As it happened, Guido Cavalcanti did return. He contracted malaria—a common disease in marshy coastal areas—and was permitted by some momentarily kind-spirited authority to come back to Florence, where he died before the year was out. Dante the pilgrim, talking with Guido’s father in the Inferno in the spring of 1300, could not yet know of his friend’s imminent death.
Following his two months in the Signoria, and largely because of his performance during it, Dante became a recognized leader in Florentine political life. According to Boccaccio, who may have been exaggerating in his wellintentioned way, no action was taken by the city council, no law was passed or abrogated, no issue of war or peace was decided unless Dante had his say. His position was steadfast: no yielding to pressure from the Donati Blacks or the Cerchi Whites, no involvement with external affairs. The welfare of the commune must come before everything.
The skimpy records show Dante addressing this council or that with impressive regularity and effectiveness; in the Brunetto Latini image, he had become the literary man engagé. Other important civic responsibility was put upon him. In late April 1301, he was appointed superintendent of roads and road repairs in Florence and was instructed to bring in supplies for such works from the country; the document hints at city-barricading, perhaps against an invasion by the displaced nobility. Earlier that month, Dante had spoken and voted in vain in favor of a proposal to have four priors in the Signoria for each sestiere, as against two. Then on June 19, he rose to discuss a request from Pope Boniface VIII.
The matter involved some extensive territories south of Siena that the pope wanted to get his hands on. The lands belonged to Margherita degli Aldobrandeschi, known as the Red Countess, whose marriage with the pope’s nephew Goffredo Caetani had been arranged by Boniface himself. But Margherita was a wayward female; she had gone through two previous husbands and continued to consort with her lover Nello dei Pannocchieschi. Worse than that, Nello, in order to be free to cohabit with Margherita, had murdered his wife, Pia Tolomei, in their castle in the Sienese Maremma.
Ascending Mount Purgatory, Dante is approached by Pia, among the other late repentants (and after listening to Buonconte da Montefeltro’s tale about his death at Campaldino; see Chapter Three). With disarming simplicity, her almost childlike spirit says:... son la Pia;
Siena mi fé, disfecimi Maremma:
[I am Pia;
Siena made me, Maremma unmade me.]
Eliot borrowed and transformed these lines, too, in The Waste Land, a poem otherwise soaked in Dante. A voice at the end of “The Fire Sermon” declaims:Highbury bore me. Richmond and Kew Undid me.
Taking stock of all this, Boniface now arranged for a divorce between his nephew and Margherita. But he still lusted for the Aldobrandeschis’ lands and had even ignited a local Tuscan war to achieve this goal. One more factor in the ongoing story was Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta, whom Boniface had sent to Florence the year before, charged with bringing peace between the tumultuous Black and White parties. The cardinal was so obviously working to help the Blacks that an attempt was made to assassinate him (by a bolt from a crossbow), and the cardinal withdrew in haste. But it was he who, in June 1301, transmitted the papal request for armed support, two hundred horsemen, to help secure the southern Tuscan territories.
As of this moment, Boniface was not ill disposed toward the Florentines or toward Dante in particular. They were good Guelph citizens, in his view, resolutely opposed to the Ghibelline imperialists. During the jubilee year, a vast event that Boniface had launched with a papal pronouncement in February 1300, it seemed to him, as he said, that almost all the spokesmen for the myriad embassies to the Vatican were Florentines by birth. Florence, he was heard to say with an air of astonishment, was the fifth element in the cosmos. Dante was among his city’s representatives in one of the two missions to Rome in 1300, either just before or just after his priory service; so, as of the following June, he was well in the pope’s good graces.
At a first meeting on June 9, two members of the council spoke in favor of granting the cardinal’s request. One moved that the question be postponed; Dante alone spoke up against it. “About the papal matter,” reads the Latin report, “Dante Alighieri advised that nothing be done.” Nihil fiat: that phrase, “that nothing be done,” is attributed often enough to Dante in documents from 1300 to 1301 to give a clear sense of his staunch resistance to what seemed to him wrongheaded demands upon the city’s resources. As it turned out, at a second sitting, on June 19, military support was offered to Boniface by a vote of forty-nine to thirty-two, an indication that the Cerchi-led White Party was anything but unified. But with his negative statement, Dante incurred the pope’s severe displeasure.
In 1301, a new danger appeared on the Tuscan horizon: Charles of Valois, of the same house as Charles of Anjou, who had defeated Manfred and the Ghibellines at Benevento thirty-five years before and helped inaugurate the Guelph regime in Florence. The second Charles was a lackluster personality, constantly in need of money, always taking the easy way out. But Boniface believed that Charles could help establish French power in Sicily and also, perhaps, stimulate the Florentines into actively backing papal needs. He invited Charles into Italy. In May 1301, the French warrior with his troops stopped at Parma, where he borrowed a large sum from the Este family. Warily circling Florence, he continued on to Anagni, southeast of Rome, where in September he met the pope, worked him for two hundred thousand florins, and started back northward. At Siena, he kept an appointment with Corso Donati, and they began to plan their arrival in Florence.
The threat of Charles of Valois was debated before a full council meeting on September 13 and again two weeks later. Dante spoke out both times. On September 27, he was effective in gaining a vote to declare the complete innocence of one Neri Diodati, wrongfully accused of sanguinary violence; and then the council turned again to the French presence. Dante evidently voted his opposition to any compromise.
By October 4, Charles had reached Castel della Pieve, where the exiled Donatis were awaiting him—all except Corso, who was in Siena by this time. The priory hastily appointed a three-man embassy to go down to Rome, with the mission of persuading the pope of their complete Guelph loyalty and begging him to call off Charles of Valois. The three ambassadors were Maso Minerberti, Corazzo Ubaldini, and Dante Alighieri. The ambassadors met with the pope and made their pleas. Two of them were then released and sent back to Florence; Dante was detained.
He was not in the city to witness the fearful events of November 1301. On November 1, Charles of Valois entered Florence with a retinue of two thousand horsemen. He promised the White Priory to preserve the peace but instantly turned the town into an armed camp. Corso Donati was permitted to return. He stood near his home in San Piero Maggiore shouting curses and vengeful threats, then led a band through the sestiere looting and burning. The Alighieri house was vandalized, and the family fled to the home of a nearby relative. The sitting priors were deposed, and on November 8 a new set of priors, all Black, was elected, and a new podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli di Gubbio, always favorable to the Donatis, was called back from exile and placed in charge.
Cardinal Matthew of Acquasparta made a genuine effort to calm things down, but he was scorned and ridiculed and finally chased out of the city. New violence broke out, in the course of which Corso Donati’s favorite son, Simone, attacked Niccolò dei Cerchi, his uncle (the brother of Corso’s first wife); both were killed. The entire White contingent had left Florence by the start of April.
Florence was entirely in the grip of an all-Black priory, under the vindictive new podestà. The ever active Corso Donati roamed the streets, handing out punishments to lingering Whites, with the forces of Charles of Valois virtually occupying the city.
It was the new priory that on January 27, 1302, issued a detailed condemnation of Dante Alighieri and three others on charges of financial corruption. Dante was charged both in his capacity as head of the program of road repairs—pocketing
funds and accepting bribes—and during his time as prior, with what we would now call campaign financing irregularities, and other crimes. For not answering these charges, Dante and others were subjected to enormous fines and two years’ banishment from public office. On March 10, 1302, the priory, prodded by their superiors, issued the ultimate condemnation: Dante and now fourteen others were condemned to death by burning.
Dante had been held at Rome until these developments were well under way. He began the journey back to Florence and reached Siena when he was informed of the accusations in the decree of January 27th. He seems to have understood at once that it would be fatal for him to present himself in Florence to plead his case. He remained outside the city, to learn shortly of the final condemnation.
His ancestor Cacciaguida, talking to Dante in the planet Mars in April 1300 (Par. xviii), two years before these calamities, predicts them with sad accuracy:... You will be severed from Florence.
So it is willed and already plotted,
and will be accomplished soon by him
who preaches there where Christ is put to sale
every day.
Dante, writing fifteen years later, thus puts the major blame for his grief and that of Florence on Pope Boniface VIII. But he knows that for a time he himself will be the one accused of wrongdoing: The blame will fall upon the injured side As always.
Yet hope remains:Vengeance shall bear witness to the truth which dispenses it.
But Cacciaguida’s 1300 vision of Dante’s future is a grim one:You shall abandon everything you love most dearly.
That is the arrow which the bow of exile
shall shoot.
It was an arrow that reached its mark. Dante never again set foot inside the city of Florence.
SIX
The Poet in Exile, 1302-1310: The Comedy Is Begun
FOR A TIME following his banishment and the death sentence, Dante moved about restlessly, mostly within the confines of Tuscany, keeping a watchful eye on developments in Florence. It was a dismally disorienting period. Cacciaguida warns Dante about it in Paradiso xvii: “You shall abandon everything most beloved,” and in addition, “You shall discover how another man’s bread tastes of salt.” For Dante, as for Florentines today, salted bread was a kind of punishment. But there were flickerings of hope.
In early June 1302, Dante joined with sixteen other White Guelph exiles in an alliance with the Ubaldini family to plan an invasion of Florence. The Ubaldinis—Ghibellines by tradition, and vigorously opposed to the Black Guelphs of the city—resided in the tiny hill village of San Godenzo in the Mugello, some thirty miles northeast of Florence. It was a picturesque region of farms, chestnut trees, and olive groves, and was already becoming a summer home for the wealthy, with the Sieve River running south through it. The Mugello had the added appeal for Dante of belonging to the same countryside as the Alighieri holdings of fond memory at Pagnolle, just over the hills to the west.
Two months after the alliance was formed, the Florentine Blacks, taking note of it, sent a somewhat disorganized force to attack the exile group. The latter repelled the onslaught easily, their only military achievement during this entire phase of things. Early in 1303, Dante gave up on the Mugello coalition and continued on his northeastern course, ending up at Forli, a flourishing town of Roman origins (the name derives in part from the forum that once stood there), now ruled by Scarpetta Ordelaffi, another Ghibelline adherent. His family would command Forli for two hundred years. Scarpetta quickly enlisted Dante as an advisor on political and military matters; but after six months Dante took off again, making his way up to Verona, as emissary of the local White Guelphs to the Veronese leader Bartolomeo della Scala.
It was the beginning of a long relationship, perhaps the most valued of any in Dante’s exile years. Cacciaguida reports in advance on it:Your first refuge and your first place of rest
Shall be the courtesy of the great Lombard, who
On the ladder bears the sacred bird.
The della Scala family arms showed an eagle on a ladder, a scala, hence the name (the older German name, often invoked in Italy, was Scaliger). Alberto della Scala had died in 1301; he was succeeded by the oldest of his three sons, Bartolomeo. Between the new ruler and Dante, as Cacciaguida perceives it, there grew an ideal friendship: each, Cacciaguida says, gave first, gave freely, and only then made any request.
On this first visit, Dante remained in Verona about nine months. Bartolomeo honored and protected him; and the exile seems gradually to have felt almost at home in the city. It was a compact town of artful design, like Florence, with a river, the Adige, curving gracefully through the heart of it, even as the Arno flowed through Florence. Rolling green hills surrounded Verona, as they did Florence; and within the walls were reminders that Verona, like Florence, was a “daughter of Rome”—most visibly the vast Roman amphitheater, the Arena, rivaling in bulk the Roman Colosseum and dominating the urban center and the river view.
Dante’s mission in Verona was to gain the support of Bartolomeo della Scala for another White Guelph effort to force their way into Florence. In late 1303, the moment seemed propitious. The French monarch, Philip IV, “the Fair,” had quarreled with Boniface over the matter of taxation and had been summarily excommunicated. In furious revenge, Philip sent two henchmen to the papal palace at Anagni, thirty-five miles southeast of Rome. They seized and manhandled Boniface and plundered his palace—the moment became known as “the terrible day at Anagni.” Boniface died in Rome a month later, in October. For all his hostility to Boniface, Dante denounced the attack as mortally sinful, an attack against Christ Himself. In the Purgatorio (xx), Dante speaks of seeing “the fleur-de-lis enter Anagni, and in the person of His Vicar, Christ being made captive.” But he was understandably relieved to see Boniface depart, and he rejoiced at the election of the mild-mannered Benedict XI.
Hope arose when Benedict sent an able diplomat, the cardinal of Prato, to Florence, with the aim of effecting a truce between the Blacks and the Whites. Dante addressed an open letter to the cardinal—it is his first surviving letter—on behalf of the “Council of the White Party,” declaring their belief in the papal emissary and their high expectations.
But the endeavor came to nothing: the Blacks were intractable, and the cardinal left Florence in June 1304, having placed the city under a papal interdict. Benedict himself died in July 1304; the complex politicking within the college of cardinals led to a hiatus in the papacy for eleven months, after which time Clement V was elected. The papacy was controlled by the French during the rest of Dante’s lifetime.
Dante had left Verona by the early spring of 1304. The cardinal’s mission was evidently doomed to failure, and Bartolomeo della Scala had died that winter. He was succeeded by his brother Alboino, with whom Dante was unable to get along. In the Convivio (IV, xvi), the work he would soon set about writing, Dante would refer scornfully to Alboino as one whom some people thought of as noble simply because he was well known. Eventually, of course, Dante would come within the orbit of Alberto’s youngest son, Can Grande, but that future ruler was no more than a stripling of thirteen when Dante quit Verona.
The departure from Verona symbolized an act by Dante that was the product of extreme frustration and impatience: a sharp and final break with the White Guelph exile group. In retrospect, and once more via Cacciaguida, Dante labels them “wicked and stupid” (malvagia e scempia ), “completely ungrateful, mad and impious.” They were leaderless and inept, a motley unorganized crew, who on their side appear to have accused Dante of slack performances as an emissary. Dante now struck off entirely on his own—in Cacciaguida’s phrase, he made “a party for yourself” (parte per te stesso).
It was as a party of one that Dante went on to Padua briefly, and then to Bologna for a longer stay. Among the poets and scholars of Bologna, Dante to his joy met up with his friend Cino da Pistoia, a poet and jurist about five years younger than Dante and (what did not trouble Dante in the slightest) a memb
er of the Black Guelph party in his native city. He had been an exile from the time of the White party takeover of Pistoia.
Dante and Cino had exchanged sonnets, often with accompanying letters, for a good many years, talking mainly about poetry and the poetic idiom and about the vicissitudes of love. Typically, in one of the earlier verses, Cino had asked Dante’s advice about how he should respond to a new and lovely lady he had come to know, the “green lady” as he called her. “Dante, what shall I do [Che farò, Dante]?” Dante’s sonnet, in reply, observed somewhat enigmatically that “there is great danger in a woman so clothed”—in green—“so in my opinion you should call off the hunt.”
In Bologna and immediately afterward, Dante and Cino each passed at least three sonnets back and forth until sometime in 1306, when Cino was able to return to Pistoia. The poems are personal, affectionate, and literary. Dante grows reminiscent: “I have been together with Love since my ninth year,” he tells Cino, who had asked about how Love and desire might be controlled, “and I know how he curbs and spurts, and how, under his sway, one laughs and groans.” And, in a flash of self-exposure, “He who urges reason and virtue against him acts like one who raises his voice in a storm.”
One of Cino’s sonnets followed Dante across Italy to the region of Lunigiana, in the northwest tip of Tuscany. To this ancient and still thriving Roman settlement Dante came in 1305, at the request of the Marchese Malaspina, who had heard of his diplomatic skills and besought him to intercede in a harsh dispute with the local power figure, the bishop of Luni. Dante settled the affair quite satisfactorily, and it was then that there arrived the communication from Cino, punning on the name Malaspina by lamenting that an evil thorn (mala spina) had pierced his heart. Could help be sent him before he died? To this, Dante responded in a fondly chiding tone:Your sweet and clear voice makes you worthy
Dante: A Life (PENGUIN LIVES) Page 7