Dante Biography

During these years Dante wrote important political epistles—evidence of the great esteem in which he was held throughout Italy, of his personal authority, as it were—in which he exalted Henry, urging him to be diligent, and condemned Florence. In subsequent action, however, which was to remind Dante of Boniface's duplicity, Clement himself turned against Henry. This action prompted one of Dante's greatest polemical treatises, his De monarchia ( 1313; On Monarchy) in which he expands the political arguments of the Convivio. In the embittered atmosphere caused by Clement's deceit Dante turned his argumentative powers against papal insistence on its superiority over the political ruler, that is, against the argument that the empire derived its political authority from the pope. In the final passages of the Monarchia Dante writes that the ends designed by Providence for man are twofold: one end is the bliss of this life, which is conveyed in the figure of the earthly paradise; the other is the bliss of eternal life, which is embodied in the image of a heavenly paradise. Yet despite their different ends, these two purposes are not unconnected. Dante concludes his Monarchia by assuring his reader that he does not mean to imply “that the Roman government is in no way subject to the Roman pontificate, for in some ways our mortal happiness is ordered for the sake of immortal happiness.” Dante's problem was that he had to express in theoretical language a subtle relationship that might be better conveyed by metaphoric language and historical example. Surveying the history of the relationship between papacy and empire, Dante pointed with approval to specific historical examples, such as Constantine's good will toward the church. Dante's disappointment in the failed mission of Henry VII derived from the fact that Henry's original sponsor was apparently Pope Clement and that conditions seemed to be ideal for reestablishing the right relationship between the supreme powers.

The Divine Comedy

Dante's years of exile were years of difficult peregrinations from one place to another—as he himself repeatedly says, most effectively in Paradiso [XVII], in Cacciaguida's moving lamentation that “bitter is the taste of another man's bread and . . . heavy the way up and down another man's stair.” Throughout his exile Dante nevertheless was sustained by work on his great poem. The Divine Comedy was possibly begun prior to 1308 and completed just before his death in 1321, but the exact dates are uncertain. In addition, in his final years Dante was received honourably in many noble houses in the north of Italy, most notably by Guido Novello da Polenta, the nephew of the remarkable Francesca, in Ravenna. There at his death Dante was given an honourable burial attended by the leading men of letters of the time, and the funeral oration was delivered by Guido himself.