War was not so serious an affair then as it is now, and everyone engaged in it. Moreover, the towns that warred against each other were so near that it was sometimes an easy matter to go forth and fight on one day and be back in your own home on the day following. Everyone was expected to bear arms for his city, and going to war was held to be a matter of course; but in spite of these things Dante gained great praise for the way in which he conducted himself in the war with Arezzo, perhaps because he was braver than the rest, or perhaps because a poet is not generally considered to be as warlike as other men.
After the fighting had ended, Dante returned to Florence and prepared to take his part in city politics. Before he could accomplish anything it was necessary for him to go on record that he belonged to one of the great guilds into which all the citizens at that time were divided, and which controlled all the different branches of business and manufacturing, and all the sciences. So Dante entered the guild of the Doctors and Apothecaries—not because he knew anything about their professions—that was not necessary—but to give himself an apparent vocation when he came to assume some one of the city offices.
By this time Dante's great intellect and scholarly attainments had made him well known in Florence, although he was only a young man. He was high in the esteem of many learned men and had a great many poets and artists for his friends. Among them were the artist named Giotto and the poet called Guido Cavalcante. So well did he appear in their eyes and to the men of the city of Florence who ran its affairs that in the year 1300 Dante was made one of the Priors of Florence, that is, one of the chief rulers of the city.
It was not to be thought that a man could gain such a position in those turbulent times without making many enemies, and as Dante belonged to the controlling faction, others who were not in power planned his overthrow and that of his fellow rulers. Dante himself, however, disliked this civil strife and did all in his power to bring the opposing factions together. But his enemies got the upper hand, and he was finally driven from the city in exile.
Another sorrow had befallen him. Beatrice, whom he still continued to love ardently (although he had married a good woman named Gemma Donati and had three children) had died some years before, leaving him nothing but her memory. But Dante's love for Beatrice had not interfered in his relations with his wife. It was not an earthly love. He had not wanted Beatrice as his wife, but rather as an ideal that he could worship. And after her death he became both gloomy and unhappy.
His exile, moreover, was a bitter blow to Dante, for he had loved Florence dearly and could not imagine making his home elsewhere. With bitterness in his heart he wandered from city to city, and then he set out in earnest to write the great poem which is called the Divine Comedy. Dante had already written a number of beautiful poems, but they were more in the style of other Italian and Latin poetry. What he now planned was entirely new and so daring that it had never been thought of since the beginning of the world.
He planned in this poem to describe a journey into the nethermost regions of Hell, then into Purgatory and finally into Heaven, where Beatrice should be his guide and conduct him to the throne of God Himself.
Such a poem, as we have said, had never been written or even wildly imagined, but Dante's imagination was so vivid that it seemed as if he really had beheld the scenes that he described. And he told the story of the poem as though the adventures in it were real and had happened directly to himself.
Hell, according to Dante's belief, and that of the religion of his day, was a gigantic funnel-shaped gulf directly beneath the city of Jerusalem, shaped into nine vast circles or pits with a common center that reached down to the center of the earth like a circular flight of stairs. In the lowest pit of all Satan himself was to be found, ruling his kingdom. On the other side of the earth was a wide sea, from which arose a mighty mountain called the Mount of Purgatory—the place where the souls of human beings did penance for their sins until they were fit to enter Heaven. Heaven itself was composed of nine transparent and revolving spheres that enclosed the earth, and in which were fastened the sun, the moon and the stars. The motion of these heavenly bodies as they rose and set above the earth's horizon was believed by Dante to be due to the turning of the spheres, which were moved by the hand of God.
It was in accordance with this idea of Heaven and Hell that Dante began his poem.