National Policy of Florence.—The Emperor himself shared the golden dream of the Italian idealists, and, believing in the possibility of the union of Church and Empire in a peaceful Italy healed of her wounds, addressed himself ardently to his impossible task, forcing cities to take back their exiles, patching up old quarrels. Opposed to him arises the less sympathetic figure of King Robert of Naples, who, having succeeded his father, Charles II., in May 1309, was preparing—though still for a while negotiating on his own account with Henry—to head the Guelf opposition. While others temporised, Florence openly defied the Emperor, insulted his envoys, and refused to send ambassadors to his coronation. While the Emperor put his imperial vicars into Italian cities, as though he were another Frederick Barbarossa, the Florentines drew closer their alliance with Robert, formed a confederation of Guelf cities, and aided with money and men all who made head against the German King. In spite of the bitter language used by Dante in his letters, modern historians have naturally recognised in this one of the most glorious chapters in the history of the Republic. “Florence,” writes Pasquale Villari, “called on the Guelf cities, and all seeking to preserve freedom and escape foreign tyranny, to join in an Italian confederation, with herself at its head. This is, indeed, the moment in which the small merchant republic initiates a truly national policy, and becomes a great Italian power. So, in the medieval shape of a feudal and universal Empire, on the one hand, and in that of a municipal confederation on the other, a gleam of the national idea first began to appear, though still in the far distance and veiled in clouds.”
Letters and Fresh Sentence.—On March 31st, 1311, from “the boundaries of Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” and on April 17th, from “Tuscany under the source of the Arno,” Dante addressed two terrible letters to “the most wicked Florentines within,” and to “the most sacred triumphant and only lord, Henry by divine providence King of the Romans, ever Augustus.” In the former he reasserts the rights and sanctity of the Empire, and, whilst hurling the fiercest invective upon the Florentine government, foretells their utter destruction and warns them of their inability to withstand the might of the Emperor. In the latter he rebukes the “minister of God and son of the Church and promoter of Roman glory” for his delay in Lombardy, and urges him on against Florence, “the sick sheep that infects all the flock of the Lord with her contagion.” Let him lay her low and Israel will be delivered. “Then shall our heritage, the taking away of which we weep without ceasing, be restored to us again; and even as we now groan, remembering the holy Jerusalem, exiles in Babylon, so then, citizens breathing again in peace, we shall look back in our joy upon the miseries of confusion.” These letters were evidently written from the Casentino, where Dante had gone probably on an imperial mission to one or other of the Conti Guidi. He was perhaps staying at the castle of Poppi, and there is a tradition that the Florentine government sent agents to arrest him there. Probably in consequence of these letters, a new condemnation was pronounced against him; on September 2nd, 1311, Dante is included in the long list of exiles who, in the “reform” of Baldo d’Aguglione, are to be excepted from amnesty and for ever excluded from Florence.
Failure of the Emperor.—But in the meantime Brescia, “the lioness of Italy,” who had offered as heroic a resistance to Henry VII. as she was to do five centuries later to the Austrians of Haynau, had been forced to surrender; and the Emperor had at last moved southwards to Genoa and thence to Pisa, from which parties of imperialists ravaged the Florentine territory. From Genoa, on December 24th, 1311, he issued a decree placing Florence under the ban of the Empire, and declaring the Florentine exiles under his special protection. Dante (with Palmieri Altoviti and other exiles) was probably at Pisa in the early spring of 1312, and it may well have been there that Petrarch—then a little boy in his eighth year—saw his great predecessor. Rome itself was partly held by the troops of King Robert and the Florentines; with difficulty was Henry crowned by the Pope’s legates in the Church of St. John Lateran on June 29th, 1312. From September 19th to October 31st Henry besieged Florence, himself ill with fever. “Do ye trust in any defence girt by your contemptible rampart?” Dante had written to the Florentines: “What shall it avail to have girt you with a rampart and to have fortified yourselves with outworks and battlements, when, terrible in gold, that eagle shall swoop down on you which, soaring now over the Pyrenees, now over Caucasus, now over Atlas, ever strengthened by the support of the soldiery of heaven, looked down of old upon vast oceans in its flight?” But the golden eagle did not venture upon an assault. Wasting the country as it went, the imperial army retreated. Early in 1313 the Florentines gave the signory of their city to King Robert for five years, while the Emperor from Pisa placed the king under the ban of the Empire, and declared him a public enemy. The Pope himself had deserted the imperial cause, and was fulminating excommunication if Henry invaded Robert’s kingdom (cf. Par. xvii. 82; xxx. 144), when the Emperor, moving from Pisa with reinforcements from Germany and Sicily, died on the march towards Naples at Buonconvento, near Siena, on August 24th, 1313. Dante had not accompanied the imperialists against Florence; he yet retained so much reverence for his fatherland, as Bruni writes, apparently from some lost letter of the poet’s. We do not know where he was when the fatal news reached him. Cino da Pistoia and Sennuccio del Bene broke out into elegiac canzoni on the dead hero; Dante was silent, and waited till he could more worthily write the apotheosis of his alto Arrigo in the Empyrean (Par. xxx. 133-138).
7. Last Period of Exile
Dante’s Wanderings—Death of Clement V.—Dante was again a proscribed fugitive. His movements are hardly known, excepting by more or less happy conjecture, from the spring of 1311 in the Casentino to the close of his days at Ravenna. Boccaccio and Bruni agree that he had now given up all hope of return to Florence. According to the latter, he wandered about in great poverty, under the protection of various lords, in different parts of Lombardy, Tuscany, and Romagna. There is a tradition, perhaps mainly based upon a passage in the Paradiso (Par. xxi. 106-120), that Dante retired to the convent of Santa Croce di Fonte Avellana in the Apennines, from which he gazed forth upon the perishing world of the Middle Ages, which was finding imperishable monument in his work. To this epoch might possibly be assigned—for what it may be worth—the story of his visit to the other convent of Santa Croce del Corvo in Lunigiana in quest of peace; but the only authority for this episode is the letter of Frate Ilario to Uguccione della Faggiuola, now almost universally regarded as a fabrication. But, if his steps are hidden, his voice is heard, and with no uncertain sound. On April 20th, 1314, Clement V. died in Provence (Par. xxx. 145); and, early in the interregnum that followed, Dante addressed a famous letter to the Italian cardinals, rebuking them for their backsliding and corruption, urging them to make amends by striving manfully for the restoration of the papacy to Rome. It is a noble production, full of zeal and dignity, impregnated with the sublimest spirit of mediaeval Catholicity. It had no immediate effect; after a long interval the Cahorsine, John XXII., was elected in August 1316; and the disgrace of Avignon continued. The ideal Emperor had failed; no ideal Pope was forthcoming; conscious at last of his own greatness, with luci chiare ed acute (Par. xxii. 126), eyes clear from passion and acute with discernment, the divine poet turned to the completion of his Commedia.
Rejection of the Amnesty.—After the death of the Emperor, the Ghibelline leader, Uguccione della Faggiuola, had been chosen lord of Pisa; he captured Lucca in June, 1314, and began a brief career of conquest in Tuscany which seriously alarmed Florence. In this crisis the Florentine government on May 19th, 1315, decreed a general ribandimento, or recall of exiles, under condition of a small fine, a merely formal imprisonment, and the ceremony of “oblation” in the Baptistery. Dante was probably at Lucca when he received letters to the effect that he was included.[7] The famous letter to a Florentine friend contains his rejection of this amnesty. While deeply and affectionately grateful to the friends who have striven for his return, the conditions of this “revocatio gratiosa” seem to Dante derogatory to his fame and honour, and with calm dignity he refuses to avail himself of it: “This is not the way of return to our native land, my father; but if another may be found, first by you and then by others, which does not derogate from Dante’s fame and honour, that will I accept with no lagging feet. But, if by no such way Florence may be entered, I will never enter Florence. What then? May I not anywhere gaze upon the mirror of the sun and stars? Can I not ponder on the sweetest truths anywhere beneath the heaven, unless first I return to the city, inglorious, nay dishonoured, in the sight of the Florentine people? Nor, assuredly, will bread fail me” (Epist. ix 4).[8]
New Condemnation.—On August 29th, 1315, Uguccione utterly defeated the united armies of Florence and Naples at the great battle of Montecatini; the Pisan ploughman had crushed the flowers and the lilies, as Giovanni del Virgilio afterwards wrote to Dante. Dante’s two sons, Jacopo and Pietro, had perhaps joined him in Lucca. The original death sentence had apparently been commuted (probably because of his having refrained from joining in the imperialist attack upon Florence in 1312) to being placed under bounds in some defined locality; and in October 1315 the poet, with his two sons, and others were cited to appear before Ranieri di Zaccaria of Orvieto, royal vicar in the city of Florence and its district (King Robert’s vicars having replaced the podestàs), to give surety as to going and staying in the places appointed. On their neglecting to appear, “Dante Alighieri and his sons,” in Ranieri’s sentence of November 6th, are condemned as contumacious and rebels, and sentenced to be beheaded if they ever come into the power of the royal vicar or of the Commune of Florence. “And, lest they should glory in their contumacy, we put all and each of them under ban of the city of Florence and district, giving licence to anyone to offend all and any one of them in goods and in person, according to the form of the statutes of Florence.” All the Portinari are included in this decree, with the exception of Manetto and fourteen others who have given security.
Dante at Verona.—In the following year, 1316, Uguccione lost Pisa and Lucca, and fled to Verona, where Can Grande della Scala, since the death of his brother Albuino in 1311, held sovereign sway as imperial vicar, and had become the champion of Ghibellinism in northern Italy; in 1318 Cane was elected captain of the Ghibelline League, and in his service Uguccione died during the siege of Padua in 1319 or 1320. It is probable that, somewhere about this time, Dante’s wandering feet had led him back to Verona to renew his friendship with Can Grande (Par. xvii. 85-90; Epist. x. 1). The old legend of Dante having met with discourtesy at his hands is to be absolutely rejected, as indeed every reference to Can Grande in his works demands. That, on his earlier visit, there may have been some unpleasantness with Albuino (Conv. iv. 16) is more credible. But Dante needed a more peaceful refuge than Verona to complete his life’s work; the city of the imperial vicar resounded with the clash of warlike preparations:
But at this court, peace still must wrench
Her chaplet from the teeth of war: