Nowhere in his writings
does Dante make any reference to his wife. It was Beatrice who continued to
fascinate and inspire him, and in 1283, he tells us, she actually deigned to
speak to him for the first time. In the meantime he studied the great Roman authors, particularly Virgil and Cicero, under the tutorship of Brunetto Latini, a man whose soul he came to place in
Hell. He began his first attempts at writing poetry, particularly about
his love for Beatrice. But she had married Simone de Bardi in 1287, had
children, and then died prematurely in 1290.
Dante never forgot her,
and many years later he would portray her spotless soul guiding him through
Paradise in the final section of his “Divine Comedy”. In the immediate future,
her death inspired him to the compilation and publication of his first
collection of sonnets about his love for her, together with his commentary upon
them: a book generally known as “La Vita Nuova”; the New Life.
Dante’s lifetime saw the start of a new style of painting in
Florence, with Cimabue (1250-1302) and Giotto (1266-1337) foreshadowing the
Renaissance. He certainly knew Giotto personally. It was also an age of great
political turmoil in Italy. The great Emperor Frederick II, “Stupor Mundi”,
“The wonder of the world”, who ruled Naples and Sicily as well as Germany, had
faced a sentence of excommunication and deposition pronounced against him by Pope Innocent IV,
and had finally died defeated in 1250. His illegitimate son Manfred managed
to establish himself in southern Italy, only for Pope Clement IV to proclaim a
crusade against him. The French warrior, Charles of Anjou, financed and
supported by the Pope, defeated and killed Manfred at Benevento in 1266. Two years later
Frederick’s 15-year-old grandson Conradin tried his luck with an expedition
from Germany, but he too was defeated by Charles and then beheaded in the
market-place at Naples, together with his equally young friend and supporter Frederick of Baden. This unprecedented act of violence against youths of the
highest aristocracy shocked contemporaries, and fifty years later Dante was still
upset by it, but the Pope rejoiced that the last of the “devil’s
brood” had been extirpated. Dante, by contrast, rather admired Manfred, and
placed his soul in Purgatory rather than Hell.
This was not the end of
disturbances in Sicily, because at Easter 1282 the people of Palermo suddenly
rose up and massacred Charles’s French troops in the city, in a carnage that
quickly spread throughout the island. (One of the many explanations of the
mysterious word “Mafia” is that it is short for “Death to the French!”) King
Peter of Aragon then claimed the throne of Sicily by virtue of his marriage to
Manfred’s daughter, and the Pope, Martin IV, responded by excommunicating him
and proclaiming a crusade against him. Such blatant abuse of spiritual weapons
for purely political ends did much to discredit the papacy.
The troubles of the
papacy had, in fact, barely begun. Following the death of Nicholas IV in 1292
there was a hiatus of two years while the cardinals wrangled over the
succession. Eventually they settled on a compromise candidate: an 80-year-old
Italian hermit called Peter Morrone, who duly became Celestine V. Not
surprisingly, this aged unworldly man proved to be a disastrous choice, and
after a few months he was persuaded to abdicate, was imprisoned and died soon
after. Inevitably, there were rumours that he had been murdered. Dante showed his contempt for Celestine by consigning him to the
“Vestibule” just inside the gates of Hell: a region reserved for those who lack
the courage to be either virtuous or wicked, and who are endlessly buffeted
about by powerful winds and stung by wasps.
The next Pope was
Boniface VIII, the scion of a powerful Roman clan. He had exalted opinions of
the authority of the papacy, which soon involved him in a disastrous dispute
with King Philip IV of France. The culmination came in 1303 when Philip’s
minister, Nogaret, kidnapped the Pope and actually struck him in the face.
Boniface was soon rescued by his supporters, but he was a broken man and died not long afterwards.
After the brief papacy of
Benedict XI, a Frenchman was elected Pope, as Clement V. But he took up
residence in Avignon and never set foot in Rome. For the next seventy years,
all the Popes were French, living at Avignon, and little more than puppets
of the Kings of France. This then was the situation for the latter stages of
Dante’s life. It is not surprising that he consigned Boniface VIII to one of
the lowest circles of Hell, as we shall see.
All this left Italy, and
especially Florence, divided into two rival parties; the Guelphs (supporters of
the Pope) and the Ghibellines (supporters of the Emperor), and local feuding was
very bitter. The Ghibelline families were driven out of Florence in 1266 and
all their properties destroyed, thereby leaving an open space which is now the
Piazza della Signoria; it being solemnly decreed that no building should ever
be erected on such an accursed spot. It was against this background that Dante
began his public life. He joined the Apothecaries’ Guild, fought for his city
at the battle of Campaldino against Ghibelline forces in 1289, and began to make a name for himself in
Florentine politics. He emerged as a fine orator, and in 1300 was elected one
of the three Priors of the city, made a superintendent in charge of the roads
and road repairs, and sent on a mission to Rome.
But Florentine city
politics was always riddled with factions, and the Guelph party soon found
itself divided into rival groups known as the “Blacks” and the “Whites”; a
split which seems to have been more about family rivalries than any ideological
disputes. Dante’s sympathies were with the Whites. He was still in Rome in
November 1302 when Florence was occupied by the troops of Charles of Valois,
brother of Philip IV of France. The Black faction seized power and the Whites were driven out. Early next year Dante was charged in his absence with embezzlement of
public funds and sentenced to death by burning at the stake. The death
sentence was renewed in 1315, and even extended to include his three sons.
Dante never set foot in his home city again.
The rest of his life was spent in a wandering existence round the
cities of northern Italy, supported by various powerful families but never staying anywhere for more than a few years. In
his work “De Monarchia”, published in 1308, he expressed his longing for a
strong leader who could provide unity for Italy and for the whole of
Christendom. He had hopes that first Charles Martel, grandson of Charles of
Anjou, and then the Holy Roman Emperor Henry of Luxembourg might fulfil this role, but
both died young with nothing achieved.
Around 1308 he began
work on his masterpiece, known as the “Divine Comedy”. It is set in Easter
1300, and describes in three books how he, guided by Roman poet Virgil, is
taken firstly down through Hell, then up Mount Purgatory on the far side of the
earth, and finally through the spheres of the planets and stars in Paradise.
He takes the opportunity
to bring many of his contemporaries into the story, especially in the first
book, the “Inferno”, where he descends ever deeper inside the earth. Pope
Celestine V, as was mentioned, is amongst other cowardly souls in the
Vestibule. The Florentine Ghibelline leader, Farinata degli Uberti, is
discovered alongside the Emperor Frederick II in the burning tombs of the
heretics. Dante’s old tutor Brunetto Latini is placed among the sodomites; a
fact which has puzzled scholars ever since, because Dante was always
appreciative of the debt he owed to Brunetto’s teaching. Pope Boniface VIII
was, of course, still alive when the story was supposed to be set, but Dante
still manages to get a dig at him. In one of the lowest circles of Hell the
poets meet the shade of Nicholas III, a notoriously corrupt Pope, who mistakes Dante for one of his successors and asks, “Are you here already, Boniface?”
Finally they encounter the gigantic form of Satan himself, at the earth’s centre,
like a maggot in the heart of an apple. Satan eternally chews on the bodies of
Judas Iscariot, Brutus and Cassius. This last scene always comes as a shock
to modern readers, brought up on Shakespeare and accustomed to see Brutus as a
heroic, patriotic figure, “the noblest Roman of them all”; but to Dante, who
believed universal empire was God’s will for the world, the crime of Brutus and
Cassius in killing Julius Caesar was almost as wicked as that of Judas in
betraying Christ.
The poets now pass right
through the earth and reach Mount Purgatory on the far side (thus making it
clear that Dante, as with all his educated contemporaries, knew that the world
was round). Purgatory houses the souls of those who repented of their sins and
who, after being purged of evil, will eventually be permitted to enter Paradise. (In later
centuries, Luther, Calvin and other Protestant theologians denounced the whole
notion of Purgatory) As mentioned above, at the entrance to the mountain he
meets King Manfred, who is having to do penance for thirty times his natural
life because he delayed repentance until just before his death in battle.
Virgil conducts Dante to the summit of the mountain, but as a pagan he can go
no further, and it is the shade of Beatrice who then guides the poet through
the circles of Paradise, which are marked by the moon, the sun and the five
visible planets, meeting saints and choruses of angels, until finally, beyond the stars, Dante is
granted a sight of God himself. This vision of the structure of the heavens was
ultimately derived from Aristotle.
Dante completed this third section of his great work around 1320,
when he was living in Ravenna. The next year, returning to the city from a
diplomatic mission to Venice, he caught malaria and died, aged 56.
Dante is revered as one of the greatest poets of all time, but also as the originator of the modern Italian language.
