by A. N. Wilson
In the cold of the Tuscan winter, with no money and nowhere to live, Dante was banished from Florence. He was sentenced to a fine of 5,000 florins. His property was to be destroyed, and if he returned within five years he was to be killed. Later, in the summer of 1301, the Blacks added to the misery by decreeing that the wives and children over the age of fourteen of the exiled Whites should also be expelled from the city. Altogether 600 White Guelfs were exiled, wandering through Tuscany like beggars. It was this abominable cruelty which was to be the making of Dante’s poetic life. It is to his early life in Florence that we shall now return.
III
DANTE’S FLORENCE 1260–74
FLORENCE IS ONE OF THE MOST BEAUTIFUL CITIES IN THE WORLD, and it is difficult to imagine any visitor who does not remember their first sight of it. Its most conspicuous feature for us is perhaps the dome of Brunelleschi, built in 1462 after the architect’s death. Next, the eye catches the bell-tower of the cathedral, the campanile, designed by Dante’s friend Giotto, but not built in Dante’s lifetime. In fact, the visitor who wishes to see the Florence of Dante’s boyhood must imaginatively eliminate nearly all the glorious Renaissance city of Florence which we see today: all the austere splendours of the Medici, the Strozzi and the Pitti palaces, and the Laurentian Library and the Masaccios in the Carmine, and the cells of San Marco decorated by Fra Angelico, and the giant statue of Michelangelo’s David in the Bargello.
If you, as a modern visitor, approached the Florence in which Dante was born, some time in May or June of 1265, you might, if you did so at dawn or twilight, imagine that you were coming into a modern city with a high-rise skyline. In his Comedy, Dante makes the same mistake in reverse, when he and Virgil approach the central pit of Hell. Seeing the giants looming up from the ninth circle of the Inferno, Dante thinks he is entering a contemporary Italian city:
Thitherward, not long
My head was raised, when many a lofty tower
Methought I spied. ‘Master,’ said I, ‘what land
Is this?’
[Inf. XXXI.14, 18–21, Henry Francis Cary’s translation]
The inhabitants of medieval Italian cities lived in a state of such enmity with one another that it was necessary for them to live huddled in fortified towers. Not only were their cities surrounded by thick turreted walls to keep at bay their enemies from other cities. Their internal city architecture also took for granted the fact that, at any moment, your fellow-citizens would wish to knife, rob or pillage you and your family.
Rome at this period was infested with towers built by rival gangs. In spite of drastic measures which the city authorities and the Popes tried to take against them, such magnates as the Orsini and the Colonna built tower-fortresses all over the ancient monuments and even on the Capitol.1 It was the same in Florence. In 1200, there were 150 towers. The modern tourist in Tuscany can see something of the same effect when visiting the small hill town of San Gimignano, where some of these extraordinary structures survive. The effect, when approached in mist, or evening light, is not unlike a sort of medieval Manhattan.
To be born in medieval Florence was to be born with a ready-made set of enemies. Dante, as a member of a Guelf family, was born the enemy of their rivals the Ghibellines. And within the tightly crowded area of the city where he first saw the light, the loyalties owed by his father to various gang leaders or grandi would literally determine the course of his life. Dante’s Florence was an independent city republic torn apart by rivalries and hatreds, yet held together by the unholy but creative desire for wealth. Iceland, at precisely the same period, was a small independent republic blood-spattered with civil conflict; small republics can seldom agree on a constitution which does not give one set of mafiosi power over the other. But Iceland was not producing all the gold coins in Europe, so that its struggles left little behind save the magnificent sagas. Florence was to produce, as well as much gold and bloodshed, some of the greatest poetry, painting and architecture which the world has ever seen. These artefacts – beginning in the Trecento, 1300s, with the poems of Dante and the paintings of his friend and contemporary Giotto, grew in the fructiferous soil of hatred, blood and cash. Dante is the self-proclaimed poet of love, but he is also the poet of hate, the poet of vengeance, of implacable resentment and everlasting feuds.
As Dante came down to the very depths of Hell, and thought he was seeing the towers of a city like his own, he was, in fact, seeing the old giants who had warred against the gods – Nimrod the Hunter who built the Tower of Babel, and the giants Ephialtes and Briareus who struggled against the Greek gods. The mistake was an apt one, almost, like everything in his poem, an allegorical one, since the mighty families of Florence built just such towers, and were themselves belligerent giants who brought chaos and anarchy just like their mythological equivalents. Rightly do the giants of Hell loom up with the same sinister gloomy aspect that characterized the fortified dwellings of the Florentine warlords. Many of these Florentine towers had nicknames – Furnace-mouth, Strong Chain, Iron-mouth, Cat’s Kiss – which were themselves slightly surreal and suggestive of the Hell which would later take shape in Dante’s brain.2
The tower would have multiple purposes and occupancy. Many different kinsmen and women would be crammed into it. We read, for example, of a Florentine saint, Umiliana de’ Cerchi, living in an enclosed cell in one of the fortresses owned by her rich banking family, tended by a servant. Her biographer speaks of this tranquil existence being disturbed somewhat as, during one of the ever-repeated brawls and battles, the other Cerchi kinsfolk swarmed into the tower, and as siege engines hurled stones against the saint’s windows.3 The Cerchi were the leaders of one of the most powerful Guelf families. They were new money, and it is perhaps suggestive that Dante and his family belonged to this faction. We are rightly warned by the historians not to be deceived by the ‘mirage of a Florentine commercial class distinct from the great landed families’.4 Rather, as in Victorian England, the powerful were the rich, and this sometimes included old money; sometimes new money pure and simple; sometimes the distinction between the two became blurred, by marriages and by the passage of time. Dante, however, does show an awareness in his work of old-fashioned class distinction. It is of significance to us, as it must have been to him, that his unmentioned wife belonged to the Donati, an ancient, noble house, who were the leaders of a rival Guelf family, who were not only Dante’s in-laws, but destined to spell Dante’s political downfall in 1302.
These murderous divisions between rival gangs and families in Florence are sometimes explained by politer historians in terms of whether the participants in disputes were Guelf, that is supporters of the Pope, or Ghibelline, supporters of the Emperor. There is no doubt that the Guelfs did support (with variations and modifications in the viewpoint) the dominance of Italy by the Pope, supported by France, whereas the Ghibellines supported the old order, with a German-born Emperor holding the French at bay. But the broader political perspective which this distinction suggests was often clouded by much pettier issues of personal vendetta and spite. Probably, the medieval chronicler (known as Pseudo-Brunetto Latini, because his account was once falsely attributed to Dante’s old mentor of the same name) was closer to the truth when he saw the Guelf–Ghibelline conflict itself as a simple matter of Mafia-style thuggery, shows of strength between rival gangs. By this account, the initial quarrel had no bearing whatsoever on the views taken in Florence on the divine origins of power, or the desirability of a unifying seat of power in Europe, or any of the theologico-political themes which occupied Dante’s elevated mind when he wrote about them. They had a lot to do, however, with magnate families’ sense of their own importance, and with the enjoyment felt by rival groups of males when there was the chance to beat, stab or kill other males. The chronicler Giovanni Villani, and Dante’s friend, understandably referred to the ‘accursed’ parties of Guelfs and Ghibellines.5 The inability of the Florentines to agree among themselves greatly weakened their position as a growin
g city state, supposedly independent of the sway either of Pope or of Emperor.
Florence had grown to be one of the largest and richest cities in Europe at this date. Its wealth depended upon the skills and enterprise of merchants, manufacturers and bankers, many of whom were not members of the big magnate families. It was essential, if Florence’s political independence and real originality as a political entity were to be strengthened, that political power should be available not only to the magnate families, but also to those who, either by cleverness or wealth or both, also had a voice in the city’s political processes.
The idea that political power should be in the hands of as wide a base as possible found its focus in the word popolo. It was the popolo who were eventually to refashion Florence from being primarily a clan-based culture to one based upon guilds – confraternities joined by a shared trade or skill. Such a process had begun in the decades before Dante was born. A key figure in the popolo was that brilliant figure Brunetto Latini (1220–94). He was chancellor of the first popular government of Florence, from 1250 to 1260. But in 1260, on 4 September, there occurred what Dante came to see as a pivotal fact in his city’s history and in his own pre-history: the Battle of Montaperti.
‘The slaughter and great havoc,’ I replied
‘That coloured Arbia’s flood with crimson stain –’
[Inf. X. 85–6, Cary]
as he called it. The victorious Ghibelline history of the battle, the Annales Placentini Gibellini, reckons that there were 8,000 dead and 22,000 taken prisoner, whereas a later Pisan history (dating from 1371) says that there were 10,000 dead and only 7,000 Guelfs taken prisoner.6 Either way, it was by medieval standards a battle with a huge number of casualties. The Arbia, a bosky narrow stream today, overhung with bushes and surrounded by rolling arable land, must indeed have flowed red with blood, and the reason is not hard to seek – the vast fortified castle of Montaperti which the Emperor-elect Manfred and the Ghibelline forces occupied on the crest of the poplar-planted hill.7
It was a battle in which the Ghibelline forces of Siena strove for dominance of Tuscany with the Guelf forces of Florence. The Ghibellines won. And, as happened when one side gained temporary dominance in Florence, their rivals were sent into exile. We note that Dante’s father, Alighiero II, was not considered important enough to be exiled by the victorious Ghibellines. This gives us some idea of the small scale of the father’s wealth and business interests.8 Florence was now for the next six years governed by the Ghibellines, and the ally of the supporters of the Emperor.
But of what Emperor? Here lay one of the fundamental causes of the political chaos of Dante’s lifetime. The Ghibellines supported the dominance of Italy by the Hohenstaufen dynasty, led by the last Emperor’s illegitimate son Manfred. But when Dante was born, it was fifteen years since an Emperor had been crowned on Italian soil.
The Emperor Frederick II had died in the winter of 1250. The news reached Florence when a sole horseman rode into the city, bowed his head and proclaimed that ‘the enemy of God and the saints is in Hell, carrying with him nothing but his sins’.9 Frederick was described in this way because, by the standards of stricter Catholics, his Sicilian court had been a great source of scandal. Openly bisexual, Frederick had surrounded himself not only with courtesans and catamites, but also with poets and philosophers who were outwardly scornful of Christianity. He gave as much prominence to his Muslim subjects as to the Catholics, and allowed them their own courts to settle marriage and property disputes according to Qur’anic law. He was a cruel, but also a charismatic figure. He had on the one hand founded the University of Naples and encouraged intellectual discussion. On the other, he had devised exquisite methods of torture for his enemies, such as encasing them in lead when they were boiled alive to ensure a slow cooking. No wonder they called him the enemy of God. When he died, the Popes were understandably anxious to get his family, the German dynasty of Hohenstaufen, out of Southern Italy, and replace them with the French. If a French Emperor were to be found, then an obvious candidate, waiting in the wings as Dante was born, was the brother of King (Saint) Louis IX of France – the far from saintly Charles of Anjou (1226–85). (‘There was no kindliness in his make-up, no pity, nor any imaginative sympathy.’10)
The absence of a recognized Emperor gave a certain power to the Pope, and even more power, or potential power, to the Kings of France, who longed to extend their suzerainty down through Italy, into Sicily, and indeed into the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. But the absence of an Emperor by no means handed to the Pope the control of Italy. The city states guarded their independence fiercely. Florence had been late to establish its republican freedom – later than the seaports of Genoa and Venice, for example. But now came a magnificent opportunity. Frederick II had forbidden anyone in Italy to mint gold. Coinage all came from his Imperial mint. But in 1252 Florence established its gold coin, named after the city – the florin. Since money was everywhere debased, this became the standard of value, not just in Italy, but throughout Europe. Though the Emperor Henry VII in March 1313 was to forbid gold or silver coinage other than his own, the demand for florins was so great that even the Imperial mint was obliged to manufacture fake florins. By 1336–8, the Florentine mint was producing 350,000 to 400,000 coins per annum.
This, quite apart from the huge commercial success of the Florentine silk and wool factories, was what made this city a commercial centre of such huge importance and (by contemporary standards) vast size. Dante’s Florence had perhaps 90,000 inhabitants. By the time of the Black Death (1348) it had swollen to 120,000.11 London, by far the biggest city in Britain, had reached 40,000 or 50,000 at the same period.12 Only Paris was larger than Florence with maybe 100,000 in the early fourteenth century.13 Constantinople had sunk to 80,000 (from a high of half a million in the glory days of the Emperor Justinian). Genoa and Venice were the only Italian cities of comparable size to Florence. Rome, Padua, Naples, Palermo all had populations of about 25,000, and this was itself enormous by the standards of most medieval towns – Valladolid had no more than 10,000 throughout the Middle Ages, Antwerp, Lyons and the Baltic ports the same. Moreover, the medieval town in most European countries – a great cathedral city such as Winchester had just 5,000 inhabitants – remained essentially rural, dependent upon farming and the land for its economy and essentially feudal in its political outlook and composition. Florence, however, and the new, big mercantile cities of Italy were different. Here was a place where money, trade and commerce were for the first time creating ‘a new and revolutionary aristocracy’.14
In Florence, the Guelf–Ghibelline quarrel, in the years immediately ante-dating Dante’s birth, were in essence a quarrel about this revolution. Should – could? – Florence remain in the hands of the old aristocracy of the city or pass into the hands of the ‘new’ money?
Since the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Guelfs had been predominant in Florence, but in 1248, with the assistance of Frederick II, a few powerful old noble families were able to expel the Guelfs from the city. After Frederick died, the Guelfs were able themselves to muster enough strength to expel the Ghibellines. But the Ghibellines had a powerful ally in Manfred, the bastard son of the late Emperor. With Manfred’s help, and that of the Sienese, the Ghibellines inflicted a huge defeat on the Florentine Guelfs and became the masters of Tuscany. There were thousands left dead on the battlefield of Montaperti, an enormous number by medieval standards. Count Giordano entered Florence and appointed Count Guido Novello the podestà – the military and judicial chief of the city. There was even talk of razing the walls of the city to the ground, but one of the proudest of the old Ghibelline lords protested. Farinata degli Uberti said that he had ‘fought to regain, not to destroy his Fatherland’.15 Boccaccio tells us that, under the influence of Frederick II, Farinata was one of those who did not believe in the immortality of the soul, but was of the Epicurean opinion that the soul dies with the body.16 Dante once wrote that this belief was ‘the worst f
orm of beastliness’ [Conv. II.viii.8]. Farinata was the father-in-law of his best friend, Guido Cavalcanti, but this did not prevent Dante from placing the old man, who died in 1264, the year before Dante’s own birth, in the sixth circle of Hell among the Heretics.
His breast and forehead there
Erecting, seemed as in high scorn he held
E’en Hell.
[Inf. X.36–8, Cary]
After Montaperti, the proud old Ghibelline lords such as Farinata abolished many of the liberties which had been developed during the Florentine Republic of the previous century. The popolo were deprived of any say in administration. But this situation was not to last long. Charles of Anjou, as a champion of the Papacy, descended into Italy to redress the balance of power which had shifted so strongly to the Ghibelline interest after Montaperti. On 26 February 1266, Charles’s army defeated Manfred’s decisively at the Battle of Benevento. Manfred was killed, laid first under a heap of stones, and subsequently hurled on the bank of the river Verde. On the outer shores of Purgatory, Dante was to meet him, beautiful and fair-haired and aristocratic-looking, and to hear from his lips one of the most powerful declarations in the entire poem of belief in the Divine Mercy:
‘I am Manfredi, grandson to the Queen
Constanza: whence I pray thee, when returned,
To my fair daughter go, the parent glad
Of Aragonia and Sicilia’s pride;
And of the truth inform her, if of me
Aught else be told. When by two mortal blows
My frame was shattered, I betook myself
Weeping to him, who of free will forgives.
My sins were horrible: but so wide arms
