Dante Alighieri

#1Dante Alighieri had spent years wanting to get back to Florence. It was his birthplace, the city where he'd entered politics, and the place around which much of his life still revolved.

#2Then a possible way home appeared.

#3There were conditions. Dante would have to pay a fine and accept a humiliating return that treated him as a guilty man seeking mercy.

#4He said no.

#5If Florence offered a road back that preserved his honor, he was willing to take it. If not, he could stay elsewhere. The sun and stars weren't visible from Florence alone.

#6That sounds like a strange choice for a man who had wanted to return for so long.

#7So what changed?

#8To understand the refusal, you have to go back to the Dante who lived in Florence before the exile. He wasn't simply a poet crushed by politics.

#9He'd once been one of the people making political decisions—including a decision that sent his own close friend out of the city.

#10Florence in 1300 was being pulled apart by two rival factions, the White Guelphs and the Black Guelphs. They had come out of the same larger political camp, but by then they were fighting over control of Florence and, among other things, how much power the pope should have in the city's affairs.

#11Dante was aligned with the Whites.

#12That year he became one of Florence's priors, part of the small group at the top of the city government.

#13Then the factional violence got bad enough that the government decided to send leading men from both sides out of Florence for a time. Dante was one of the officials who took part in that collective decision.

#14One name on the list was different for him.

#15Guido Cavalcanti.

#16Guido was a poet Dante had known since his youth. Dante had described him, in effect, as his first friend.

#17Dante didn't exile Guido by himself. This was a government decision, made by several officials.

#18But Dante was part of the government that made it.

#19Guido became ill in exile at Sarzana. He was eventually allowed back to Florence, but he died soon afterward.

#20And less than two years later, Florentine politics flipped.

#21This time, Dante's name was on the other side of the process.

#22The Black Guelphs took control of Florence. Pope Boniface VIII had become deeply involved in Tuscan politics, and after the French prince Charles of Valois entered Florence in 1301, the Blacks seized the city government.

#23Then they began prosecuting opponents.

#24In 1302, Dante was convicted on charges that included abuses connected with public office. He was fined, barred from office, and expelled from Florence.

#25Dante didn't accept the judgment. He didn't come back to pay the fine.

#26The penalty then became more severe. If Florentine authorities caught him, he could be put to death.

#27So Florence became two places at once.

#28The city he most wanted to see again. And a city he couldn't safely enter.

#29Still, Dante didn't immediately give up on politics and turn to poetry as some kind of replacement.

#30First, he tried to get home in the real world.

#31At first Dante remained connected to other exiled White Guelphs. A change of government might bring them home. So might military force.

#32But the exiles fell out with one another, and Dante eventually distanced himself from many of them.

#33In 1304, exiled forces tried to push back into Florence and were badly defeated at Lastra. Dante appears not to have taken part in that attack.

#34Then another possibility appeared.

#35Henry VII, the Holy Roman Emperor, came into Italy.

#36There wasn't a unified Italian state at the time. Cities and local rulers competed with one another, while the papacy and the emperor also fought for influence. Dante hoped an emperor powerful enough to stand above those local feuds might reorder the politics of Florence too.

#37He backed Henry enthusiastically.

#38Florence resisted.

#39Even when some exiles were allowed back, Dante remained excluded. Then Henry died in 1313.

#40Another real road home was gone.

#41By then Dante was working on a different kind of journey.

#42Not toward Florence.

#43Down into Hell.

#44During exile, Dante worked on the poem he called the "Commedia," later known as "The Divine Comedy."

#45A living Dante travels through Hell, climbs Purgatory, and eventually reaches Paradise.

#46But the date makes the whole structure stranger.

#47The journey takes place in 1300.

#48Before Dante's exile.

#49So the Dante walking through the poem doesn't know what is about to happen to him. The Dante writing the poem does.

#50The writer already knows Florence will condemn him. He knows his attempts to return will fail. He knows what it feels like to depend on other people's houses and courts.

#51That lets the dead speak to the character Dante about a future the author has already lived.

#52You'll lose your home. You'll learn how hard it is to return. You'll learn what dependence on other people's hospitality feels like.

#53Dante took his own past and turned it into prophecy.

#54And this afterlife wasn't populated only by biblical figures and people from ancient history.

#55Florentine politicians were there. Old enemies were there. People Dante actually knew were there.

#56So was the father of the friend whose exile Dante's government had once approved.

#57In "Inferno," Dante meets Farinata degli Uberti among burning tombs.

#58Farinata belonged to a political tradition hostile to Dante's side. But Dante doesn't make him cower in Hell. Farinata rises from the tomb with enough pride to seem almost unimpressed by the place around him.

#59Then he and Dante start arguing about Florence.

#60Who had driven whom out? Which faction managed to come back? Which family had lost?

#61Even in Hell, Florentine politics is still going.

#62Then another man rises from the same tomb.

#63Cavalcante de' Cavalcanti.

#64Guido's father.

#65Cavalcante sees Dante alive among the dead and looks around for his son. If Dante can make this extraordinary journey through intellect and poetry, he seems to think, why isn't Guido here too?

#66He asks where Guido is.

#67Dante answers, but his wording makes Cavalcante think his son has already died.

#68The father collapses back into the tomb.

#69A little later, Dante asks Farinata to correct the misunderstanding. At the fictional date of the journey, Guido is still alive.

#70That fictional date is 1300.

#71In the real 1300, the government Dante served in had participated in sending Guido Cavalcanti into exile. Guido became ill and died later that year.

#72There's no solid evidence that Dante wrote the scene out of guilt.

#73It doesn't need that explanation to be striking.

#74A man who had served in the government that exiled his friend created an afterlife where he had to face that friend's father asking:

#75Where is my son?

#76Farinata makes the idea of "revenge" even less tidy.

#77He's Dante's political enemy. He's in Hell.

#78But Dante gives him dignity.

#79During their argument, Dante boasts that his own side knew how to return after exile, while Farinata's side didn't.

#80Farinata answers with a prediction: Dante will soon discover for himself how difficult the art of returning really is.

#81For the Dante of 1300, that's a prophecy.

#82For the exiled man writing the scene, it's something he's already lived.

#83Dante put an enemy in Hell, then handed that enemy one of the sharpest truths about Dante's own life.

#84He also preserves one of Farinata's virtues. When people on Farinata's victorious side once considered destroying Florence itself, Farinata had opposed them.

#85Dante can condemn the man without flattening him into a cartoon villain.

#86That makes "The Divine Comedy" hard to read as a simple list of people Dante disliked.

#87But that doesn't mean he hid his anger.

#88With one pope in particular, he found a way to make the point before the man was even dead.

#89Boniface VIII posed a timing problem.

#90Dante opposed the kind of papal power that reached beyond religion and deep into the politics of cities like Florence. Boniface's intervention also mattered in the political sequence that ended with the Black Guelph takeover.

#91But the poem's journey happens in 1300.

#92Boniface was still alive then. He wouldn't die until 1303.

#93So Dante couldn't simply have him appear in Hell.

#94Instead, Dante meets Pope Nicholas III among churchmen punished for corrupting sacred office through money and power. Nicholas is stuck upside down in a hole, with flames at his feet.

#95Dante approaches.

#96Nicholas mistakes him for somebody else.

#97Boniface?

#98Already?

#99According to the poem's calendar, Boniface should still have several years left to live.

#100The point lands anyway.

#101Dante has effectively shown the reader the place he expects the living pope to occupy after death.

#102And yet personal affection didn't buy anyone a free pass.

#103One of the men Dante treats with real reverence is also in Hell.

#104Brunetto Latini belonged to an older generation of Florentine politics and letters. In the poem, Dante treats him much like a revered mentor.

#105Brunetto's life also had an unsettling resemblance to Dante's. Politics had forced him out of Florence too, and he wrote an important work while abroad.

#106When Dante encounters him in "Inferno," the respect is obvious.

#107But Brunetto isn't in Paradise.

#108He's in Hell.

#109An enemy such as Farinata can keep his dignity. A revered figure such as Brunetto can still be damned.

#110So the map isn't:

#111friends above, enemies below.

#112Dante was trying to place people inside the Christian moral order as he understood it.

#113But his memories, anger, loyalties, friendships, and Florentine politics were all inside that moral universe too.

#114That's why his Hell feels so peculiar.

#115It claims to show eternal judgment.

#116And yet the Florentines are still talking about Florence.

#117Years later, Florence offered Dante a possible route home.

#118This brings us back to the beginning.

#119He'd spent years trying to return. He'd moved with fellow exiles, watched military plans fail, and placed hope in an emperor.

#120So he hadn't stopped caring about Florence.

#121The problem was the terms.

#122To come back this way, Dante would have to pay and accept a humiliating status that treated him as though the city's judgment against him were legitimate.

#123He wouldn't do it.

#124He wanted to go home.

#125He just wouldn't go home that way.

#126Then, in the final part of "The Divine Comedy," Dante made exile itself part of the poem's reason for existing.

#127In "Paradiso," Dante meets an ancestor called Cacciaguida.

#128This is a scene inside the poem, not a historical conversation.

#129Cacciaguida tells the Dante of 1300 what's coming.

#130He'll leave behind the things he loves most. He'll learn how salty another man's bread tastes. He'll learn how hard it is to go up and down another man's stairs.

#131The writer Dante knew those images from experience.

#132He'd moved between cities. He'd lived under the protection of other rulers. He'd depended on households that weren't his own.

#133Then Dante asks Cacciaguida another question.

#134Should he really tell the world everything he's seen? If he writes openly about the failures of powerful people, won't he simply create more enemies?

#135Within the poem, Cacciaguida tells him not to hide the truth.

#136Dante ties two things together in that scene:

#137the fact that he was exiled,

#138and the belief that what he'd seen had to be written.

#139Exile had become part of his poetic mission.

#140Dante's final home was Ravenna.

#141Its ruler, Guido Novello da Polenta, gave him protection, and Dante is believed to have completed "Paradiso" there.

#142In 1321, he went on a diplomatic mission connected with Ravenna and Venice. He became ill on the way back and died in Ravenna.

#143Nearly two decades had passed since Florence expelled him.

#144He never returned.

#145That could have ended the story.

#146Except Dante didn't return to Florence—

#147and his book did.

#148"The Divine Comedy" spread in handwritten copies. Readers copied it, passed it around, and began building a tradition of commentary around it.

#149Then in 1373, about half a century after Dante's death, Florentine citizens asked for public lectures on his work.

#150The lecturer chosen was Giovanni Boccaccio, later famous for "The Decameron."

#151Boccaccio began reading and explaining Dante's "Inferno" in Florence.

#152The reversal is hard to miss.

#153In 1302, Florentine public authority had condemned Dante and driven him from the city.

#154Now people were gathering in Florence, with public support, to hear his poem taught.

#155Dante hadn't returned.

#156His book had.

#157And eventually Florence wanted more than the book.

#158It wanted Dante's body.

#159In 1519, almost two centuries after Dante's death, Florence tried to bring his remains back from Ravenna.

#160The effort had authorization from Pope Leo X, a member of the Medici family.

#161The city that had once offered the living Dante a return he couldn't accept now wanted the dead poet.

#162But Franciscan friars in Ravenna moved first.

#163They removed Dante's bones and hid them.

#164When the Florentine side opened the tomb, there was no body to take.

#165Dante's remains ultimately stayed in Ravenna.

#166While he was alive, Dante wanted Florence and couldn't return on terms he could accept.

#167After he was dead, Florence wanted Dante.

#168This time, Ravenna kept him.

#169Today there's a grand monument to Dante in Florence's Basilica of Santa Croce.

#170But his remains aren't there.

#171They're still in Ravenna.

#172The living Dante wanted to return. Florence offered a return he believed would dishonor him. He refused.

#173After his death, Florence read him, taught him, celebrated him, and eventually tried to recover his body.

#174His body never came back.

#175Something else had already returned.

#176Dante had filled "The Divine Comedy" with the city that expelled him. Its politicians argue among the dead. An old enemy tells him what exile will cost. His friend's father rises from a tomb. A living pope already has a future place waiting in Hell. Dante even turns his own exile into a prophecy.

#177Florence put Dante outside its walls.

#178Dante never put Florence outside his book.