Europe in the Middle Ages

by Ierne L. Plunket

Dante Alighieri

The greatest of Italian poets, Dante Alighieri, was a ‘White’, and was exiled from his city in 1302 owing to the triumph of his rivals. When pardon was suggested on the payment of a large sum of money, Dante, who had tried to serve his city faithfully, refused to comply, feeling that this would be an open acknowledgement of his guilt. ‘If another way can be found ... which shall not taint Dante’s fame and honour’, he wrote proudly, ‘that way I will accept and with no reluctant steps ... but if Florence is not to be entered by any such way never will I enter Florence.’

Dante’s mental outlook was typical of mediaeval times in its stern prejudices and hatreds, but it was also clearer and nobler in its scope. An enthusiastic Ghibelline in politics, he believed that it was the first duty of Holy Roman Emperors to exert their authority over Italy, but this vision was not narrowed, as with many Italians, into the mere hope of restoration to home and power, with a sequel of revenge on private enemies. Dearer to Dante than any personal ambitions was the desire for the salvation of both Church and state from tyranny and corruption; and this he believed could only be achieved by bestowing supreme power on a world-emperor.

One attempt at reform had been made in 1294, when the conclave of Cardinals, suddenly stung with the contrast between the character of the Catholic Church and its professions, chose as their Vicar a hermit noted for his privations and holy life. Celestine V, as he was afterwards called, was a small man, pale and feeble, with tousled hair and garments of sackcloth. When a deputation of splendidly dressed cardinals came to find him, he fled in terror, and it was almost by force that he was at last persuaded to go with them and put on the pontifical robes. The men and women who longed for reform now waited eagerly for this new Pope’s mandates; but their expectations were doomed to failure. Celestine V had neither the originality nor the strength of will to withstand his change of fortunes. Terrified by his surroundings, he became an easy prey to those who were unscrupulous and ambitious, giving away benefices sometimes twice over because he dared not refuse them to importunate courtiers, and creating new cardinals almost as fast as he was asked to do so. At last he was allowed to abdicate, and hurried back to his cell, but only to be seized by his successor, the fierce Boniface VIII,[44] and shut up in a castle, where he died.

Dante hated Boniface as a ruler who debased his spiritual opportunities in order to obtain material rewards, but he had hardly less scorn for Celestine V, who was given power to reform the Church of Christ and ‘made the great refusal’. Reform, in the Florentine’s eyes, could not be looked for from Rome, but, when the Emperor Henry VII crossed the Alps,[45] his hopes rose high that here at last was the saviour of Italy, and it is probable that at this time the poet wrote his political treatise called the De Monarchia, embodying his views. He himself went out to meet his champion, but Henry was not destined to be a second Charlemagne or Otto the Great, and his death closed all expectations built on his chivalrous character and ideals.

Dante’s greatest work is his long poem the Divina Commedia, divided into three parts, the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso. It tells how on Good Friday of the year of Jubilee 1300 the Florentine, meeting with the spirit of Virgil whom he had chosen as his master, was led by him through the realms of everlasting punishment and of penance, and from there was borne by another guide, Beatrice, the idealized vision of a woman he had loved on earth, up through the ‘Nine Heavens’ to the very throne of God. As a summary of mediaeval theories as to the life eternal, and also as the reflection of a fourteenth-century mind on politics of the day, the Divine Comedy is indeed an historical treasury as well as a masterpiece of Italian literature. It is, however, a great deal more—the revelation of the development of a human soul. Dante’s journey is told with a mastery of atmosphere and detail that holds our imaginations to-day with the sense of reality. It was obviously still more real to himself and expresses the agonized endeavour of a soul, alive to the corruption and nerve-weariness of the world around him, to find the way of salvation, a pilgrimage crowned at last by the realization of a Civitas Dei so supreme in its beauty and peace as to surpass the prophecies of St. Augustine.

Now ‘Glory to the Father, to the Son,
And to the Holy Spirit’ rang aloud
Throughout all Paradise; that with the song
My spirit reel’d, so passing sweet the strain.
And what I saw was equal ecstasy:
One universal smile it seemed of all things;
Joy past compare; gladness unutterable;
Imperishable life of peace and love;
Exhaustless riches and unmeasured bliss.

Dante himself did not live to fulfil his earthly dream of returning to Florence, but died at Ravenna in 1321. On his tomb is an inscription in Latin containing the words, ‘Whom Florence bore, the mother that did little love him’; while his portrait has the proud motto so typical of his whole life, ‘I yield not to misfortune’. In later centuries Florence recalled with shame her repudiation of this the greatest of her sons; but while he lived, and for some years after his death, political prejudices blinded her eyes. In the Emperor Henry VII, to whom Dante referred as ‘King of the earth and servant of God’, Florence saw an enemy so hateful that she was willing to forgo her boasted democracy, and to accept as master any prince powerful enough to oppose him. Thus she granted the Signoria, or ‘overlordship’ of the city, for five years to King Robert of Naples, the head of the Guelf party in Italy during the early years of the fourteenth century.

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