Dante Alighieri (16 page)

    
From the same place a few weeks later (on 16 April), Dante addressed a letter to the Emperor himself, who was at that time besieging Cremona, urging him to lay everything else aside, and to come and crush without further delay the viper Florence, as the most obstinate and dangerous rebel against the Imperial authority. From this letter it appears that Dante had been present at the coronation of Henry with the iron crown at Milan, on the day of Epiphany (6 January, 1311), when ambassadors were sent from nearly every city of Italy, except Florence and her allies. “I too, who write for myself as well as for others, have beheld thee most gracious, as beseems Imperial Majesty, and have heard thee most clement, when my hands touched thy feet, and my lips paid their tribute.”
¹⁹

    
On 2 September of this same year (1311) was issued at
Florence a proclamation
²⁰
(known as the “Riforma di Messer Baldo d' Aguglione,” from the name of the Prior who was responsible for it), offering pardon to a portion of the Florentine exiles, but expressly excepting certain others by name. Among these names was that of Dante Alighieri, whose exclusion was no doubt largely due to the letters mentioned above, and to his active sympathy with the Imperial cause. To this proclamation the Emperor issued a counterblast in the following December from Genoa, in the shape of an edict declaring Florence to be outside the pale of the Empire, which was followed by another from Poggibonsi in February, 1313, containing the names of more than 600 Florentine citizens and subjects, who were branded as rebels.

    
Nothing is known of Dante's whereabouts during these years of deferred hopes and disappointments. Leonardo Bruni states,
²¹
apparently on the authority of a letter of Dante's which has not been preserved, that when the Emperor advanced against Florence and laid siege to the city (in the autumn of 1312), Dante out of reverence for his native place would not accompany him, although he had urged him to the attack. Dante had scoffed at the idea that the Florentines could stand up against the Imperial host. “Do you trust,” he had written in the letter already quoted,
²²
“do you trust in your defence, because you are girt by a contemptible rampart? What shall it avail you to have girt you with a rampart, and to have
fortified yourselves with bulwarks and with battlements,
²³
when, terrible in gold, the eagle shall swoop down upon you, which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, borne up by the breath of the soldiery of heaven, gazed down of old upon the vast expanse of ocean in its flight?”

    
But the Imperial eagle was obliged to retire baffled, leaving the viper uncrushed; and in the following year, while the Emperor was marching southward against Naples, he was suddenly seized with sickness at Buonconvento near Siena, where he died on 24 August, 1313. The news of his death was received with savage exultation by the Florentines.
²⁴
To Dante it meant the final abandonment
of any hope of a return to Florence. “On the Emperor Henry's death,” writes Bruni, “every hope of Dante's was utterly destroyed; for he had himself closed up the way to forgiveness by his abusive writings against the government of the commonwealth; and there was no longer any hope of return by force.”

    
Where Dante was when the fatal news reached him, and what his movements were at this time, is not known. After the death of Clement V, on 20 April, 1314, Dante addressed a letter
²⁵
to the Italian cardinals in conclave at Carpentras, rebuking them for their backslidings and corruption, and calling upon them to make amends by electing an Italian Pope, who should restore the Papal See to Rome. At some date subsequent to 14 June of that year, when Lucca fell into the hands of the Ghibelline captain, Uguccione della Faggiuola, Dante appears to have been in that city; and it has been conjectured that it may have been during this stay that he formed the attachment for a Lucchese lady named Gentucca, which is supposed to be alluded to by Bonagiunta in Purgatory.
²⁶
What was the real nature of his relations with this lady, who has been identified with a certain Gentucca Morla,
²⁷
wife of Cosciorino Fondora of Lucca, we have no means of ascertaining.

    
In August, 1315, the Ghibellines under the leadership of Uguccione della Faggiuola, completely defeated the Florentines and Tuscan Guelfs at Monte Catini, between Lucca and Pistoja. This event was followed by a fresh sentence from Florence against the exiled Whites. In this sentence,
²⁸
which is dated 6 November, 1315, Dante and those named with him, including Dante's sons this time, were branded as Ghibellines and rebels, and condemned, if captured, “to be taken to the place of justice (i.e. the place of public execution), and there to have their heads struck from their shoulders, so that they die outright.” On 2 June in the next year, however, an amnesty was proclaimed by the Florentine chief magistrate, Lando of Gubbio,
²⁹
and permission was granted to the majority of the exiles to return to Florence, under certain degrading conditions, including the payment of a fine and the performance of penance in the Baptistery. From this amnesty all the exiles who had been originally condemned by the Podestà, Cante de' Gabrielli, among whom of course was Dante, were expressly excluded. Many of the exiles appear to have accepted the terms; but Dante, who seems at first to have been unaware of his exclusion, scornfully rejected them.

    
“Is this, then,” he writes to a friend in Florence, “is this the generous recall of Dante Alighieri to his native
city, after the miseries of nearly fifteen years of exile? Is this the reward of innocence manifest to all the world, of unceasing sweat and toil in study? Far be it from the friend of philosophy, so senseless a degradation, befitting only a soul of clay, as to submit himself to be paraded like a prisoner, as some infamous wretches have done! Far be it from the advocate of justice, after being wronged, to pay tribute to them that wronged him, as though they had deserved well of him! No! this is not the way for me to return to my country. If another can be found which does not derogate from the fame and honour of Dante, that will I take with no lagging steps. But if by no such way Florence may be entered, then will I re-enter Florence never. What! can I not everywhere gaze upon the sun and the stars? can I not under any sky meditate on the most precious truths, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay ignominious, in the eyes of the people and city of Florence? Nay, bread will not fail me!”
³⁰

    
After again seeking shelter with the Scaligers at Verona, this time as the guest of Can Grande della Scala, Dante, on the invitation of Guido Novello da Polenta, went to Ravenna (probably in 1317 or 1318), “where,” says Boccaccio, “he was honourably received by the lord of that city, who revived his fallen hopes with kindly encouragement, and, giving him abundantly such things as he needed, kept him there at his court for many years, nay, even to the end of his days”.
³¹
At Ravenna, his last refuge, where his sons Pietro and Jacopo and his daughter Beatrice resided with him, Dante appears to have lived in
congenial company;
³²
and here he put the finishing touches to his “sacred poem,” the
Divina Commedia
, his work upon which he tells us “had made him lean for many years”.
³³

    
Boccaccio states that at Ravenna many scholars came to Dante for instruction in the poetic art, especially in vernacular poetry, which he first brought into repute among Italians.
³⁴
While he was here, after the
Inferno
and
Purgatorio
had been completed and made public, Dante was invited by a poet and professor of Bologna, Giovanni del Virgilio, in a Latin poem,
³⁵
to come and receive the laurel crown at Bologna. To this suggestion Dante sent a reply in the form of a Latin eclogue
³⁶
declining the invitation, the laurel having no attraction for him unless conferred by his own fellow-citizens in the same Baptistery where as a child he had received the name which he was to make so famous.

    
At the end of 1319 or beginning of 1320 Dante appears to have paid a visit to Mantua, on which occasion a discussion
was started as to the relative levels of land and water on the surface of the globe. Dante subsequently wrote a treatise on the subject (if we may trust the evidence of the treatise
De Aqua et Terra
³⁷
traditionally ascribed to him), which was delivered as a public dissertation at Verona, on 20 January, 1320.

    
From the mention of Dante's name in a document lately discovered in the Vatican
³⁸
it has been inferred that Dante was at Piacenza some time in 1319 or 1320. The document in question, which is incomplete, contains the account of a process instituted at the Papal Court at Avignon against Matteo Visconti of Milan, and his son Galeazzo,
³⁹
for an attempt upon the life of Pope John XXII by means of sorcery. The story of the episode, which is an exceedingly curious one, as showing that in his own life-time Dante had the reputation of a sorcerer, is briefly as follows. In October, 1319, Matteo Visconti sent for a certain Bartolommeo Canolati who was reputed to be an adept in the black art, and showed him a small silver figure of a man, on the forehead of which was written “Jacobus
⁴⁰
papa Johannes”. He then explained to Bartolommeo that he wanted him to apply to this image
⁴¹
the requisite “fumigations” and incantations to ensure the death of the
Pope, who was his bitter enemy.
⁴²
Bartolommeo declared that he did not know how to do anything of the sort, but being taxed with having in his possession a powerful drug adapted for the purpose, he admitted that he had once had it, but protested that at the bidding of a friar he had thrown it all away. Matteo thereupon dismissed him with an injunction to hold his tongue, on pain of death. Bartolommeo, however, divulged what he had seen, and the matter came to the ears of the Pope, who summoned him to Avignon, where he was examined before three cardinals, one of whom was Bertrand du Pouget, the same who subsequently condemned Dante's
De Monarchia
to the flames.
⁴³
As the result of this inquisition, in the following February proceedings were initiated against the Visconti for conspiring against the life of the Pope. Meanwhile another sorcerer whom Matteo had employed having failed to produce any effect by his incantations, Galeazzo sent for Bartolommeo to Piacenza, and repeated the proposal that he should practise on the image. By way of putting him on his mettle Galeazzo told him that he had sent for Maestro Dante Alighieri of Florence to perform the task, but that he had far rather that Bartolommeo should undertake it, as he had no wish to let Dante have any hand in the matter.
⁴⁴
The record states that Bartolommeo said
he would think the matter over—but the sequel to the story is lost. If Galeazzo's statement about Dante is to be taken literally it would appear that Dante was in Piacenza somewhere about the date of this transaction, towards the end of 1319 or the beginning of 1320.

    
In the summer of 1321, a difference having arisen between Ravenna and Venice, on account of an affray in which several Venetian sailors were killed, Guido da Polenta sent an embassy to the Doge of Venice, of which Dante was a member. The ambassadors were ill received by the Venetians, who, it is said, refused them permission to return by sea, and obliged them to make the journey overland along the malarious seaboard. The consequences to Dante were fatal, for he contracted a fever (as is supposed) on the way, and, growing worse after his return to Ravenna, died in that city on 14 September, 1321, aged fifty-six years and four months.
⁴⁵
At Ravenna Dante was buried, and there, “by the upbraiding shore,” his remains still rest, in spite of repeated efforts on the part of Florence
to secure possession of “the metaphorical ashes of the man of whom they had threatened to make literal cinders if they could catch him alive”.
⁴⁶

    
“The noble knight, Guido da Polenta,” writes Boccaccio, “placed the dead body of Dante, adorned with the insignia of a poet,
⁴⁷
upon a funeral bier, and caused it to be borne upon the shoulders of his most reverend citizens to the place of the Minor Friars in Ravenna, with such honour as he deemed worthy of the illustrious dead. And having followed him to this place, in the midst of a public lamentation, Guido had the body laid in a sarcophagus of stone, wherein it reposes to this day. Afterwards returning to the house where Dante had formerly lived, according to the custom of Ravenna, Guido himself pronounced a long and ornate discourse, as well in commendation of the great learning and virtue of the dead man, as for the consolation of his friends whom he had left to mourn him in bitter sorrow. And Guido purposed, had his estate and life endured, to honour Dante with so splendid a tomb, that if no other merit of his had kept his name alive among future generations, this memorial alone would have preserved it. This laudable purpose was in a brief space made known to certain who at that time were the most renowned poets in Romagna; so that each, not only to exhibit his own powers, but also to testify to the love he bore toward the dead poet, and to win the grace and favour of the lord Guido, who they were aware had this at his heart—each, I say, composed an epitaph in verse for inscription on the tomb that was to be, which with fitting praise should make known to posterity what
manner of man he was who lay within. And these verses they sent to the illustrious lord, who through the evil stroke of Fortune not long after lost his estate and died at Bologna; on which account the making of the tomb and the inscription of the verses thereon was left undone.”
⁴⁸