The Portable Dante Read Free

and a number of other transgressions. Dante always felt that his difficulties had been brought on by the trickery of Boniface, and this only aggravated his already pronounced hatred for the pontiff and his methods. When Dante failed to appear to answer the charges against him, and when he did not pay the fine levied against him for his “crimes, ” a second sentence was imposed: should he ever return to the commune, he would be seized and burned alive. There is no evidence that Dante saw his beloved Florence again.
    In 1302, shortly after his banishment, Dante conspired with his fellow exiles, most of them Whites, to regain admission to Florence. However, disapproving of their machinations and possibly in danger of his life because of their violence, he abandoned them and set off on his own to lead the life of an exiled courtier. It appears that he first took refuge with the Scala family at Verona. He is believed to have visited the university at Bologna, where he had been known since 1287. This visit probably occurred after the death in 1304 of his generous patron, Bartolommeo della Scala. It is generally thought that Dante traveled extensively in Italy, particularly in the north. He may have been in Padua in 1306. During that same year he appeared in Lunigiana with the Malaspina family, and it was probably then that he went to the mountains of Casentino, on the upper Arno. It is also thought that he went to Paris sometime between 1307 and 1309.
    In 1310 Henry VII of Luxembourg, Holy Roman emperor from 1312 to 1313, entered Italy in an effort to reunite Church and state, restore order, and force various rebellious cities to submit to his authority. His coming caused a great deal of excitement and conflict. Florence generally opposed him, but Dante, who attributed the woes of Florence and all of Italy to the absence of imperial guidance, welcomed Henry as a savior. Dante’s state of great exaltation is documented in three letters that he wrote in 1310 and 1311. However, Henry’s invasion proved fruitless; he met opposition from all sides, including Pope Clement V, who had sent for him in the first place. Just as the situation for Henryand his supporters began to improve, the emperor died near Siena in 1313. With him went Dante’s every hope of restoring himself to an honorable position in his city. Thus in 1314 he took shelter with the Ghibelline captain Can Grande della Scala in Verona.
    Dante did not totally abandon his quest to return to his native city. He wrote letters to individual members of the government, attempting to appease those who ruled. He even sent a
canzone
to the city of Florence, praising her love for justice and asking that she work with her citizens on his behalf. Dante strove to be acceptable to the Florentines, but for many reasons the public associated him with the Ghibellines; no matter how Dante tried to free himself of suspicion, he did not succeed. He also tried to appeal to them on the grounds of his poetic ability, and sought to show that if he had cultivated poetry in the vernacular it was not for lack of skill or study. He was compelled to display his love for learning and his great respect for philosophy and matters having to do with civic education. He therefore composed two treatises (both left incomplete), the
De vulgari eloquentia
(
On Eloquence in the Vernacular
) and the
Convivio
(
Banquet
), sometime between 1304 and 1307. In them can be seen his longing to reestablish himself in the good graces of his city and to find consolation for his wretchedness in the study of matters useful to man’s well-being and his art. Thus in the ten years or so between the
Vita nuova
and the
Commedia
(
Divine Comedy
), Dante’s studies were essentially of a philosophical and artistic nature. The
Convivio
is often acknowledged as the key to his philosophical researches, while the
De vulgari eloquentia
is viewed as the key to his artistic inquiries.
    Though he desperately hoped to restore his