[26] That Dante was not of the grandi, or great nobles (what we call grandees), as some of his biographers have tried to make out, is plain from this sentence, where his name appears low on the list and with no ornamental prefix, after half a dozen domini. Bayle, however, is equally wrong in supposing his family to have been obscure.
[27] See Witte, "Quando e da chi sia composto l' Ottimo Comento," etc. (Leipsic, 1847)
[28] Ott. Com. Parad. XVII.
[29] The loose way in which many Italian scholars write history is as amazing as it is perplexing. For example: Count Balbo's "Life of Dante" was published originally at Turin, in 1839. In a note (Lib. I. Cap. X.) he expresses a doubt whether the date of Dante's banishment should not be 1303, and inclines to think it should be. Meanwhile, it seems never to have occurred to him to employ some one to look at the original decree, still existing in the archives. Stranger still, Le Monnier, reprinting the work at Florence in 1853, within a stone's throw of the document itself, and with full permission from Balbo to make corrections, leaves the matter just where it was.
[30] Convito, Tratt. I. Cap. III.
[31] Macchiavelli is the authority for this, and is carelessly cited in the preface to the Udine edition of the "Codex Bartolinianus" as placing it in 1312. Macchiavelli does no such thing, but expressly implies an earlier date, perhaps 1310. (See Macch. Op. ed. Baretti, London, 1772, Vol. I. p. 60.)
[32] See Carlyle's "Frederic," Vol. I. p. 147.
[33] A mistake, for Guido did not become lord of Ravenna till several years later. But Boccaccio also assigns 1313 as the date of Dante's withdrawal to that city, and his first protector may have been one of the other Polentani to whom Guido (surnamed Novello, or the Younger; his grandfather having borne the same name) succeeded.
[34] Under this date (1315) a 4th condemnatio against Dante is mentioned facta in anno 1315 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, D. Zachario de Urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis Florentia, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in 1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to wit: Una possessione cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, combustis et non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnlao. In the domibus combustis we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois. (See "De Romanis," notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, Vol. V. p. 119.)
[35] Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and adds: Il n'y a donc pas trop à s'etonner des noms bizarres de Mastino et de Cane donnés à ces Della Scala. (Dante, hérétique, révolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)