Dante Alighieri

by Paget Toynbee

3 Dino Compagni, bk. i. ch. 20.

  4 Villani, bk. viii. ch. 39.

  5 From Guido’s last poem, written at Sarzana during his exile, it is evident that he never expected to return. If certain expressions in this poem are to be taken literally, it would appear that Guido already felt the hand of death upon him:—

  “Perch’ i’ no spero di tornar giammai,

  Ballatetta, in Toscana,

  Va tu, leggera e piana

  Dritt’ a la Donna mia . . .

  Tu senti, ballatetta, che la morte

  Mi stringe sì che vita m’ abbandona.”

  (Rime, ed. Ercole, pp. 406-8).

  6 The documents relating to this matter and to Dante’s votes in the “Consiglio dei Cento” are printed in Annual Report of the Cambridge (U.S.A.) Dante Society for 1891 (pp. 36-47).

  7 That this was no empty threat is proved by the mention in a document (dated 14 August, 1305) of a levy in Florence “in bonis Dantis de Allaghieris et Francischi eius fratris rebellium et condempnatorum comunis Florentie” (see Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, N.S. (1907), xiv. 125); and by the deed of restitution (dated 9 January, 1343) to Dante’s son Jacopo of his father’s confiscated property (see Del Lungo, Dell’ Esilio di Dante, pp. 158-60).

  8 The text of both sentences is printed by Del Lungo in Dell’ Esilio di Dante, pp. 97-106.

  9 That burning alive was no uncommon punishment in those days, as in later times, is evident from the fact that in an old Sienese inventory occurs the entry “due pezzi di catene da ardere huomini”. Maestro Adamo of Brescia was burned alive in 1281 for coining counterfeit gold florins (Inf. xxx. 109-10) ; and Dante himself refers in the Purgatorio (xxvii. 17-18) to his having seen men burned alive; cf. also Inferno, xxix.110.

  10 Villani, bk. ix. ch. 136.

  11 “Nacque questo singulare splendore italico nella nostra città . . . ricevuto nella paterna casa da assai lieta fortuna: lieta dico, secondo la qualità del mondo che allora correva’ (Vita di Dante, ed. Macrì-Leone, § 2, p. II).

  12 “Dante innanzi la cacciata sua di Firenze, contuttochè di grandissima ricchezza non fusse, nientedimeno non fu povero, ma ebbe patrimonio mediocre e sufficiente al vivere onoratamente” (Vita di Dante, ed. Brunone Bianchi, 1883, p. xxii).

  13 See Zingarelli, Dante, p. 31. The information is derived from a document (dated 15 May, 1332) relating to the division of the family property between Dante’s half-brother, Francesco, and Dante’s two sons, Pietro and Jacopo, which is printed by Imbriani in his Studi Danteschi, pp. 86 ff.

  14 “Case in Firenze ebbe assai decenti, congiunte con le case di Gieri di messer Bello suo consorto; possessioni in Camerata e nella Piacentina e in piano di Ripoli; suppellettile abbondante e preziosa, secondo egli scrive” (op. cit. p. xxii). It is supposed that the letter here referred to was the “epistola assai lunga,” beginning “Popule mee, quid feci tibi,” mentioned by Bruni elsewhere as having been written by Dante to the people of Florence after his exile (see below, p. 91).

  15 Son. liii*, in the Oxford Dante.

  16 This document is printed by M. Barbi, in Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, No. 8 (1892), p. 11.

  17 Printed by Imbriani, Studi Danteschi, pp. 406 ff.

  18 See Bullettino della Società Dantesca Italiana, No. 8 (1892), p. 9, where Barbi prints an extract from the document already mentioned relating to the division of the Alighieri family property in 1332 (printed in full by Imbriani, Studi Danteschi, pp. 86 ff.).

  19 The documents are printed by Barbi, op. cit. pp.11 ff.

  PART III

  DANTE IN EXILE

  CHAPTER I

  1302–1321

  Wanderings—Dante’s fellow-exiles—Henry VII in Italy—His death—Fresh sentence against Dante—His retirement to Ravenna—Alleged visits to Mantua, Verona, and Piacenza—Reputed a Sorcerer—Death and burial—His tomb and epitaphs—Elegies.

  NEVER again after the sentence of banishment pronounced against him by Cante de’ Gabrielli did Dante set foot within the walls of his native city. The rest of his life, nearly twenty years, was spent in exile, and for the most part in poverty, such as is foretold to him by his ancestor Cacciaguida in the Heaven of Mars: “Thou shalt leave every thing beloved most dearly; and this is the shaft which the bow of exile first lets fly. Thou shalt prove how salt the taste is of another’s bread, and how hard a path it is to go up and down another’s stairs.”1

  In a passage at the beginning of the Convivio Dante gives a pathetic account of the miseries and mortifications he endured during his wanderings as an exile. “Alas,” he says, “would it had pleased the Dispenser of the Universe that I should never have had to make excuses for myself; that neither others had sinned against me, nor I had suffered this punishment unjustly, the punishment I say of exile and of poverty! Since it was the pleasure of the citizens of the fairest and most renowned daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me out from her most sweet bosom (wherein I was born and brought up to the climax of my life, and wherein I long with all my heart, with their good leave, to repose my wearied spirit, and to end the days allotted to me), wandering as a stranger through almost every region to which our language reaches, I have gone about as a beggar, showing against my will the wound of fortune, which is often wont to be imputed unjustly to the fault of him who is stricken. Verily I have been as a ship without sails and without rudder, driven to various harbours and shores by the parching wind which blows from pinching poverty. And I have appeared vile in the eyes of many, who, perhaps from some report of me, had imagined me in a different guise.”2

  CAST OF DANTE’S FACE TAKEN AFTER DEATH

  Elsewhere, in another of his works, he expresses his pity for those who, like himself, languish in exile, and revisit their home only in their dreams.3

  Of Dante’s movements from the time of his banishment very little is known for certain. Leonardo Bruni says that when the tidings of his ruin reached him at Rome, he hastened back to Tuscany and went to Siena, where he learned further particulars of his sentence, and consequently determined to make common cause with the other exiles. He certainly appears at first to have thrown in his lot with the rest, and to have looked, like them, to a return to Florence by forcible means. To this end they assembled at Gargonza, a castle of the Ubertini between Arezzo and Siena, and decided to enter into an alliance with the Ghibellines of Tuscany and Romagna, fixing their headquarters at Arezzo, where they remained until 1304. Dante, at any rate, was present at a meeting of the exiles, held on 8 June, 1302, in the church of San Godenzo, in the Tuscan Apennines, about twenty miles from Florence, when a convention was entered into with the Ubaldini, the ancient enemies of Florence.

  In the prophecy of Cacciaguida, already referred to, Dante is warned that what should gall him most would be the folly and wickedness of the company into which he should be thrown; and it is foretold to him that he should after a while dissociate himself from the rest of the exiles, and make a party for himself.4 At what particular juncture Dante did dissociate himself from his fellow-exiles we cannot tell. It was probably before the summer of 1304, for in July of that year the exiles, disappointed in their expectations of a peaceable return to Florence through the mediation of Cardinal Niccolò da Prato, the legate of Benedict XI (who had recently succeeded Boniface VIII), made an abortive attempt from Lastra, in concert with the Pistojans, to effect an entry into the city—an attempt from which Dante appears to have held aloof.

  There is evidence of his having been at Forlì in 1303,5 and it was doubtless about this time that he separated himself from “the worthless and vile company” of his fellow-exiles; not long after which he took refuge with one of the Scaliger family, most probably Bartolommeo della Scala, at Verona, which Cacciaguida foretells to him as his “first refuge”.6 “Here,” writes Leonardo Bruni, “he was very courteously received, and remained some time, being now become very humble and seeking by good deeds and good behaviour to win back the favour of being allowed to return to Florence by a spontaneous reca
ll from the Government of the city. To this end he laboured much, and wrote many times, not only to individual members of the Government, but also to the people; and amongst the rest was a long letter beginning, ‘My people, what have I done to you ?’” 7

  How long Dante remained at Verona is not known. It is impossible, for lack of information, to follow him with any certainty in his wanderings, which, as he records in the above-quoted passage of the Convivio, took him into nearly every part of Italy. It is presumed, from a legal document8 still in existence, that he was at Padua on 27 August, 1306; and from others9 it is known that he was shortly after (on 6 October in the same year) at Sarzana in Lunigiana as agent for the Malaspini, where he was the guest of Franceschino Malaspina. This visit to the Malaspini, “the honoured race which ceases not to be adorned with the glory of the purse and of the sword,” is foretold to Dante by Currado Malaspina, Franceschino’s first cousin, whom he meets in Purgatory.10 Dante on this occasion acted as procurator for the Malaspini family in their negotiations for peace with their neighbour, the Bishop of Luni, which by Dante’s means was successfully concluded. The duration of his stay in Lunigiana is uncertain, but it probably did not last beyond the summer of 1307.

  His movements during the next few years are largely a matter of conjecture. Some of his biographers state that he went from Lunigiana to the Casentino (the upper valley of the Arno above Florence) and to Forlì11 again, and returned once more to Lunigiana12 on his way to Paris. That Dante visited Paris during his exile is stated both by Boccaccio and by Villani in his chronicle,13 but at what precise period this visit took place it is impossible to say. Some are inclined to believe, from a phrase in a Latin poem addressed to Petrarch by Boccaccio, that Dante came to England;14 and it is even stated by Giovanni da Serravalle, a fifteenth-century writer, that he studied in the University of Oxford,15 but this is extremely doubtful.

  There seems little doubt that Dante was in Italy between September, 1310, and January, 1311, when he addressed a letter to the Princes and Peoples of Italy on the advent of the Emperor Henry VII into Italy,—the Emperor through whose means Dante hoped to be restored to Florence. “Lo! now is the acceptable time,” he writes, “wherein arise the signs of consolation and peace. For a new day is beginning to break, showing forth the dawn, which even now is dispersing the darkness of our long night of tribulation ; already the breezes from the East are springing up, the face of the heavens grows rosy, and confirms the hopes of the peoples with a peaceful calm. And we too, who have long kept vigil through the night in the desert, we too shall behold the looked-for joy.”16

  He was certainly in Tuscany (probably as the guest of Guido Novello of Battifolle at the castle of Poppi in the Casentino) when he wrote his terrible letter to the Florentines, dated “from the springs of the Arno,” 31 March, 1311, after he learned that they were preparing to resist the Emperor by force. In this letter,17 which is headed “Dante Alighieri, a Florentine and undeservedly an exile, to the most iniquitous Florentines within the city,” he uses no measured terms, and does not hesitate to threaten the Florentines with the direct vengeance of the Emperor. “You,” he thunders, “you, who transgress every law of God and man, and whom the insatiable maw of avarice urges headlong into every crime, does not the dread of the second death haunt you, seeing that you first and you alone, refusing the yoke of liberty, have set yourselves against the glory of the Roman Emperor, the king of the earth, and the servant of God? The hope which you vainly cherish in your madness will not be furthered by this rebellion of yours, but by your resistance the just wrath of the king at his coming will be but the more inflamed against you. If my prophetic spirit be not deceived, your city, worn out with long sufferings, shall be delivered at the last into the hands of the stranger, after the greatest part of you has been destroyed in death or in captivity, and the few that shall be left to endure exile shall witness her downfall with weeping and lamentation.”18

  From the same place a few weeks later (on 16 April), Dante addressed a letter to the Emperor himself, who was at that time besieging Cremona, urging him to lay everything else aside, and to come and crush without further delay the viper Florence, as the most obstinate and dangerous rebel against the Imperial authority. From this letter it appears that Dante had been present at the coronation of Henry with the iron crown at Milan, on the day of Epiphany (6 January, 1311), when ambassadors were sent from nearly every city of Italy, except Florence and her allies. “I too, who write for myself as well as for others, have beheld thee most gracious, as beseems Imperial Majesty, and have heard thee most clement, when my hands touched thy feet, and my lips paid their tribute.”19

  On 2 September of this same year (1311) was issued at Florence a proclamation20 (known as the “Riforma di Messer Baldo d’ Aguglione,” from the name of the Prior who was responsible for it), offering pardon to a portion of the Florentine exiles, but expressly excepting certain others by name. Among these names was that of Dante Alighieri, whose exclusion was no doubt largely due to the letters mentioned above, and to his active sympathy with the Imperial cause. To this proclamation the Emperor issued a counterblast in the following December from Genoa, in the shape of an edict declaring Florence to be outside the pale of the Empire, which was followed by another from Poggibonsi in February, 1313, containing the names of more than 600 Florentine citizens and subjects, who were branded as rebels.

  Nothing is known of Dante’s whereabouts during these years of deferred hopes and disappointments. Leonardo Bruni states,21 apparently on the authority of a letter of Dante’s which has not been preserved, that when the Emperor advanced against Florence and laid siege to the city (in the autumn of 1312), Dante out of reverence for his native place would not accompany him, although he had urged him to the attack. Dante had scoffed at the idea that the Florentines could stand up against the Imperial host. “Do you trust,” he had written in the letter already quoted,22 “do you trust in your defence, because you are girt by a contemptible rampart? What shall it avail you to have girt you with a rampart, and to have fortified yourselves with bulwarks and with battlements,23 when, terrible in gold, the eagle shall swoop down upon you, which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, borne up by the breath of the soldiery of heaven, gazed down of old upon the vast expanse of ocean in its flight?”

  But the Imperial eagle was obliged to retire baffled, leaving the viper uncrushed; and in the following year, while the Emperor was marching southward against Naples, he was suddenly seized with sickness at Buonconvento near Siena, where he died on 24 August, 1313. The news of his death was received with savage exultation by the Florentines.24 To Dante it meant the final abandonment of any hope of a return to Florence. “On the Emperor Henry’s death,” writes Bruni, “every hope of Dante’s was utterly destroyed; for he had himself closed up the way to forgiveness by his abusive writings against the government of the commonwealth; and there was no longer any hope of return by force.”

  Where Dante was when the fatal news reached him, and what his movements were at this time, is not known. After the death of Clement V, on 20 April, 1314, Dante addressed a letter25 to the Italian cardinals in conclave at Carpentras, rebuking them for their backslidings and corruption, and calling upon them to make amends by electing an Italian Pope, who should restore the Papal See to Rome. At some date subsequent to 14 June of that year, when Lucca fell into the hands of the Ghibelline captain, Uguccione della Faggiuola, Dante appears to have been in that city; and it has been conjectured that it may have been during this stay that he formed the attachment for a Lucchese lady named Gentucca, which is supposed to be alluded to by Bonagiunta in Purgatory.26 What was the real nature of his relations with this lady, who has been identified with a certain Gentucca Morla,27 wife of Cosciorino Fondora of Lucca, we have no means of ascertaining.

  In August, 1315, the Ghibellines under the leadership of Uguccione della Faggiuola, completely defeated the Florentines and Tuscan Guelfs at Monte Catini, between Lucca and Pist
oja. This event was followed by a fresh sentence from Florence against the exiled Whites. In this sentence,28 which is dated 6 November, 1315, Dante and those named with him, including Dante’s sons this time, were branded as Ghibellines and rebels, and condemned, if captured, “to be taken to the place of justice (i.e. the place of public execution), and there to have their heads struck from their shoulders, so that they die outright.” On 2 June in the next year, however, an amnesty was proclaimed by the Florentine chief magistrate, Lando of Gubbio,29 and permission was granted to the majority of the exiles to return to Florence, under certain degrading conditions, including the payment of a fine and the performance of penance in the Baptistery. From this amnesty all the exiles who had been originally condemned by the Podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli, among whom of course was Dante, were expressly excluded. Many of the exiles appear to have accepted the terms; but Dante, who seems at first to have been unaware of his exclusion, scornfully rejected them.

  “Is this, then,” he writes to a friend in Florence, “is this the generous recall of Dante Alighieri to his native city, after the miseries of nearly fifteen years of exile? Is this the reward of innocence manifest to all the world, of unceasing sweat and toil in study? Far be it from the friend of philosophy, so senseless a degradation, befitting only a soul of clay, as to submit himself to be paraded like a prisoner, as some infamous wretches have done! Far be it from the advocate of justice, after being wronged, to pay tribute to them that wronged him, as though they had deserved well of him! No! this is not the way for me to return to my country. If another can be found which does not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante, that will I take with no lagging steps. But if by no such way Florence may be entered, then will I re-enter Florence never. What! can I not everywhere gaze upon the sun and the stars? can I not under any sky meditate on the most precious truths, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay ignominious, in the eyes of the people and city of Florence? Nay, bread will not fail me!”30