to have answered Dante’s dream; their friendship was perhaps at present mainly confined to exchanging poems. Boccaccio and Benvenuto da Imola speak of an early visit of Dante’s to the universities of Bologna and Padua, and there is some evidence for thinking that he was at Bologna some time not later than 1287. He may possibly have served in some cavalry expedition to check the harrying parties of Aretines in 1288; for, when the great battle of the following year was fought, it found Dante “no novice in arms,” as a fragment of one of his lost letters puts it, _non fanciullo nell’ armi_.

POPULAR GOVERNMENT.--Twenty years had now passed since the victory of Colle di Valdelsa in 1269. Great changes had taken place in the meanwhile. The estrangement between Charles of Anjou and the Popes, Gregory X. and Nicholas III., the attempts of these latter to weaken the king’s power by reconciling the Florentine Guelfs with the Ghibelline exiles, and the dissensions among the Guelf magnates themselves within the city, had led, in 1280, to the peace arranged by Cardinal Latino Frangipani. A government was set up of fourteen _buonuomini_, magnates and popolani, eight Guelfs and six Ghibellines. But the city remained strenuously Guelf. Nicholas III. had deprived King Charles of the offices of Senator of Rome and Vicar Imperial and had allowed Rudolph of Hapsburg to establish a vicar in Tuscany (_Inf._ xix. 99). In 1282 came the Vespers of Palermo (_Par._ viii. 75). The Sicilians rose, massacred Charles’s adherents, and received as their king Peter of Aragon, the husband of Manfred’s daughter Constance (_Purg._ iii. 143). The hitherto united kingdom of Sicily, which had been the heritage of the imperial Suabians from the Norman heroes of the house of Hauteville, was thus divided between a French and a Spanish line of kings (_Par._ xx. 63); the former at Naples as kings of “Sicily and Jerusalem,” the latter in the island as kings of “Trinacria.” Charles was henceforth too much occupied in war with the Sicilians and Aragonese to interfere in the internal affairs of Tuscany. In the June of this year a peaceful revolution took place in Florence. Instead of the fourteen _buonuomini_, the government was put into the hands of the Priors of the Arts or Guilds, who, associated with the Captain, were henceforth recognised as the chief magistrates of the Republic, composing the Signoria, during the two months for which they were elected to hold office. Their number, originally three, was raised to six; both _grandi_ and _popolani_ were at first eligible, provided the former left their order by enrolling themselves in one of the Guilds. A thorough organisation of these Guilds, the _Arti maggiori_ (which were mainly engaged in wholesale commerce, exportation and importation, and the mercantile relations of Florence with foreign countries) and _Arti minori_ (which carried on the retail traffic and internal trade of the city), secured the administration in the hands of the trading classes.

Thus was established the democratic constitution of the state in which Dante was afterwards to play his part. There was the central administration of the six Priors, one for each _sesto_ of the city, with the council of a hundred “good men of the people without whose deliberation no great thing or expenditure could be done” (Villani, vii. 16). The executive was composed of the Captain of the People and the Podestà, both Italian nobles from other states, holding office for six months, each with his two councils, a special and a general council, the general council of the Podestà being the general council of the Commune. The great Guilds had their own council (_Consiglio delle Capitudini delle Arti_), and their consuls or rectors, while specially associated with the two councils of the Captain, were sometimes admitted to those of the Podestà; the nobles were excluded from all these councils, excepting the special council of the Podestà and the general council of the Commune. But, while the central government of the Republic was thus entirely popular, the magnates still retained control over the captains of the Guelf Society, with their two councils, and exerted considerable influence upon the Podestà, always one of their own order and an alien, in whose councils they still sat. The Podestà, however, was now little more than a chief justice; “the Priors, with the Captain of the People, had to determine the great and weighty matters of the commonwealth, and to summon and conduct councils and make regulations” (Villani).

BATTLE OF CAMPALDINO.--A period of prosperity and victory followed for Florence. The crushing defeat inflicted upon Pisa by Genoa at the great naval battle of Meloria in 1284 was much to her advantage; as was also, perhaps, the decline of the Angevin power after the victory of Peter of Aragon’s fleet (_Purg._ xx. 79). Charles II., the “cripple of Jerusalem,” who succeeded his father as king of Naples, was a less formidable suzerain. On June 11th, 1289, the Tuscan Ghibellines were utterly defeated by the Florentines and their allies at the battle of Campaldino. According to Leonardo Bruni--and there seems no adequate reason for rejecting his testimony--Dante was present, “fighting valiantly on horseback in the front rank,” apparently among the 150 who volunteered or were chosen as _feditori_, amongst whom was Vieri de’ Cerchi, who was later to acquire a more dubious reputation in politics. Bruni states that in a letter Dante draws a plan of the fight; and he quotes what seems to be a fragment of another letter, written later, where Dante speaks of “the battle of Campaldino, in which the Ghibelline party was almost utterly destroyed and undone; where I found myself no novice in arms, and where I had much fear, and in the end very great gladness, by reason of the varying chances of that battle.”

Dante probably took part in the subsequent events of the campaign; the wasting of the Aretine territory, the unsuccessful attack upon Arezzo, the surrender of the Pisan fortress of Caprona. “Thus once I saw the footmen, who marched out under treaty from Caprona, fear at seeing themselves among so many enemies” (_Inf._ xxi. 94-96). There appears to be a direct reference to his personal experiences of the campaign in the opening of _Inferno_ xxii.: “I have seen ere now horsemen moving camp and beginning the assault, and holding their muster, and at times retiring to escape; coursers have I seen upon your land, O Aretines! and seen the march of foragers, the shock of tournaments and race of jousts, now with trumpets and now with bells, with drums and castle signals.” He has sung of Campaldino in peculiarly pathetic strains in