Exile and death
Boniface quickly sent away the other representatives and asked Dante alone to remain in Rome. At the same time (November 1, 1301) Charles de Valois was entering Florence with Black Guelfs, who in the next six days destroyed everything and killed most of their enemies. A new government was installed of Black Guelfs, and Cante dei Gabbrielli di Gubbio was named "Podesta'" (mayor). Dante was condemned to exile for 2 years, and to pay a huge amount of money. The poet was still in Rome, where the Pope had "suggested" he stay, and was therefore considered an absconder. He could not pay his fine and was finally condemned to perpetual exile. If he were ever caught by Florentine soldiers, he would have been summarily executed.
The poet took part in several attempts by the White Guelfs to regain the power they had lost, but these failed due to treachery. Dante, bitter at the treatment he had received at the hands of his enemies, also grew disgusted with the infighting and ineffectiveness of his erstwhile allies and vowed, in his own words, to become a party of one. At this point he began sketching the foundations for the Comedy, a work in 100 cantos, divided into three books of thirty-three cantos each, with a single introductory canto.
He went to Verona as a guest of Bartolomeo Della Scala, then moved to Sarzana (Liguria), and after this he is supposed to have lived for some time in Lucca with Madame Gentucca, who made his stay comfortable (and was later gratefully mentioned in Purgatorio XXIV,37). Some sources say that he was in Paris, too, between 1308 and 1310.Other sources, even less trustworthy, take him to Oxford.
In 1310 Arrigo VII of Luxembourg was invading Italy; Dante saw in him the chance of revenge, so he wrote to him (and to other Italian princes) several public letters violently inciting them to destroy the Black Guelfs. Mixing religion and private concerns, he invoked the worst anger of God against his town, suggesting several particular targets that coincided with his personal enemies.
In Florence Baldo d'Aguglione pardoned most of the White Guelfs in exile and allowed them to come back; Dante had however exceeded any limit in his violent letters to Arrigo, and he was not recalled.
In 1312, Arrigo assaulted Florence and defeated the Black Guelfs, but there is no evidence that Dante was involved. Some say he refused to participate in the assault on his city by a foreigner; others suggest that his name had became unpleasant for White Guelfs too and that any trace of his passage had carefully been removed. In 1313 Arrigo died, and with him any residual hope for Dante to see Florence again. He returned to Verona, where Cangrande Della Scala allowed him to live in a certain security and, presumably, in a fair amount of prosperity. Cangrande was admitted to Dante's Paradise (Paradiso XVII, 76).
In 1315, Florence was forced by Uguccione della Faggiuola (the military officer controlling the town) to grant an amnesty to people in exile. Dante too was in the list of citizens to be pardoned. But Florence required that, apart from paying a sum of money, these citizens agreed be treated as public offenders in a religious ceremony. Dante refused this outrageous formula, and preferred to remain in exile.
When Uguccione finally defeated Florence, Dante's death sentence was converted into confinement, at the sole condition that he go to Florence to swear that he would never enter the town again. Dante didn't go. His condemnation to death was confirmed and extended to his sons.
Dante still hoped late in life that he might be invited back to Florence on honorable terms. For Dante, exile was nearly a form of death, stripping him of much of his identity. Dante addresses the pain of exile in Canto XVII of Paradiso, where Cacciaguida, his great-great-grandfather, warns him what to expect:
«. . . Tu lascerai ogne cosa diletta
più caramente; e questo è quello strale
che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta.
Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
lo pane altrui, e come è duro calle
lo scendere e 'l salir per l'altrui scale . . .»
". . . You shall leave everything you love most:
this is the arrow that the bow of exile
shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste
of others' bread, how salt it is, and know
how hard a path it is for one who goes
ascending and descending others' stairs . . ."
Paradiso, XVII, 55-60. As for the hope of returning to Florence, he describes it wistfully, as if he had already accepted its impossibility, in Canto XXV of Paradiso:
Se mai continga che 'l poema sacro
al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra,
sì che m'ha fatto per molti anni macro,
vinca la crudeltà che fuor mi serra
del bello ovile ov'io dormi' agnello,
nimico ai lupi che li danno guerra;
con altra voce omai, con altro vello
ritornerò poeta, e in sul fonte
del mio battesmo prenderò 'l cappello . . .
If it should happen . . . if this sacred poem
this work so shared by heaven and earth
that it has made me lean these long years
can ever overcome the cruelty
that bars me from the fair fold where I slept,
a lamb opposed to wolves that war on it,
by then with other voice, with other fleece,
I shall return as poet and put on
at my baptismal font, the laurel crown . . .
Paradiso, XXV, 1-9. Of course it never happened; his bones are still found in Ravenna, not Florence.
Guido Novello da Polenta, prince of Ravenna, invited him there in 1318, and he accepted the offer. Here he finished Paradise and, soon after, he died, perhaps of malaria. This was in 1321 (at the age of 56) and was buried in the Church of San Pier Maggiore (later called San Francesco). Bernardo Bembo, praetor of Venice, in 1483 took care of his remains by organising a better tomb.
On the grave, some verses of Bernardo Canaccio, a friend of Dante, dedicated to Florence:
- parvi Florentia mater amoris
- "Florence, mother of little love"
Works
The Divine Comedy describes Dante's journey through Hell (Inferno), Purgatory (Purgatorio), and Paradise (Paradiso), guided first by the Roman epic poet Virgil and then by his beloved Beatrice (whom he never spoke to, and had seen only once). While the vision of Hell, the Inferno, is vivid for modern readers, the theological niceties presented in the other books require a certain amount of patience and scholarship to understand. Purgatory, the most lyrical and human of the three, also has the most poets in it; Paradiso, the most heavily theological, has the most ecstatic mystic passages, in which Dante tries to describe what he confesses he is unable to convey.
Dante wrote the Comedy in his regional dialect. By creating a poem of epic structure and philosophic purpose, he established that the Italian language was suitable for the highest sort of expression, and simultaneously established the Tuscan dialect as the standard for Italian.
Other works include De Vulgari Eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), on vernacular literature, and the Vita Nuova ("New Life"), the story of his love for Beatrice Portinari, who also served as the ultimate symbol of salvation in the Comedy. The book contains love poems in Tuscan, not a new thing; the vernacular had been used for lyric works before. But it also contains Dante's learned comments on his own work and these too are in the vernacular, instead of the Latin that was almost universally used.
Note: References to La Divina Commedia are as follows:
(Inferno, XV, 76) = (book, canto, verse)
See also: