Florence, Faction, and Beatrice
Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in 1265 to a family of the minor nobility with money in lending. He fought as a cavalryman at Campaldino in 1289, joined a guild in order to hold office, and rose to serve two months as one of the city's six governing priors in 1300. Florence was rich, violent, and split between Guelphs loyal to the pope and Ghibellines loyal to the emperor, and then split again when the victorious Guelphs divided into White and Black factions over papal interference.
His literary life began with Beatrice Portinari, a Florentine woman he saw first in childhood and who died in 1290 at twenty-four. He barely knew her. Out of that distance he made the Vita Nuova, a sequence of poems with prose commentary that transformed courtly love conventions into something closer to a theology. Beatrice returns in the Comedy as the figure who sends Virgil to rescue him and who guides him through paradise, an ordinary young woman rebuilt as the vehicle of divine grace.
Sentenced in Absence
In 1301 he was sent to Rome on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII while Charles of Valois entered Florence and installed the Black Guelphs. In 1302 the new regime convicted him in absentia of corruption and intrigue, fined him, and ordered that he be burned alive if he ever returned. He never did. The rest of his life was spent moving between the courts of Verona, Lunigiana, and finally Ravenna, dependent on patrons, writing that he had learned how salty another man's bread tastes.
Exile made his politics and his prose. In De vulgari eloquentia he argued for the literary dignity of the spoken vernacular, in the unfinished Convivio he tried to bring philosophy to readers without Latin, and in De monarchia he insisted that imperial authority came directly from God and not through the papacy, a position condemned and burned after his death. When an amnesty was offered on humiliating terms, requiring a public penitential procession, he refused it in writing and stayed away.
The Poem That Judged Everyone
The Comedy, written over roughly the last fourteen years of his life, runs one hundred cantos in a chain-linked rhyme he invented, and it is set in the Jubilee year of 1300 so that the poet can prophesy events he had already lived through. He used it to settle accounts: popes stuffed head-down in the pit of the simonists, Boniface VIII condemned by prediction, political enemies frozen in ice, and a friend's father asking after a son still living. It is a work of enormous learning that also names names.
Its judgments can be repellent to modern readers, most obviously the mutilation of Muhammad among the sowers of discord, even as Dante places the Muslim philosophers Avicenna and Averroes, and Saladin, among the virtuous unbaptized in Limbo. He wrote in Tuscan rather than Latin, and in doing so helped make it the basis of Italian. He died of malaria at Ravenna in 1321, and Ravenna has kept his bones ever since, resisting every Florentine request to return the poet the city once condemned to the fire.
