Inferno Decoded

by Michael Haag

  When Dante is lost in the dark wood, Beatrice sends Virgil to show him the way, and when Dante has braved the horrors of Hell, Beatrice is waiting for him in Purgatory to lead him into the highest realms of Paradise. Dante’s love for Beatrice would be his reason for living; his passion for her was shared only with his passion for politics, and this too would lead him to write his Divine Comedy.

  WAR AND POLITICS

  If his studies were arduous, his marriage passionless, and his love for Beatrice ethereal, Dante was nevertheless a robust young man, ready to go to battle for his city and eager to enter into its politics. In 1289 he fought with the Florentines on the side of the Guelfs in the battle of Campaldino against the Ghibelline forces of Arezzo. The Florentines and their allies raised a rabble of ten thousand soldiers on foot but also something like two thousand mounted men, with Dante riding among the cavalry. An overwhelming Florentine victory, the battle guaranteed Guelf rule in the city. But in a first extreme reaction to the Ghibelline defeat the Florentines excluded all citizens of noble birth from public office, though this stern measure was relaxed provided the intending candidate obtained nominal membership of one of the guilds.

  The guilds of Florence – the cloth merchants, wool merchants, bankers, doctors and apothecaries and so on – were more than trade associations; they had become self-regulating political institutions governed by an elected committee of priors. Each guild also had its own armed enforcers headed by a captain of the guards, just as the aristocrats had theirs. In addition, as explained on p.99, new Black and White factions arose within the victorious Guelfs themselves. The former wished to keep Florence close to the papacy, the latter opposed papal influence and particularly that of Pope Boniface VIII. All of which may have suggested to Dan Brown the myriad security forces that appear bewilderingly in the pages of his Inferno.

  Aristocratic rule had often been capricious, whereas merchants required stability to flourish. For the Florentine republic, that made it essential to maintain an equilibrium between the two great powers who wielded influence in northern Italy at the time: the Holy Roman Empire, whose king was based in Germany, and the Church and pope at Rome. For Dante these were the two suns, as he called them, one representing secular rule, the other spiritual. Keeping them in balance ensured the greatest independence and stability for Florence, and seemed to Dante to bring harmony to the world. His aim was to achieve harmony too among the factions in Florence, between the nobles and the ‘people’ as members of the artisan and merchant guilds were called, and between the Blacks and the Whites.

  In 1295 Dante entered the doctors’ and apothecaries’ guild, one of the city’s seven major guilds. In the ensuing years, the records show Dante speaking and voting in various councils of the Florentine republic; and in 1300 he was elected to the city’s highest office as one of the six chief executive priors of Florence.

  A woodcut of Florence from Boccaccio’s Life of Dante.

  Following an outbreak of factional strife between the Blacks and the Whites, Dante led the priors in taking the drastic measure of banishing the chief figures among both factions. One of these was Dante’s friend and fellow poet in the Fedeli d’Amore, Guido Cavalcanti, who was a leader of the Whites.

  But Pope Boniface VIII was eager for a showdown with the Whites in Florence, along with other anti-Church factions elsewhere in Tuscany. He called upon Charles of Valois, a brother of Philip the Fair, the king of France, to lead an army into Italy. To avert an armed intervention, the government of Florence sent Dante to Rome as an envoy to the pope, where Boniface toyed with him, keeping him delayed in the city for three months towards the end of 1301. Meanwhile, behind his back, the Blacks were being helped to power in Florence by the French mediator to whom they had opened the city gates.

  Only the year before, Boniface had declared 1300 a jubilee, marking thirteen hundred years since the birth of Christ. To all Christians who made the pilgrimage to St Peter’s in Rome he promised full remission of their sins – at vast profit to the Vatican – even as he sat on the throne of Constantine the Great, where holding the symbols of temporal dominion, the sword, the sceptre and the crown, he called to the crowd, ‘I am Caesar!’ Outraged by the machinations of the pope, Dante became one of the most outspoken critics of Boniface and would consign him to the Eighth Circle of Hell for simony.

  UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH

  It is no coincidence that Dante set his Divine Comedy in 1300, for in a sense that year became his own jubilee, in which he lost his way in the dark wood of worldly error and began his journey to personal salvation. Though he had reached the apogee of Florentine politics when he became one of its six ruling priors, the harmony he had hoped to bring to his native city turned to dust. His friend Guido Cavalcanti died of malaria during the banishment into which he had been sent by Dante himself. And in the following year, during his embassy to Rome, Dante was outwitted by the pope and Florence fell into the hands of his enemies, the Blacks. Dante never saw Florence again.

  At the start of 1302, while Dante was still in Rome, he was condemned by the triumphant Blacks to pay a fine of five thousand florins and to be banished from Florence for two years. Behind the legalities it was in effect a political purge that was determined to break him and make him submit. Two months later, when he refused to pay and by implication admit to the charge of graft levelled against him, the banishment was made permanent. The stipulation was added that should he ever be caught within the territory of Florence he would be burned alive at the stake.

  YEARS OF EXILE

  In exile Dante became, in his own words, ‘a Florentine by birth but not in spirit’; instead he joined those ‘to whom the world is our native country, just as the sea is to the fish’. As he wrote in a later prose work, the Convivio:

  After it was the pleasure of the citizens of that fairest and most famous daughter of Rome, Florence, to cast me out of her dearest bosom, I have wandered through almost every region to which this tongue of ours extends, a stranger, almost a beggar, exposing to view against my will the stroke of fortune which is often wont unjustly to be charged to the account of the stricken. Truly I have been a ship without sail and without rudder, wafted to divers havens and inlets and shores, by the parching wind which woeful poverty exhales.’

  Time and again in the years that followed, Dante was offered the chance to return to Florence, but only if he made a public atonement. If he would come to the Baptistery dressed in sackcloth and submit to a ritual humiliation, he would be accepted back into the city. Proudly, the poet refused, saying that if he returned at all he would stand before his baptismal font only to accept the poet’s laurel crown. His final answer came in these lines from the Paradiso, Canto XXV 1–9:

  If it ever come to pass that the sacred poem

  to which both heaven and earth have set their hand

  so as to have made me lean for many years

  should overcome the cruelty that bars me

  from the fair sheepfold where I slept as a lamb,

  an enemy to the wolves that make war on it,

  with another voice now and other fleece

  I shall return a poet and at the font

  of my baptism take the laurel crown.

  DANTE AND THE TEMPLARS

  Dante’s poetry did not, however, serve him as a passport. For two decades he led the wandering life of a learned courtier, travelling throughout northern Italy, to France, and according to Boccaccio as far north as Paris.

  Quite possibly he was in Paris on Friday 13 October 1307, the day king Philip IV, the Fair, launched a nationwide dawn raid against the Knights Templar, arresting everyone associated with the order and putting them on trial for blasphemy, heresy, sodomy and a host of other charges that were designed to smear their reputation forever.

  It has been suggested that Dante himself had had some connection with the order in his youth, for the Templars had a house in Florence. Whatever the truth of that, Dante was outraged at their arrest, which he ascribed to sim
ple theft by the French king who wanted the Templars’ money. Writing in the Purgatorio, Canto XX, Dante described Philip as another Pontius Pilate who ‘ruthless’ and ‘without law … bears into the Temple his greedy sails’.

  WRITING THE INFERNO

  Dante came to rest for a while in Verona, the guest of Can Grande Della Scala, who was the leader of the Ghibelline League; Dante’s politics had now swung from his youthful support of the Guelfs, who had since betrayed him, to the Ghibellines. There at Della Scala’s sophisticated court, and with access to one of the best libraries in Europe, Dante began the Inferno in 1308. He also lived briefly in Bologna and Padua. His powerful and aristocratic hosts might use him to compose in Latin elaborate despatches or treaties with a neighbouring city, and sometimes they sent him on diplomatic missions. But in his lack of independence he learned ‘how bitter another’s bread is’.

  The Casa di Dante museum in the poet’s native quarter of Florence.

  Dante spent his last years at Ravenna, in the house of its ruler, Guido Novello da Polenta. Guido was a nephew of Francesca da Rimini, who had been murdered by her husband in around 1286, following an adulterous affair. Dante had already written Francesca into his Inferno, placing her along with her lover in the Second Circle of Hell. By this time, it seems, Dante was sufficiently famous that to have a lustful aunt celebrated by the great poet was something to be proud of. Her fame was to grow still further; the original name of Rodin’s The Kiss was Francesca da Rimini.

  RETURN TO HIS STARS

  In the house of Francesca’s nephew, Dante completed his Divine Comedy, ascending to Paradise with Beatrice and beholding the face of God. He had with him one of his sons and his daughter Antonia, who had become a nun and had taken the name Beatrice.

  Not long afterwards, Dante was sent by Guido on a diplomatic mission to Venice. He chose rather than to return in comfort by boat along the coast to travel through the marshland of the estuary of the River Po, and contracted malaria, the same illness that had killed the great friend of his youth, Guido Cavalcanti. Dante died in Ravenna; the exact date is disputed, but tradition places his death at the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, 14 September 1321. An epitaph was composed: ‘Ungrateful Florence, a cruel fatherland, rewarded her bard with the bitter fruit of exile; but compassionate Ravenna is glad to have received him in the bosom of Guido Novello, its revered leader. In the year of Our Lord, one thousand three hundred and thrice seven, on the ides of September, then did he return to his stars’.

  Dante was given a stately funeral and his dead brow was adorned with a laurel crown. But the magnificent tomb intended for the poet was never built; Guido da Polenta was overthrown exactly a year later, and Dante rests in a modest mausoleum. Florence has ever since tried to have his bones, but Ravenna has refused.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Beatrice

  When Dante has lost his way in life and is stumbling about in the dark forest, the Roman poet Virgil comes to show him the way – that is how the Inferno, the first book of the Divine Comedy, begins. But before they can get out, they have to go down, into the very depths of Hell. Virgil is a denizen of Limbo, that place where virtuous pagans born before the advent of Christ remain suspended for eternity. Nevertheless Virgil has had thirteen hundred years to kill; he has done some exploring underground, and knows his way around. He is also a celebrity, ‘of whom the fame still in the world endures, / And shall endure, long-lasting as the world’. These words are spoken by a beautiful woman, her eyes shining brighter than the stars, who visits Virgil in Limbo and implores his help. She is Beatrice, who is dwelling in Paradise, but who has seen Dante’s plight and wants to save him before it is too late. ‘Love moved me’, she says.

  BEATRICE OF PARADISE

  Beatrice is the love of Dante’s life, a radiant creature with emerald eyes, a voice ‘gentle and low’, and a motherly smile, who died when she was twenty-four. Dante, who is now thirty-five, in the middle of his life, has not seen Beatrice for more than ten years and he does not see her now. Instead first he must follow Virgil through the Inferno, then upwards to the summit of Purgatory where Beatrice appears to him and then shows him the way to Paradise where she takes her place in the highest tier, two seats away from the Virgin Mary.

  This is an ethereal Beatrice; Dante has turned the flesh-and-blood woman that he knew into an angel, though he had begun doing that already when she was alive. In fact there is some question about whether Beatrice was ever real, though Dante’s experience of her, which he describes in his Vita Nuova, is so wacky that oddly her reality becomes all the more believable.

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  Dante began composing the Divine Comedy in his mid-thirties, but Beatrice makes her first appearance before that, in his autobiographical work called Vita Nuova (New Life), a prose account of his younger years, which includes a number of poems as well, and which he wrote in his mid-twenties. Dante writes that Beatrice ‘appeared to me at the beginning of her ninth year almost, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth year’ (Dante would forever identify the number nine with Beatrice). Though both were only children, Dante fell in love with her instantly on that May day in 1274, and his love for her continued to burn with extraordinary intensity well beyond the day she died at the age of twenty-four in 1290. From the moment he saw Beatrice, he became a man possessed by a divine power, by Love itself.

  At that moment, I say most truly that the spirit of life, which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart, began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words: ‘Here is a deity stronger than I; who, coming, shall rule over me’.

  According to Giovanni Boccaccio, famous as the author of the ribald tales called The Decameron, who lived almost a lifetime after Dante and was the first to write his biography, this meeting between Dante and Beatrice took place at the house of Folco Portinari. A wealthy banker and philanthropist of Florence, Portinari had invited friends and neighbours to celebrate the first of May. The house is today the Palazzo Portinari Salviati at 6 Via del Corso, very close to where Dante himself lived. Dante came along with his father, and here he mingled with other children, girls and boys, of his own age. In Boccaccio’s words:

  Henry Holiday’s Pre-Raphaelite painting of Dante’s encounter with Beatrice as she walks past the Santa Trinità Bridge. Beatrice, in the white dress, is accompanied by her friend Monna Vanna, and her maidservant.

  There was among the crowd of children a little daughter of the aforesaid Folco, whose name was Bice (although he always called her by her full name, that is, Beatrice), who was perhaps eight years old, very comely – for her age – and very gentle and pleasing in her actions, with ways and words more serious and modest than her youth required; and besides this, with features very delicate and well formed, and, further, so full of beauty and of sweet winsomeness that she was declared by many to be like a little angel. She, then – such as I paint her and perhaps even more beautiful – appeared at this feast to the eyes of our Dante – not, I believe, for the first time, but for the first time with power to enamour him. And although a mere boy, he received her sweet image in his heart with such affection that from that day forward it never departed thence while he lived.

  BEATRICE EATS DANTE’S HEART

  As Dante grew older his passion for Beatrice increased. He could find no pleasure or peace except by seeing her, going wherever he thought he might again glimpse her eyes, her face. ‘Oh, senseless judgment of lovers!’, Boccaccio writes. ‘Who else but they would think by adding to the fuel to make the flames less?’ But it was always a chaste love, Boccaccio is sure. Having studied Dante’s writings and those of his friends, and interviewing people in Florence whose families may have known him, Boccaccio concluded that ‘his love was most virtuous, nor did there ever appear, by look or word or sign, any wanton appetite either in the lover or in her whom he loved’. Boccaccio, who knew and wrote about carnal desire, remarked that ‘this is n
o small marvel to the world of today, from which all virtuous pleasure has so fled, and which is so accustomed to having whatever pleases it conform to its lust’.

  There must have been numerous sightings of Beatrice, many encounters in the streets of Florence, but Dante makes no mention of any of this; if they happened they happened silently, no words passed between them. Instead the next great moment, he writes in the Vita Nuova, came ‘nine years exactly’ after they met at her father’s May Day party. Beatrice, ‘dressed all in pure white’, was walking along a street (he does not name the street) in the company of two older women. The hour was ‘the ninth of the day’ (three o’clock in the afternoon) and she stopped and greeted him; ‘it was the first time that any words from her reached my ears’. Overwhelmed and intoxicated, he stumbled to his room.

  There he fell asleep and was seized by a vision, a cloud of fire, and emerging from it the figure of a man, the Lord of Love, frightening to behold yet filled with joy. ‘I am your master’, he said. In his arms Dante noticed a woman, naked except for a loosely wrapped crimson cloth, and recognised her as Beatrice. And in his hand was a fiery object, which he held before Dante saying, ‘Behold your heart’. Then he pressed it upon Beatrice, who ate it. Still carrying Beatrice in his arms, the Lord of Love ascended, as though to heaven, and Dante awoke with a start, realising that this vision had come to him at ‘the fourth hour (which is to say, the first of the nine last hours) of the night’.