Chapter III: Canto V: of the Purgatorio. On the lower slopes of the Mountain of

Purgation wanders the soul of Buonconte da Montefeltro, who led the Aretine cavalry, and whose body was never found; mortally wounded and forsaken by all, he had died gasping out the name of Mary, and his Giovanna had forgotten even to pray for his soul.

DEATH OF BEATRICE.--In the following year, 1290, Beatrice died: “The Lord of justice called this most gentle one to glory under the banner of that blessed queen Mary virgin, whose name was in very great reverence in the words of this blessed Beatrice” (_V. N._ xxix.). Although Dante complicates the date by a reference to “the usage of Arabia,” she appears to have died on the evening of June 8th;[1] and the poet lifts up his voice with the prophet: “How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people! How is she become as a widow, she that was great among the nations!”

3. _After the Death of Beatrice_

PHILOSOPHIC REFUGE.--It is not easy to get a very definite idea of Dante’s private life during the next ten years. With the completion of the _Vita Nuova_, shortly after Beatrice’s death, an epoch closes in his life, as in his work. From the _Convivio_ it would appear that in his sorrow Dante took refuge in the study of the _De Consolatione Philosophiae_ of Boëthius and Cicero’s _De Amicitia_; that he frequented “the schools of the religious and the disputations of philosophers,” where he became deeply enamoured of Philosophy. Cino da Pistoia addressed to him an exceedingly beautiful canzone, consoling him for the loss of Beatrice, bidding him take comfort in the contemplation of her glory among the saints and angels of Paradise, where she is praying to God for her lover’s peace. This poem is quoted years later by Dante himself in the second book of the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ (ii. 6), where he couples it with his own canzone--

Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona,

“Love that in my mind discourses to me,” with which Casella consoles the penitent spirits upon the shore of Purgatory: “The amorous chant which was wont to quiet all my desires.”

ABERRATIONS.--It would seem, however, that neither the memory of Beatrice nor his philosophical devotion kept Dante from falling into what he afterwards came to regard as a morally unworthy life. _Tanto giù cadde_, “so low he fell” (_Purg._ xxx. 136). It is almost impossible to hold, as Witte and Scartazzini would have us do, that the poignant reproaches which Beatrice addresses to Dante, when he meets her on Lethe’s banks, are connected mainly with intellectual errors, with culpable neglect of Theology or speculative wanderings from revealed truth, for there are but scanty, if any, traces of this in the poet’s writings at any period of his career. The dark wood in which he wandered, led by the world and the flesh, was that of sensual passion and moral aberration for a while from the light of reason and the virtue which is the “ordering of love.”

FRIENDSHIP WITH FORESE DONATI.--Dante was evidently intimate with the great Donati family, whose houses were in the same district of the city. Corso di Simone Donati, a turbulent and ambitious spirit, had done heroically at Campaldino, and was now intent upon having his own way in the state. A close and familiar friendship united Dante with Corso’s brother Forese, a sensual man of pleasure. Six sonnets interchanged between these two friends, though now only in part intelligible, do little credit to either. “If thou recall to mind,” Dante says to Forese in the sixth terrace of Purgatory, “what thou wast with me and I was with thee, the present memory will still be grievous” (_Purg._ xxiii, 115). Forese died in July 1296; the author of the _Ottimo Commento_, who wrote about 1334, and professes to have known the divine poet, tells us that Dante induced his friend when on his death-bed to repent and receive the last sacraments. Another sonnet of Dante’s shows him in friendly correspondence with Brunetto (Betto) Brunelleschi, a noble who later played a sinister part in the factions and, like Corso Donati, met a violent death.

LOVES, MARRIAGE, AND DEBTS.--Several very striking canzoni, written for a lady whom Dante represents under various stony images, and whose name may possibly have been Pietra, are frequently assigned to this period of the poet’s life, but may perhaps have been written in the early days of his exile. From other lyrics and sonnets we dimly discern that several women may have crossed Dante’s life now and later, of whom nothing can be known. Dante married Gemma di Manetto Donati, a distant kinswoman of Corso and Forese. In the _Paradiso_ (xvi. 119) he refers with complacency to his wife’s ancestor, Ubertino Donati, Manetto’s great-grandfather, whose family pride scorned any alliance with the Adimari. According to Boccaccio, the marriage took place some time after the death of Beatrice, and it was certainly not later than 1297; but there is documentary evidence that Gemma’s dowry was settled in 1277, which points to an early betrothal. The union has generally been supposed--on somewhat inadequate grounds--to have been an unhappy one. Gemma bore Dante two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, and either one or two daughters. Boccaccio’s statement, that she did not share the poet’s exile, is usually accepted; she was living in Florence after his death, and died there after 1332.[2] During the following years, between 1297 and 1300, Dante was contracting debts (Durante di Scolaio degli Abati and Manetto Donati being among his sureties), which altogether amounted to a very large sum, but which were cleared off from the poet’s estate after his death.

4. _Dante’s Political Life_

ELECTION OF BONIFACE VIII.--Upon the abdication of Celestine V., Cardinal Benedetto Gaetani was made Pope on Christmas Eve 1294, under the title of Boniface VIII. (_Inf._ xix. 52-57), an event ominous for Florence and for Dante. Although canonised by the Church, there is little doubt that St. Celestine is the first soul met by Dante in the vestibule of Hell: _Colui che fece per viltà il gran rifiuto_ (_Inf._ iii. 58-60), “He who made from cowardice the great renunciation.”

GIANO DELLA BELLA.--Florence had just confirmed the democratic character of her constitution by the reforms of Giano della Bella, a noble who had identified himself with the popular cause (_Par._ xvi. 132). By the Ordinances of Justice in 1293 stringent provisions were enacted against the nobles, who since Campaldino had grown increasingly aggressive towards the people and factious against each other. They were henceforth more rigorously excluded from the Priorate and Council of the Hundred, as also from the councils of the Captain and Capitudini; severe penalties were exacted for offences against _popolani_; and, in order that these ordinances should be carried out, a new magistrate, the Gonfaloniere di Guistizia or Standard-bearer of Justice, was added to the Signoria to hold office like the Priors for two months in rotation from the different districts of the city. Thus was completed the _secondo popolo_, the second democratic constitution of Florence. The third of these standard-bearers was Dino Compagni, the chronicler. Giano della Bella was meditating the continuation of his work by depriving the captains of the Guelf Society of their power and resources, when a riot, in which Corso Donati played a prominent part, caused his overthrow in March 1295. By his fall the government remained in the hands of the rich burghers, being practically an oligarchy of merchants and bankers.

FIRST STEPS IN POLITICAL LIFE.--In this same year 1295, the first year of the pontificate of Boniface VIII., Dante entered political life. Although of noble descent, the Alighieri do not seem to have ranked as magnates. By a modification in the Ordinances of Justice in July 1295, citizens, without actually exercising an “art,” were admitted to office provided they had matriculated and were not knights, if not more than two persons in their family had held knighthood within the last twenty years. Dante now (or perhaps a little later) enrolled his name in the _matricola_ of the Art of Physicians and Apothecaries, which included painters and booksellers. For the six months from November 1st, 1295, to April 30th, 1296, he was a member of the Special Council of the Captain. On December 14th, as one of the savi or specially summoned counsellors, he gave his opinion (_consuluit_) in the Council of the Capitudini of the Arts on the procedure to be adopted for the election of the new Signoria. On January 23rd, 1296, the Pope inaugurated his aggressive policy towards the Republic by addressing a bull to the Podestà, Captain, Ancients, Priors and Rectors of the Arts, to the Council and the Commune of Florence (purposely ignoring the new office of Gonfaloniere). After denouncing in unmeasured terms the wickedness of that “rock of scandal,” Giano della Bella, and extolling the prudence of the Florentines in expelling him, the Pope, hearing that certain persons are striving to obtain his recall, utterly forbids anything of the kind without special licence from the Holy See, under penalty of excommunication and interdict. The Pope further protests his great and special affection for Florence, amongst the cities devoted to God and the Apostolic See. “I love France so well,” says Shakespeare’s King Henry, “that I will not part with a village of it; I will have it all mine.”

Although Boccaccio, and others in his steps, have somewhat exaggerated Dante’s influence in the politics of the Republic, there can be no doubt that he soon came to take a decided attitude in direct opposition to all lawlessness, and in resistance to any external interference in Florentine matters, whether from Rome, Naples, or France. The eldest son of Charles II., Carlo Martello, whom Dante had “loved much and with good cause” (_Par._ viii. 55) during his visit to Florence in the spring of 1294, had died in the following year; and his father was harassing the Florentines for money to carry on the Sicilian war. Dante, on leaving the Council of the Captain, had been elected to the Council of the Hundred, in which, on June 5th, 1296, he spoke in support of various proposals, including one on the embellishment of the cathedral and baptistery by the removal of the old hospital, and another undertaking not to receive men under ban of the Commune of Pistoia in the city and contado of Florence. In the previous May, in consequence of internal factions, Pistoia had given Florence control of the city, with power to send a podestà and a captain every six months. After this we do not hear of Dante again until May 7th, 1300, when he acted as ambassador to San Gemignano to announce that a parliament was to be held for the purpose of electing a captain for the Guelf League of Tuscany, and to invite the Commune to send representatives. But already the storm cloud which loomed on the horizon had burst upon the city on May Day 1300.

BLACKS AND WHITES.--The new division of parties in Florence became associated with the feud between two noble families, the Donati and the Cerchi, headed respectively by two of the heroes of Campaldino, Corso Donati and Vieri de’ Cerchi. The names Neri and Bianchi, Black Guelfs and White Guelfs, by which the two factions became known, seem to have been derived from a similar division in Pistoia, the ringleaders of which, being banished to Florence, embittered the quarrels already in progress in the ruling city. But the roots of the trouble went deeper and were political, connected with the discontent of both magnates and _popolo minuto_ under the hegemony of the Greater Arts. The Bianchi were opposed to a costly policy of expansion; the Neri, who had wider international and mercantile connections, looked beyond the affairs of the Commune, and favoured intimate relations with the Angevin sovereigns of Naples and the Pope. To the Bianchi adhered those nobles who had matriculated in the Arts, the more moderate spirits among the burghers, the remains of the party of Giano della Bella who supported the Ordinances of Justice in a modified form. While the Bianchi drew closer to the constitutional government, the strength of the Neri lay in the councils of the Guelf Society and the influence of the aristocratic bankers. Guido Cavalcanti (who, even after the modification of the Ordinances, would have been excluded from office) was allied with the Cerchi, but probably less influenced by political considerations than by his personal hostility towards Messer Corso, who was in high favour with the Pope. Florence was now indeed “disposed for woeful ruin” (_Purg._ xxiv. 81), but there had been a “long contention” (_Inf._ vi. 64) before the parties came to bloodshed.

THE JUBILEE.--On February 22nd, 1300, Pope Boniface issued the bull proclaiming the first papal jubilee. It began with the previous Christmas Day and lasted through the year 1300. Amongst the throngs of pilgrims from all parts of the world to Rome were Giovanni Villani and, probably, Dante (_Inf._ xviii. 29). This visit to Rome inspired Villani to undertake his great chronicle; and it is the epoch to which Dante assigns the vision which is the subject of the _Divina Commedia_ (_Purg._ ii. 98). The Pope, however, had his eyes on Florence, and had apparently resolved to make Tuscany a part of the Papal States. Possibly he had already opened negotiations with the Neri through his agents and bankers, the Spini. A plot against the state on the part of three Florentines in the service of the Pope was discovered to the Signoria, and sentence passed against the offenders on April 18th.[3] Boniface wrote to the Bishop of Florence, on April 24th, 1300, demanding from the Commune that the sentences should be annulled and the accusers sent to him. The Priors having refused compliance and denied his jurisdiction in the matter, the Pope issued a second bull, declaring that he had no intention of derogating from the jurisdiction or liberty of Florence, which he intended to increase; but asserting the absolute supremacy of the Roman Pontiff both in spiritual and temporal things over all peoples and kingdoms, and demanding again, with threats of vengeance spiritual and temporal, that the sentences against his adherents should be annulled, that the three accusers with six of the most violent against his authority should appear before him, and that the officers of the Republic should send representatives to answer for their conduct. This was on May 15th, but, two days earlier, the Pope had written to the Duke of Saxony, and sent the Bishop of Ancona to Germany, to demand from Albert of Austria the renunciation absolutely to the Holy See of all rights claimed by the Emperors in Tuscany.

DANTE’S PRIORATE.--But in the meantime bloodshed had taken place in Florence. On May 1st the two factions came to blows in the Piazza di Santa Trinita; and on May 4th full powers had been given to the Priors to defend the liberty of the Commune and People of Florence against dangers from within and without (which had evidently irritated the Pope). The whole city was now divided; magnates and burghers alike became bitter partisans of one or other faction. The Pope, who had previously made a vain attempt to reconcile Vieri de’ Cerchi with the Donati, sent the Franciscan Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta as legate and peacemaker to Florence, in the interests of the captains of the Guelf Society and the Neri, who accused the Signoria of Ghibelline tendencies. The Cardinal arrived in June. From June 15th to August 14th Dante was one of the six Priors by election. “All my misfortunes,” he says in the letter quoted by Leonardo Bruni, “had their cause and origin in my ill-omened election to the Priorate; of which Priorate, though by prudence I was not worthy, still by faith and age I was not unworthy.” We know too little of the facts to be able to comment upon this cryptic utterance. On the first day of office (June 15th), the sentence passed in the previous April against the three Florentines in the papal service was formally consigned to Dante and his colleagues--Lapo Gianni (probably the same person as his poet friend of that name) acting as notary. There were disturbances in the city. On St. John’s Eve an assault was made upon the Consuls of the Arts by certain magnates of the Neri, and their opponents threatened to take up arms. The Priors, perhaps on Dante’s motion, exiled (or, more accurately, put under bounds outside the territory of the Republic) some prominent members of both factions, including Corso Donati and Guido Cavalcanti. The Neri attempted to resist, expecting aid from the Cardinal and from Lucca; the Bianchi obeyed. Negotiations continued between the Signoria and the Cardinal, Dante and his colleagues resisting the papal demands without coming to a formal rupture.

THE BIANCHI IN POWER.--The succeeding Signoria was less prudent. The banished Bianchi were allowed to return just after Dante had left office (as he himself states in a lost letter seen by Leonardo Bruni), on the plea of the illness of Guido Cavalcanti, who had contracted malaria at Sarzana, and died at Florence in the last days of August. At the end of September a complete rupture ensued with Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, who broke off negotiations and retired to Bologna, leaving the city under an interdict. Corso Donati had broken bounds and gone to the Pope, who, towards the close of 1300, nominated Charles of Valois, brother of Philip the Fair, captain-general of the papal states, and summoned him to Italy to aid Charles of Naples against Frederick of Aragon in Sicily and reduce the “rebels” of Tuscany to submission.

We meet the name of Dante on several occasions among the _consulte_ of the Florentine Republic during 1301. It is probable that he was one of the _savi_ called to council on March 15th, and that he opposed the granting of a subsidy in money which the King of Naples had demanded for the Sicilian war and which was made by the Council of the Hundred.[4] On April 14th he was among the _savi_ in the Council of the Capitudini for the election of the new Signoria, of which Palmieri Altoviti was the leading spirit. On April 28th Dante was appointed _officialis et superestans_, in connection with the works in the street of San Procolo, possibly with the object of more readily bringing up troops from the country. During the priorate of Palmieri Altoviti (April 15th to June 14th), a conspiracy was discovered, hatched at a meeting of the Neri in the church of S. Trinita, to overthrow the government and invite the Pope to send Charles of Valois to Florence. In consequence a number of Neri were banished and their possessions confiscated, a fresh sentence being passed against Corso Donati. The Bianchi were all potent in Florence; and, in May 1301, they procured the expulsion of the Neri from Pistoia (ruthlessly carried out by the Florentine captain, Andrea Gherardini), which was the beginning of the end (_Inf._ xxiv. 143): “Pistoia first is thinned of Neri; then Florence renovates folk and rule.”

THE COMING OF CHARLES OF VALOIS.--The government still shrank from directly opposing the Pope, who, by letter from Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta, demanded the continuation of the service of a hundred horsemen. On June 19th, 1301, in a united meeting of the Councils of the Hundred, of the Captain, and of the Capitudini, and again in the Council of the Hundred apart, Dante spoke against compliance, urging “quod de servitio faciendo domini Papae nihil fiat”--with the result that the matter was postponed. In the united Councils of the Hundred, the Captain, the Podestà, and the Capitudini, on September 13th, he pleaded for the preservation of the Ordinances of Justice (a sign that the State was regarded as in peril). On this occasion all the twenty-one arts were represented, which we may connect with Leonardo Bruni’s statement that Dante had advised the Priors to strengthen themselves with the support of the “moltitudine del popolo.” On September 20th, in the Council of the Captain, he supported a request of the ambassadors of the Commune of Bologna (then allied with the Bianchi) for free passage for their importation of grain. On September 28th, again in the Council of the Captain, he defended a certain Neri di Gherardino Diedati (whose father was destined to share the poet’s fate) from an injust charge. This is the last recorded time that _Dantes Alagherii consuluit_ in Florence. Already Charles of Valois was on his way, preparing to “joust with the lance of Judas” (_Purg._ xx. 70-78). On November 1st, after giving solemn pledges to the Signoria (Dino Compagni being one of the Priors), Charles with 1200 horsemen entered Florence without opposition.

Leonardo Bruni asserts that Dante was absent at Rome on an embassy to the Pope when the latter’s “peacemaker” entered Florence. It would appear that the Florentine government had requested the allied Commune of Bologna to send an embassy to Boniface, simultaneously with an embassy from Siena with which were associated three ambassadors from Florence: Maso di Ruggierino Minerbetti, Corazza da Signa, and Dante Alighieri. Their purpose was to make their own terms with the Pontiff in order to avert the intervention of Charles. The mission set out at the beginning of October; but one of the Bolognese ambassadors, Ubaldino Malavolti, having business of his own with the Florentine government, delayed the others so long that they did not arrive in time.[5] Boccaccio asserts that, when the Bianchi proposed to send Dante on such an embassy, he answered somewhat arrogantly: “If I go, who stays? and if I stay, who goes?” According to Dino Compagni, Boniface sent two of the Florentines--Maso Minerbetti and Corazza da Signa--back to Florence to demand submission to his will, but detained Dante at his court. The fact of Dante taking part in such an embassy is confirmed by the author of the _Ottimo Commento_, as also by an anonymous commentator on the canzone of the _Tre donne_, and, though seriously questioned by many Dante scholars, it is now generally accepted as historical. The other two ambassadors returned almost simultaneously with the arrival of the French prince. Yielding to necessity and trusting to his solemn oath, the Signoria, in a parliament held in S. Maria Novella, gave Charles authority to pacify the city; which he set about doing by restoring the Neri to power. Corso Donati with his allies entered Florence in arms, to plunder and massacre at their pleasure, the last Signoria of the Bianchi being compelled to resign on November 7th (cf. _Purg._ vi. 143, 144). A second effort by the Cardinal Matteo from the Pope to reconcile the two factions was resisted by Charles and the Neri; and the work of proscription began. The new Podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio, passed sentence after sentence against the ruined Bianchi. Finally, at the beginning of April, their chiefs were betrayed into a real or pretended conspiracy against Charles, and driven out with their followers and adherents, both nobles and burghers, six hundred in number; their houses were destroyed, and their goods confiscated, themselves sentenced as rebels. On April 4th, 1302, Charles left Florence, covered with disgrace and full of plunder, leaving the government entirely in the hands of the Neri. “Having cast forth the greatest part of the flowers from thy bosom, O Florence,” writes Dante in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_, “the second Totila went fruitlessly to Sicily” (_V. E._ ii. 6).

SENTENCES AGAINST DANTE.--The first sentence against Dante is dated January 27th, 1302, and includes four other names. Gherardino Diedati, formerly Prior, is accused of taking bribes for the release of a prisoner, and has not appeared when summoned. Palmieri Altoviti (who had taken the lead in putting down the conspiracy hatched in Santa Trinita), Dante Alighieri, Lippo Becchi (one of the denouncers of Boniface’s agents in 1300), and Orlanduccio Orlandi are accused of “barratry,” fraud and corrupt practices, unlawful gains and extortions and the like, in office and out of office; of having corruptly and fraudulently used the money and resources of the Commune against the Supreme Pontiff, and to resist the coming of Messer Carlo, or against the pacific state of Florence and the Guelf Party; of having caused the expulsion of the Neri from Pistoia, and severed that city from Florence and the Church. Since they have contumaciously absented themselves, when summoned to appear before the Podestà’s court, they are held to have confessed their guilt, and sentenced to pay a heavy fine and restore what they have extorted. If not paid in three days, all their goods shall be confiscated; even if they pay, they are exiled for two years and perpetually excluded as falsifiers and barrators, _tamquam falsarii et barattarii_, from holding any office or benefice under the Commune of Florence. On March 10th, a further sentence condemns these five with ten others to be burned to death, if any of them at any time shall come into the power of the Commune. In this latter sentence there is no mention of any political offence, but only of malversation and contumacy. None of Dante’s six colleagues in the Signoria are included in either sentence; but in the second appear the names of Lapo Salterelli, who had headed the opposition to Boniface in the spring of 1300, but whom the poet judges sternly (cf. _Par._ xv. 128), and Andrea Gherardini, who had been Florentine captain at Pistoia.

There can be little doubt that, in spite of the wording of these two sentences, Dante’s real offence was his opposition to the policy of Pope Boniface. In the _De Volgari Eloquentia_ (i. 6) he declares that he is suffering exile unjustly because of his love for Florence. All his early biographers bear testimony to his absolute innocence of the charge of malversation and barratry; it has been left to modern commentators to question it. In the letter to a Florentine friend, Dante speaks of his innocence manifest to all, _innocentia manifesta quibuslibet_, as though in direct answer to the _fama publica referente_ of the Podestà’s sentence. His likening himself to Hippolytus is a no less emphatic protestation of innocence: “As Hippolytus departed from Athens, by reason of his pitiless and treacherous stepmother, so from Florence needs must thou depart. This is willed, this is already being sought, and soon will it be done for him who thinks it, there where Christ is put to sale each day” (_Par._ xvii. 46-51). “I hold my exile as an honour”:

L’essilio che m’è dato, on or mi tegno,

he says in his canzone of the _Tre donne_. Had Dante completed the _Convivio_, he would probably have furnished us with a complete apologia in the fourteenth treatise, where he intended to comment upon this canzone and discuss Justice. “Justice,” he says in _Conv._ i. 12, “is so lovable that, as the philosopher says in the fifth of the Ethics, even her enemies love her, such as thieves and robbers; and therefore we see that her contrary, which is injustice, is especially hated (as is treachery, ingratitude, falseness, theft, rapine, deceit, and their like). The which are such inhuman sins that, to defend himself from the infamy of these, it is conceded by long usance that a man may speak of himself, and may declare himself to be faithful and loyal. Of this virtue I shall speak more fully in the fourteenth treatise.”

5. _First Period of Exile_

“Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the most beautiful and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me forth from her sweet bosom (in which I was born and nourished up to the summit of my life, and in which, with her goodwill, I desire with all my heart to rest my wearied mind and to end the time given me), I have gone through almost all the parts to which this language extends, a pilgrim, almost a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is wont unjustly to be ofttimes reputed to the wounded.”

In these words (_Conv._ i. 3), Dante sums up the earlier portion of his exile. There are few lines of poetry more noble in pathos, more dignified in reticence, than those which he has put into the mouth of Cacciaguida (_Par._ xvii. 55-60): “Thou shalt leave everything beloved most dearly, and this is that arrow which the bow of exile first shoots. Thou shalt test how savours of salt another’s bread, and how hard the ascending and descending by another’s stairs.”

EARLY DAYS OF EXILE.--The terms of the first sentence against Dante seem to imply that, if he had returned to Florence, he fled from the city before January 27th, 1302. We do not know where he went. Boccaccio, apparently from a misunderstanding of _Par._ xvii. 70, says Verona; if we suppose it to have been Siena, this would explain Leonardo Bruni’s account of Dante’s first hearing particulars of his ruin at the latter city. The sentence against Messer Vieri de’ Cerchi, with the other leaders, is dated April 5th in the terrible _Libro del Chiodo_, the black book of the Guelf Party. Arezzo, Forlì, Siena, Bologna, were the chief resorts of the exiled Bianchi; in Bologna they seem for some time to have been especially welcome. Dante first joined them in a meeting held at Gargonza, where they are said by Bruni to have made the poet one of their twelve councillors, and to have fixed their headquarters at Arezzo. For a short time Dante made common cause with them, but found their society extremely uncongenial (_Par._ xvii. 61-66). On June 8th, 1302, there is documentary evidence of his presence with some others in the choir of San Godenzo at the foot of the Apennines, where the Bianchi allied with the Ghibelline Ubaldini to make war upon Florence. The fact of this meeting having been held in Florentine territory and followed by several cavalry raids induced a fresh sentence in July from the new Podestà, Gherardino da Gambara of Brescia, in which, however, Dante is not mentioned.

FAILURE OF THE BIANCHI.--A heavy blow was inflicted upon the exiles by the treachery of Carlino di Pazzi (_Inf._ xxxii. 69), who surrendered the castle of Piantravigne in Valdarno to the Neri, when many Bianchi were slain or taken. The cruelty of the Romagnole, Count Fulcieri da Calboli, the next Podestà of Florence from January to September 1303, towards such of the unfortunate Bianchi as fell into his hands has received its meed of infamy in _Purg._ xiv. 58-66. It is perhaps noteworthy (as bearing upon the date of Dante’s separation from his fellow-exiles) that the poet’s name does not appear among the Bianchi who, under the leadership of the Ghibelline captain, Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi of Forlì, signed an agreement with their allies in Bologna on June 18th in this year; but this may merely imply that he did not go to Bologna. He was possibly associated with Scarpetta at Forlì about this time. These renewed attempts to recover the state by force of arms resulted only in the disastrous defeat of Pulicciano in Mugello.

DEATH OF BONIFACE VIII.--In this same year Sciarra Colonna and William of Nogaret, in the name of Philip the Fair, seized Boniface VIII. at Anagni, and treated the old Pontiff with such barbarity that he died in a few days, October 11th, 1303. The seizure had been arranged by the infamous Musciatto Franzesi, who had been instrumental in the bringing of Charles of Valois to Florence. “I see the golden lilies enter Alagna,” cries Hugh Capet in the _Purgatorio_; “and in His vicar Christ made captive. I see Him mocked a second time. I see renewed the vinegar and gall, and Him slain between thieves that live” (_Purg._ xx. 86-90).

BENEDICT XI.--In succession to Boniface, Nicholas of Treviso, the master-general of the Dominicans, a man of humble birth and of saintly life, was made Pope on October 22nd, 1303, as Benedict XI. He at once devoted himself to healing the wounds of Italy, and sent to Florence as peacemaker the Dominican Cardinal, Niccolò da Prato, who was of Ghibelline origin. The peacemaker arrived in March 1304, and was received with great honour. Representatives of the Bianchi and Ghibellines came to the city at his invitation; and, when May opened, there was an attempt to revive the traditional festivities which had ended on that fatal May Day of 1300. But a terrible disaster on the Ponte alla Carraia cast an ominous gloom over the city, and the Neri treacherously forced the Cardinal to leave. Hardly had he gone when, on June 10th, fighting broke out in the streets, and a fire, purposely started by the Neri, devastated Florence. On July 7th Pope Benedict died, perhaps poisoned, at Perugia; and, seeing this last hope taken from them, the irreconcilable portion of the Bianchi, led by Baschiera della Tosa, aided by the Ghibellines of Tuscany under Tolosato degli Uberti, with allies from Bologna and Arezzo, made a valiant attempt to surprise Florence on July 20th from Lastra. Baschiera, with about a thousand horsemen, captured a part of the suburbs, and drew up his force near San Marco, “with white standards displayed, and garlands of olives, with drawn swords, crying peace” (Compagni). Through his impetuosity and not awaiting the coming of Tolosato, this enterprise ended in utter disaster, and with its failure the last hopes of the Bianchi were dashed to the ground.

SEPARATION FROM THE BIANCHI AND WANDERINGS IN EXILE.--After the defeat of Lastra, Bruni represents Dante as going from Arezzo to Verona, utterly humbled. We learn from the _Paradiso_ (xvii. 61-69) that, estranged from his fellow-exiles who had turned violently against him, he had been compelled to form a party to himself. It is held by some scholars that he had broken away from them in the previous year, and that, towards the end of 1303, he had found his first refuge at Verona in “the courtesy of the great Lombard,” Bartolommeo della Scala, at whose court he now first saw his young brother, afterwards famous as Can Grande, and already in boyhood showing sparks of future greatness (_ibid._ 70-78). Others would identify _il gran Lombardo_ with Bartolommeo’s brother and successor, Albuino della Scala, who ruled in Verona from March 1304 until October 1311, and associated Can Grande with him as the commander of his troops. There is no certain documentary evidence of Dante’s movements between June 1302 and October 1306. It is not improbable that, in 1304 or 1305, he stayed some time at Bologna. The first book of the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ seems in many respects to bear witness to this stay at Bologna, where the exiles were still welcome; a certain kindliness towards the Bolognese, very different from his treatment of them later in the _Divina Commedia_, is apparent, together with a peculiar acquaintance with their dialect. But on March 1st, 1306, the Bolognese made a pact with the Neri, after which they expelled the Florentine exiles, ordering that no Bianchi or Ghibellines should be found in Bolognese territory on pain of death. Dante perhaps went to Padua from Bologna, and, though the supposed documentary proof of his residence in Padua on August 27th, 1306, cannot be accepted without reserve, it is tempting to accept the statement of Benvenuto da Imola that the poet was entertained by Giotto when the painter was engaged upon the frescoes of the Madonna dell’ Arena. In October, Dante was in Lunigiana, a guest of the Malaspina, that honoured race adorned with the glory of purse and sword (_Purg._ viii. 121-139). Here, according to Boccaccio, he recovered from Florence some manuscript which he had left behind him in his flight; possibly what he afterwards rewrote as the first seven cantos of the _Inferno_. On October 6th he acted as ambassador and _nuncio_ of the Marquis Franceschino Malaspina in establishing peace between his house and the Bishop of Luni. This is the last certain trace of Dante’s feet in Italy for nearly five years. There is a strangely beautiful canzone of his which may have been written at this time. Love has seized upon the poet in the midst of the Alps (_i.e._ Apennines): “In the valley of the river by whose side thou hast ever power upon me”; “Thou goest, my mountain song; perchance shalt see Florence, my city, that bars me out of herself, void of love and nude of pity; if thou dost enter in, go saying: Now my maker can no more make war upon you; there, whence I come, such a chain binds him that, even if your cruelty relax, he has no liberty to return hither.”[6]

Dante had probably, as Bruni tells us, been abstaining from any hostile action towards Florence, and hoping to be recalled by the government spontaneously. There are traces of this state of mind in the _Convivio_ (i. 3). It would be about this time that he wrote in vain the letter mentioned by Bruni, but now lost, _Popule mee quid feci tibi_.

CLEMENT V.--DEATH OF CORSO DONATI.--In the meantime Clement V., a Gascon, and formerly Archbishop of Bordeaux, had been elected Pope. “From westward there shall come a lawless shepherd of uglier deeds” than even Boniface VIII., writes Dante in _Inferno_ xix. He translated the Papal Court from Rome to Avignon, and thus in 1305 initiated the Babylonian captivity of the Popes, which lasted for more than seventy years, “to the great damage of all Christendom, but especially of Rome” (Platina). Scandalous as was his subservience to the French king, and utterly unworthy of the Papacy as he showed himself, it must be admitted that Clement made serious efforts to relieve the persecuted Bianchi and Ghibellines--efforts which were cut short by the surrender of Pistoia in 1306 and the incompetence of his legate, the Cardinal Napoleone Orsini. In October 1308, Corso Donati came to the violent end mentioned as a prophecy in _Purg._ xxiv.; suspected, with good reason, of aiming at the lordship of Florence with the aid of the Ghibelline captain, Uguccione della Faggiuola, whose daughter he had married, he was denounced as a traitor and killed in his flight from the city.

DANTE POSSIBLY AT PARIS.--Villani tells us that Dante, after exile, went to the Studio at Bologna, and then to Paris and to many parts of the world. The visit to Paris is also affirmed by Boccaccio, and it is not impossible that Dante went thither, between 1307 and 1309, by way of the Riviera and Provence. A highly improbable legend of his presence at Oxford is based upon an ambiguous line in a poetical epistle from Boccaccio to Petrarch and the later testimony of Giovanni da Serravalle at the beginning of the fifteenth century. Dante’s stay in Paris has been seriously questioned, and still remains uncertain. The University of Paris was then the first in the world in theology and scholastic philosophy. Boccaccio tells us that the disputations which Dante sustained there were regarded as most marvellous triumphs of scholastic subtlety. According to Giovanni da Serravalle (who has, however, placed his Parisian experiences too early), Dante was forced to return before taking the doctorate of theology, for which he had already fulfilled the preliminaries. He may have stayed in Paris until 1310, when tremendous events put an end to his studies and imperatively summoned him back to Italy.

6. _The Invasion of Henry VII._

“Lo, now is the acceptable time wherein arise the signs of consolation and peace. For a new day is breaking from the east, showing forth the dawn which already is dispersing the darkness of our long calamity; and already the eastern breezes begin to blow, the face of heaven glows red, and confirms the hopes of the nations with a caressing calm. And we too shall see the looked-for joy, we who have kept vigil through the long night in the desert” (_Epist._ v. 1).

ELECTION OF HENRY VII.--On May 1st, 1308, Albert of Austria, who, by his neglect of Italy, had suffered the garden of the Empire to be desert, was assassinated by his nephew (_Purg._ vi. 97-105). In November, with the concurrence of the Pope and in opposition to the royal house of France, Henry of Luxemburg was elected Emperor. In January 1309 he was crowned at Aix as Henry VII.; in May 1310 he announced to the Italian cities his intention of coming to Rome for the imperial crown. Here was a true King of the Romans and successor of Caesar, such as the Italians had not recognised since the death of Frederick II. (_Conv._ iv. 3). The saddle was no longer empty; Italy had once more a king and Rome a spouse. It is in the glory of this imperial sunrise that Dante appears again, and, in the letter just quoted to the Princes and Peoples of Italy, his voice is heard, hailing the advent of this new Moses, this most clement Henry, _divus Augustus Caesar_, who is hastening to the nuptials, illuminated in the rays of the Apostolic benediction. The letter seems to have been written after the beginning of September, when the Pope issued an encyclical on Henry’s behalf, and before the latter part of October 1310, when the Emperor arrived in Italy. According to the fifteenth-century historian, Flavio Biondo, Dante was at this time at Forlì with Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi. In January 1311 Henry took the iron crown (or its substitute) at Milan. Dante, sometime before the end of March, paid his homage to the Emperor (_Epist._ vii. 2): “I saw thee, as beseems Imperial Majesty, most benignant, and heard thee most clement, when that my hands handled thy feet and my lips paid their debt. Then did my spirit exult in thee, and I spoke silently with myself: ‘Behold the Lamb of God. Behold Him who hath taken away the sins of the world.’”

NATIONAL POLICY OF FLORENCE.--The Emperor himself shared the golden dream of the Italian idealists, and, believing in the possibility of the union of Church and Empire in a peaceful Italy healed of her wounds, addressed himself ardently to his impossible task, forcing cities to take back their exiles, patching up old quarrels. Opposed to him arises the less sympathetic figure of King Robert of Naples, who, having succeeded his father, Charles II., in May 1309, was preparing--though still for a while negotiating on his own account with Henry--to head the Guelf opposition. While others temporised, Florence openly defied the Emperor, insulted his envoys, and refused to send ambassadors to his coronation. While the Emperor put his imperial vicars into Italian cities, as though he were another Frederick Barbarossa, the Florentines drew closer their alliance with Robert, formed a confederation of Guelf cities, and aided with money and men all who made head against the German King. In spite of the bitter language used by Dante in his letters, modern historians have naturally recognised in this one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Republic. “Florence,” writes Pasquale Villari, “called on the Guelf cities, and all seeking to preserve freedom and escape foreign tyranny, to join in an Italian confederation, with herself at its head. This is, indeed, the moment in which the small merchant republic initiates a truly national policy, and becomes a great Italian power. So, in the medieval shape of a feudal and universal Empire, on the one hand, and in that of a municipal confederation on the other, a gleam of the national idea first began to appear, though still in the far distance and veiled in clouds.”

LETTERS AND FRESH SENTENCE.--On March 31st, 1311, from “the boundaries of Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” and on April 17th, from “Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” Dante addressed two terrible letters to “the most wicked Florentines within,” and to “the most sacred triumphant and only lord, Henry by divine providence King of the Romans, ever Augustus.” In the former he reasserts the rights and sanctity of the Empire, and, whilst hurling the fiercest invective upon the Florentine government, foretells their utter destruction and warns them of their inability to withstand the might of the Emperor. In the latter he rebukes the “minister of God and son of the Church and promoter of Roman glory” for his delay in Lombardy, and urges him on against Florence, “the sick sheep that infects all the flock of the Lord with her contagion.” Let him lay her low and Israel will be delivered. “Then shall our heritage, the taking away of which we weep without ceasing, be restored to us again; and even as we now groan, remembering the holy Jerusalem, exiles in Babylon, so then, citizens breathing again in peace, we shall look back in our joy upon the miseries of confusion.” These letters were evidently written from the Casentino, where Dante had gone probably on an imperial mission to one or other of the Conti Guidi. He was perhaps staying at the castle of Poppi, and there is a tradition that the Florentine government sent agents to arrest him there. Probably in consequence of these letters, a new condemnation was pronounced against him; on September 2nd, 1311, Dante is included in the long list of exiles who, in the “reform” of Baldo d’Aguglione, are to be excepted from amnesty and for ever excluded from Florence.

FAILURE OF THE EMPEROR.--But in the meantime Brescia, “the lioness of Italy,” who had offered as heroic a resistance to Henry VII. as she was to do five centuries later to the Austrians of Haynau, had been forced to surrender; and the Emperor had at last moved southwards to Genoa and thence to Pisa, from which parties of imperialists ravaged the Florentine territory. From Genoa, on December 24th, 1311, he issued a decree placing Florence under the ban of the Empire, and declaring the Florentine exiles under his special protection. Dante (with Palmieri Altoviti and other exiles) was probably at Pisa in the early spring of 1312, and it may well have been there that Petrarch--then a little boy in his eighth year--saw his great predecessor. Rome itself was partly held by the troops of King Robert and the Florentines; with difficulty was Henry crowned by the Pope’s legates in the Church of St. John Lateran on June 29th, 1312. From September 19th to October 31st Henry besieged Florence, himself ill with fever. “Do ye trust in any defence girt by your contemptible rampart?” Dante had written to the Florentines: “What shall it avail to have girt you with a rampart and to have fortified yourselves with outworks and battlements, when, terrible in gold, that eagle shall swoop down on you which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, ever strengthened by the support of the soldiery of heaven, looked down of old upon vast oceans in its flight?” But the golden eagle did not venture upon an assault. Wasting the country as it went, the imperial army retreated. Early in 1313 the Florentines gave the signory of their city to King Robert for five years, while the Emperor from Pisa placed the king under the ban of the Empire, and declared him a public enemy. The Pope himself had deserted the imperial cause, and was fulminating excommunication if Henry invaded Robert’s kingdom (cf. _Par._ xvii. 82; xxx. 144), when the Emperor, moving from Pisa with reinforcements from Germany and Sicily, died on the march towards Naples at Buonconvento, near Siena, on August 24th, 1313. Dante had not accompanied the imperialists against Florence; he yet retained so much reverence for his fatherland, as Bruni writes, apparently from some lost letter of the poet’s. We do not know where he was when the fatal news reached him. Cino da Pistoia and Sennuccio del Bene broke out into elegiac canzoni on the dead hero; Dante was silent, and waited till he could more worthily write the apotheosis of his _alto Arrigo_ in the Empyrean (_Par._ xxx. 133-138).

7. _Last Period of Exile_

DANTE’S WANDERINGS--DEATH OF CLEMENT V.--Dante was again a proscribed fugitive. His movements are hardly known, excepting by more or less happy conjecture, from the spring of 1311 in the Casentino to the close of his days at Ravenna. Boccaccio and Bruni agree that he had now given up all hope of return to Florence. According to the latter, he wandered about in great poverty, under the protection of various lords, in different parts of Lombardy, Tuscany, and Romagna. There is a tradition, perhaps mainly based upon a passage in the _Paradiso_ (_Par._ xxi. 106-120), that Dante retired to the convent of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, from which he gazed forth upon the perishing world of the Middle Ages, which was finding imperishable monument in his work. To this epoch might possibly be assigned--for what it may be worth--the story of his visit to the other convent of Santa Croce del Corvo in Lunigiana in quest of peace; but the only authority for this episode is the letter of Frate Ilario to Uguccione della Faggiuola, now almost universally regarded as a fabrication. But, if his steps are hidden, his voice is heard, and with no uncertain sound. On April 20th, 1314, Clement V. died in Provence (_Par._ xxx. 145); and, early in the interregnum that followed, Dante addressed a famous letter to the Italian cardinals, rebuking them for their backsliding and corruption, urging them to make amends by striving manfully for the restoration of the papacy to Rome. It is a noble production, full of zeal and dignity, impregnated with the sublimest spirit of mediaeval Catholicity. It had no immediate effect; after a long interval the Cahorsine, John XXII., was elected in August 1316; and the disgrace of Avignon continued. The ideal Emperor had failed; no ideal Pope was forthcoming; conscious at last of his own greatness, with _luci chiare ed acute_ (_Par._ xxii. 126), eyes clear from passion and acute with discernment, the divine poet turned to the completion of his _Commedia_.

REJECTION OF THE AMNESTY.--After the death of the Emperor, the Ghibelline leader, Uguccione della Faggiuola, had been chosen lord of Pisa; he captured Lucca in June, 1314, and began a brief career of conquest in Tuscany which seriously alarmed Florence. In this crisis the Florentine government on May 19th, 1315, decreed a general _ribandimento_, or recall of exiles, under condition of a small fine, a merely formal imprisonment, and the ceremony of “oblation” in the Baptistery. Dante was probably at Lucca when he received letters to the effect that he was included.[7] The famous letter to a Florentine friend contains his rejection of this amnesty. While deeply and affectionately grateful to the friends who have striven for his return, the conditions of this “revocatio gratiosa” seem to Dante derogatory to his fame and honour, and with calm dignity he refuses to avail himself of it: “This is not the way of return to our native land, my father; but if another may be found, first by you and then by others, which does not derogate from Dante’s fame and honour, that will I accept with no lagging feet. But, if by no such way Florence may be entered, I will never enter Florence. What then? May I not anywhere gaze upon the mirror of the sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths anywhere beneath the heaven, unless first I return to the city, inglorious, nay dishonoured, in the sight of the Florentine people? Nor, assuredly, will bread fail me” (Epist. ix 4).[8]

NEW CONDEMNATION.--On August 29th, 1315, Uguccione utterly defeated the united armies of Florence and Naples at the great battle of Montecatini; the Pisan ploughman had crushed the flowers and the lilies, as Giovanni del Virgilio afterwards wrote to Dante. Dante’s two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, had perhaps joined him in Lucca. The original death sentence had apparently been commuted (probably because of his having refrained from joining in the imperialist attack upon Florence in 1312) to being placed under bounds in some defined locality; and in October 1315 the poet, with his two sons, and others were cited to appear before Ranieri di Zaccaria of Orvieto, royal vicar in the city of Florence and its district (King Robert’s vicars having replaced the podestàs), to give surety as to going and staying in the places appointed. On their neglecting to appear, “Dante Alighieri and his sons,” in Ranieri’s sentence of November 6th, are condemned as contumacious and rebels, and sentenced to be beheaded if they ever come into the power of the royal vicar or of the Commune of Florence. “And, lest they should glory in their contumacy, we put all and each of them under ban of the city of Florence and district, giving licence to anyone to offend all and any one of them in goods and in person, according to the form of the statutes of Florence.” All the Portinari are included in this decree, with the exception of Manetto and fourteen others who have given security.

DANTE AT VERONA.--In the following year, 1316, Uguccione lost Pisa and Lucca, and fled to Verona, where Can Grande della Scala, since the death of his brother Albuino in 1311, held sovereign sway as imperial vicar, and had become the champion of Ghibellinism in northern Italy; in 1318 Cane was elected captain of the Ghibelline League, and in his service Uguccione died during the siege of Padua in 1319 or 1320. It is probable that, somewhere about this time, Dante’s wandering feet had led him back to Verona to renew his friendship with Can Grande (_Par._ xvii. 85-90; _Epist._ x. 1). The old legend of Dante having met with discourtesy at his hands is to be absolutely rejected, as indeed every reference to Can Grande in his works demands. That, on his earlier visit, there may have been some unpleasantness with Albuino (_Conv._ iv. 16) is more credible. But Dante needed a more peaceful refuge than Verona to complete his life’s work; the city of the imperial vicar resounded with the clash of warlike preparations:

But at this court, peace still must wrench
Her chaplet from the teeth of war:
By day they held high watch afar,
At night they cried across the trench;
And still, in Dante’s path, the fierce
Gaunt soldiers wrangled o’er their spears.

AT RAVENNA.--It was most likely towards the end of 1316, or early in 1317, that Dante finally settled at Ravenna; probably, as Boccaccio tells us, on the invitation of Guido Novello da Polenta, who had succeeded to the lordship of Ravenna in June 1316. This Guido was the nephew of Francesca da Rimini, the hapless heroine of one of the most familiar episodes of the _Inferno_. These few remaining years of Dante’s life are the pleasantest to contemplate. His two sons were with him, though their mother apparently remained in Florence. Dino Perini, a younger Florentine, seems to have been to some extent the friend of Dante’s later days, as Guido Cavalcanti had been of his youth. And there were other congenial companions round him, including perhaps Giotto, who was probably working at Ravenna about this time. It is possible that Dante held some kind of professorship in the local university. Scholars and disciples came to be instructed in the poetic art, among them, it would seem, Guido da Polenta himself. His relations were still cordial with Can Grande, to whom, probably in 1318 or 1319, he addressed the epistle which contains the dedication of the _Paradiso_. From the _Quaestio de Aqua et Terra_ (which is now generally accepted as authentic) we gather that, at the end of 1319 or beginning of 1320, Dante paid a visit to Mantua, and that at Verona, on January 20th, 1320, he delivered a discourse concerning the relative position of the two elements, earth and water, on the globe’s surface. A curious document of 1320--the report of a process at Avignon in which Dante’s name is incidentally mentioned--seems to show that the poet was regarded as an authority upon sorcery, but as one whom persons intending to put this power to guilty use should abstain from consulting. There is also some vague evidence that accusations of heresy may have been brought against him.

LAST DAYS AND DEATH.--At Ravenna, amidst the monuments of ancient Caesars and the records in mosaic of primitive Christianity, where the church walls testified the glory of Justinian and the music of the Pine Forest sounded in his ears, Dante finished his _Divina Commedia_. His poetical correspondence with Giovanni del Virgilio, a shining light of the University of Bologna, reveals the kindliness and affability of the austere “preacher of Justice.” But he was not to end his days in peace. A storm cloud of war seemed about to burst over Ravenna. According to Venetian accounts--and we have no version of the matter from the other side--the Ravennese had taken Venetian ships and killed Venetian sailors in time of peace without just cause. In consequence the Doge entered into an alliance with the lords of Forlì and Rimini, and prepared to make war upon Ravenna with forces far beyond Guido’s power to meet. In August 1321 an embassy was sent by Guido to Venice, to avert the war by diplomatic means. Of this embassy Dante formed part. According to Filippo Villani, the Venetians refused the poet a hearing, and forced him, sick with fever, to return by land. It is more probable that Dante returned with offered terms by the quickest way, which would bring him back through the Pineta to Ravenna. There he died in the night between September 13th and 14th, 1321, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. The poet of a renovated Empire and a purified Church had passed away on the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross--the Cross which he represents as the mystical bond with which Christ had bound the chariot of the Church to the tree of the Empire. He left his Church sinking, though but for a time, still deeper into the scandal and corruption of Avignon; his Empire preparing new degradation for itself, now that the Eagle had passed into the greedy and unworthy hands of Bavarian Louis; his Italy torn and rent by factions and dissensions; his own Florence still ranking him as a proscribed rebel and criminal. But the divine work of his life had been completed, and remains an everlasting proof of the doctrine formulated by another poet, five hundred years later: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”[9]

8. _Dante’s Work and First Interpreters_

FOUR PERIODS IN HUMAN LIFE.--In the _Convivio_ (iv. 23, 24) Dante represents human life under the image of an arch, ascending and descending. For the perfectly-natured the summit of this arch is in the thirty-fifth year. Life is divided into four ages, like the four seasons of the year. Adolescence, _Adolescenza_, the increase of life, ascends from birth to the twenty-fifth year; Youth or Manhood, _Gioventute_, the perfection and culmination of life, lasts from the twenty-fifth to the forty-fifth year; Age, _Senettute_, descends from the forty-fifth to the seventieth year; after which remains Old Age, _Senio_, the winter of life.

THREE PERIODS IN DANTE’S WORK.--Dante’s work falls into three periods, representing to some extent _Adolescenza_, _Gioventute_, _Senettute_. The first is that of his “New Life,” the epoch of the romantic worship of Beatrice in her life and after her death, in which the youthful poet beheld many things by his intellect, as it were dreaming, _quasi come sognado_ (_Conv._ ii. 13). This period comprises the _Vita Nuova_, with the lyrics contemporaneous with it, and closes in the promise “yet to utter concerning her what hath never been said of any woman.” The second period corresponds to Dante’s second age, or _Gioventute_; it is the period in which the image of Beatrice in the citadel of his mind is somewhat obscured by the tempests of passion and political turmoil, and for a while had become less paramount when her poet directed his thoughts to the service of philosophical research. Joined to the first period by the canzone addressed to the angelic movers of the sphere of Venus, it includes the greater part of the collection of lyrics (Canzoni, Bellate, Sonnets) included in the _Rime_ or _Canzoniere_; the two unfinished prose treatises which expound the mystical meaning and technical construction of these canzoni, the _Convivio_ and the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_. The three political letters connected with the Italian expedition of Henry VII. and, most probably, the special treatise in Latin prose on the Empire, the _Monarchia_, connect the second with the third period. This last period is the period of the _Divina Commedia_; the return to Beatrice, but now the allegorical Beatrice; the fulfilment of the supreme promise of the _Vita Nuova_; the result of the labours in art and philosophy which the second period had witnessed, of political experience, and of the spiritual and moral revulsion of Dante’s later years, after the bitter disillusion of the Emperor Henry’s enterprise and failure: “A fruit of sufferings excess.” To this period, subsidiary to the _Divina Commedia_, belong the letters to the Italian Cardinals, to the Florentine friend and to Can Grande, the _Quaestio de Aqua et Terra_ (if authentic), and the two _Eclogues_.

In addition to these works, several Italian scholars of high repute have attributed to Dante the _Fiore_--a rendering of the _Roman de la Rose_ in 232 sonnets--the author of which twice calls himself “Durante.” The editors of the sexcentenary _testo critico_ have wisely excluded it from their volume, and it has been edited as an “appendice dantiana” by Parodi. Also we know of several smaller things of Dante’s now lost: the letters mentioned by Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo; a _serventese_ containing the names of the sixty most beautiful women in Florence, referred to in the _Vita Nuova_ (_V. N._ vi.), one of his earliest poems; and a canzone on love, of peculiar structure, quoted in the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ (_V. E._ ii. 11).

EARLY COMMENTATORS.--No sooner had Dante passed away than his apotheosis began with the epitaph by Giovanni del Virgilio:

Theologus Dantes, nullius dogmatis expers

--“Dante, the theologian, skilled in every branch of knowledge,” and the canzone on his death by Cino da Pistoia:

Su per la costa, Amor, de l’alto monte

--“Up the side, Love, of the lofty mountain.” Boccaccio tells us that it was Dante’s custom to send the _Divina Commedia_ by instalments to Can Grande at Verona, and he adds a striking story of how, eight months after his death, the poet appeared in a vision, “clad in whitest garments and his face shining with an unwonted light,” to his son Jacopo, to reveal to the world where the manuscript of the last thirteen cantos of the _Paradiso_ was hidden. It is a fact that in April or May, 1322, Jacopo presented a complete copy of the sacred poem to Guido da Polenta, who was then Captain of the People at Bologna. Straightway the work of copyists and commentators began, above all at Florence and Bologna. The earliest dated MSS. are the _Codice Landiano_ at Piacenza and the _Codice Trivulziano_ at Milan (the latter of Florentine origin), dated 1336 and 1337 respectively. Of commentaries, the first two are those on the _Inferno_, written in the twenties of the century, by Dante’s son, Jacopo Alighieri, in Italian, and Ser Graziolo de’ Bambaglioli, chancellor of the Commune of Bologna, in Latin. The earliest extant commentators on the complete poem are the Bolognese Jacopo della Lana and the Florentine author of the _Ottimo Commento_, probably Andrea Lancia; the former wrote shortly before and the latter shortly after 1330. Both wrote in Italian. Pietro Alighieri composed a Latin commentary on his father’s work about 1340, and revised it, with additions, some years later. An important Latin commentary on the _Inferno_, by the Carmelite Guido da Pisa, dates from the forties of the century. And, before the fourteenth century closed, a new epoch in Dante scholarship was inaugurated by the lectures and commentaries of Giovanni Boccaccio at Florence (1373), Benvenuto da Imola at Bologna (1375-80), and Francesco da Buti at Pisa (1380-90). Of all these earlier commentators, Benvenuto da Imola is by far the greatest; and he unites mediaeval Dantology with England’s cult of the divine poet in the first complete edition of his commentary which was given to the world by Lacaita and William Warren Vernon.

In his proem, Ser Graziolo, or his contemporary translator, strikes the keynote of all reverent criticism of the _Divina Commedia_, and defines the attitude in which the divine poet and his works should be approached:

“Although the unsearchable Providence of God hath made many men blessed with prudence and virtue, yet before all hath it put Dante Alighieri, a man of noble and profound wisdom, true fosterling of philosophy and lofty poet, the author of this marvellous, singular, and most sapient work. It hath made him a shining light of spiritual felicity and of knowledge to the people and cities of the world, in order that every science, whether of heavenly or of earthly things, should be amply gathered up in this public and famous champion of prudence, and through him be made manifest to the desires of men in witness of the Divine Wisdom; so that, by the new sweetness and universal matter of his song, he should draw the souls of his hearers to self-knowledge, and that, raised above earthly desires, they should come to know not only the beauties of this great author, but should attain to still higher grades of knowledge. To him can be applied the text in Ecclesiasticus: ‘The great Lord will fill him with the spirit of understanding, and he will pour forth the words of his wisdom as showers.’”

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _V. N._ xxx. _Cf._ Moore, _Studies in Dante_, ii. pp. 123, 124. Del Lungo and others calculate the date as June 19th.

[2] Two daughters are mentioned: Antonia and Beatrice. It is probable that they are one and the same person, Antonia being the name in the world of the daughter who became a nun at Ravenna as “Suora Beatrice.” A recent discovery has revealed the existence of a Giovanni di Dante Alighieri, “Johannes filius Dantis Alagherii de Florentia,” at Lucca in October 1308, who would then have been at least fourteen years old. But it seems more probable that the “Dante Alighieri” in question is not the poet. See M. Barbi, _Un altro figlio di Dante?_ in _Studi danteschi, v._ (Florence, 1922).

[3] It is to this conspiracy, as initiating the papal interference in Florentine politics which led ultimately to Dante’s own exile, that the poet alludes in _Par._ xvii. 49-51, where Cacciaguida speaks from the standpoint of April 1300.

[4] See B. Barbadoro, _La condanna di Dante_, in _Studi danteschi diretti da_ Michele Barbi, vol. ii.

[5] Cf. Del Lungo’s notes to _La Cronica di Dino Compagni_ in the new Muratori (tom. ix. pt. ii.), and Luzzatto, _La Cronica di Dino Compagni_, p. 70, n. 1. It is clear that both Bologna and Siena sent ambassadors, but that Compagni (misled by the name) erroneously supposed Malavolti to have been a Sienese.

[6] _Rime_ cxvi.: O. canz. xi. Torraca takes this canzone as written when Dante was in the Casentino in 1311. Boccaccio speaks of an earlier stay of the poet in that region. It should be noted that Del Lungo has argued that Dante, after withdrawing from the active measures of the Bianchi, remained in Tuscany, or near at hand, until the dissolution of the party in 1307, when he may have gone to Verona.

[7] We know from the _Purgatorio_ that Dante at some time visited Lucca, where a lady, said to have been Gentucca Morla, made the city pleasant to him. Dante’s words seem to imply no more than an agreeable friendship (_Purg._ xxiv. 43-45). This visit may have been at an earlier date.

[8] Cf. A. Della Torre, _L’epistola all’ Amico fiorentino_, in _Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana_, n.s. xii.; M. Barbi, _Per un passo dell’ epistola all’ Amico fiorentino_, in _Studi danteschi_, ii.

[9] In 1350 Boccaccio was commissioned by the captains of Or San Michele, a religious confraternity at Florence, to convey a sum of money to “Suora Beatrice, daughter of the late Dante Alighieri,” a Dominican nun in the monastery of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi at Ravenna. This Suora Beatrice is mentioned, as no longer living, in a document of 1371. In a document of 1332, the only children of the poet who appear, together with his widow Gemma, are Jacopo, Pietro, and Antonia (of whom we know nothing more). It seems, therefore, probable that Dante had one daughter, Antonia, who, after 1332 (perhaps after the death of her mother), entered religion at Ravenna as Suora Beatrice. See O. Bacci, “Beatrice di Dante,” in _Giornale Dantesco_, viii. pp. 465-471.