See Lorenzen, Dannevirke og Omegn (2nd ed., Copenhagen, 1864); H. Handelmann, Das Dannewerk (Kiel, 1885); Philippsen and Sünksen, Führer durch das Danewerk (Hamburg, 1903).
DANSVILLE, a village of Livingston county, New York, U.S.A., 49 m. S. of Rochester, on the Canaseraga Creek. Pop. (1890) 3758; (1900) 3633, of whom 417 were foreign-born; (1905) 3908; (1910) 3938. The village is served by the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, and the Dansville & Mount Morris railways. At Dansville is the Jackson Health Resort, a large sanatorium, with which a nurses’ training school is connected. There is a public library. The village has large nurseries and vineyards, flour and paper mills, a large printing establishment, a foundry, and a shoe factory. Dansville, named in honour of Daniel P. Faulkner, was settled about 1800, and was incorporated in 1845.
DANTE, Dante (or Durante) Alighieri (1265-1321), the greatest of Italian poets, was born at Florence about the middle of May 1265. He was descended from an ancient family, but from one which at any rate for several generations had belonged to the burgher and not to the knightly class. His biographers have attempted on very slight grounds to deduce his origin from the Frangipani, one of the oldest senatorial families of Rome. We can affirm with greater certainty that he was connected with the Elisei who took part in the building of Florence under Charles the Great. Dante himself does not, with the exception of a few obscure and scattered allusions, carry his ancestry beyond the warrior Cacciaguida, whom he met in the sphere of Mars (Par. xv. 87, foll.). Of Cacciaguida’s family nothing is known. The name, as he told Dante (Par. xv. 139, 5), was given him at his baptism; it has a Teutonic ring. The family may well have sprung from one of the barons who, as Villani tells us, remained behind Otto I. It has been noted that the phrase “Tonde venner quivi” (xvi. 44) seems to imply that they were not Florentines. He further tells his descendant that he was born in the year 1106 (or, if another reading of xvi, 37, 38 be adopted, in 1091), and that he married an Aldighieri from the valley of the Po. Here the German strain appears unmistakably; the name Aldighiero (Aldiger) being purely Teutonic. He also mentions two brothers, Moronte and Eliseo, and that he accompanied the emperor Conrad III. upon his crusade into the Holy Land, where he died (1147) among the infidels. From Eliseo was probably descended the branch of the Elisei; from Aldighiero, son of Cacciaguida, the branch of the Alighieri. Bellincione, son of Aldighiero, was the grandfather of Dante. His father was a second Aldighiero, a lawyer of some reputation. By his first wife, Lapa di Chiarissimo Cialuffii, this Aldighiero had a son Francesco; by his second, Donna Bella, whose family name is not known, Dante and a daughter. Thus the family of Dante held a most respectable position among the citizens of his beloved city; but had it been reckoned in the very first rank they could not have remained in Florence after the defeat of the Guelphs at Montaperti in 1260. It is clear, however, that Dante’s mother at least did so remain, for Dante was born in Florence in 1265. The heads of the Guelph party did not return till 1267.
Dante was born under the sign of the twins, “the glorious stars pregnant with virtue, to whom he owes his genius such as it is.” Astrologers considered this constellation as favourable to literature and science, and Brunetto Latini, the philosopher and diplomatist, his instructor, tells him in the Inferno (xv. 25, foll.) that, if he follows its guidance, he cannot fail to reach the harbour of fame. Boccaccio relates that before his birth his mother dreamed that she lay under a very lofty laurel, growing in a green meadow, by a very clear fountain, when she felt the pangs of childbirth,—that her child, feeding on the berries which fell from the laurel, and on the waters of the fountain, in a very short time became a shepherd, and attempted to reach the leaves of the laurel, the fruit of which had nurtured him,—that, trying to obtain them he fell, and rose up, no longer a man, but in the guise of a peacock. We know little of Dante’s boyhood except that he was a hard student and was profoundly influenced by Brunetto Latini. Boccaccio tells us that he became very familiar with Virgil, Horace, Ovid and Statius, and all other famous poets. From the age of eighteen he, like most cultivated young men of that age, wrote poetry assiduously, in the philosophical amatory style of which his friend, older by many years than himself, Guido Cavalcanti, was a great exponent, and of which Dante regarded Guido Guinicelli of Bologna as the master (Purg. xxvi. 97, 8). Leonardo Bruni of Arezzo, writing a hundred years or more after his death, says that “by study of philosophy, of theology, astrology, arithmetic and geometry, by reading of history, by the turning over many curious books, watching and sweating in his studies, he acquired the science which he was to adorn and explain in his verses.” Of Brunetto Latini Dante himself speaks with the most loving gratitude and affection, though he does not hesitate to brand his vices with infamy. Under such guidance Dante became master of all the science of his age at a time when it was not impossible to know all that could be known. He had some knowledge of drawing; at any rate he tells us that on the anniversary of the death of Beatrice he drew an angel on a tablet. He was an intimate friend of Giotto, who has immortalized his youthful lineaments in the chapel of the Bargello, and who is recorded to have drawn from his friend’s inspiration the allegories of Virtue and Vice which fringe the frescoes of the Scrovegni Chapel at Padua. Nor was he less sensible to the delights of music. Milton had not a keener ear for the loud uplifted angel trumpets and the immortal harps of golden wires of the cherubim and seraphim; and the English poet was proud to compare his own friendship with Henry Lawes with that between Dante and Casella, “met in the milder shades of purgatory.” Of his companions the most intimate and sympathetic were the lawyer-poet Cino of Pistoia, Lapo Gianni, Guido Cavalcanti and others, similarly gifted and dowered with like tastes, who moved in the lively and acute society of Florence, and felt with him the first warm flush of the new spirit which was soon to pass over Europe. He has written no sweeter or more melodious lines than those in which he expresses the wish that he, with Guido and Lapo, might be wafted by enchantment over the sea wheresoever they might list, shielded from tempest and foul weather, in such contentment that they should wish to live always in one mind, and that the good enchanter should bring Monna Vanna and Monna Bice and that other lady into their barque, where they should for ever discourse of love and be for ever happy. It is a wonderful thing (says Leonardo Bruni) that, though he studied without intermission, it would not have appeared to anyone that he studied, from his joyous mien and youthful conversation. Like Milton he was trained in the strictest academical education which the age afforded; but Dante lived under a warmer sun and brighter skies, and found in the rich variety and gaiety of his early life a defence against the withering misfortunes of his later years. Milton felt too early the chill breath of Puritanism, and the serious musing on the experience of life, which saddened the verse of both poets, deepened in his case rather into grave and desponding melancholy, than into the fierce scorn and invective which disillusion wrung from Dante.
We must now consider the political circumstances in which lay the activity of Dante’s manhood. From 1115, the year of the death of Matilda countess of Tuscany, to 1215, Florence enjoyed a nearly uninterrupted peace. Political life. Attached to the Guelph party, it remained undivided against itself. But in 1215 a private feud between the families of Buondelmonte and Uberti introduced into the city the horrors of civil war. Villani (lib. v. cap. 38) relates how Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti, a noble youth of Florence, being engaged to marry a lady of the house of Amidei, allied himself instead to a Donati, and how Buondelmonte was attacked and killed by the Amidei and Uberti at the foot of the Ponte Vecchio, close by the pilaster which bears the image of Mars. “The death of Messer Buondelmonte was the occasion and beginning of the accursed parties of Guelphs and Ghibellines in Florence.” Of the seventy-two families then in Florence thirty-nine became Guelph under the leadership of the Buondelmonte and the rest Ghibelline under the Uberti. The strife of parties was for a while allayed by the war against Pisa in 1222, and the constant struggles against Siena; but in 1248 Frederick II. sent into the city his natural son Frederick “of Antioch,” with 1600 German knights. The Guelphs were driven away from the town, and took refuge, part in Montevarchi, part in Capraia. The Ghibellines, masters of Florence, behaved with great severity, and destroyed the towers and palaces of the Guelph nobles. At last the people became impatient. They rose in rebellion, reduced the powers of the podestà, elected a captain of the people to manage the internal affairs of the city, with a council of twelve, established a more democratic constitution, and, encouraged by the death of Frederick II. in December 1250, recalled the exiled Guelphs. Manfred, the bastard son of Frederick, pursued the policy of his father. He stimulated the Ghibelline Uberti to rebel against their position of subjection. A rising of the vanquished party was put down by the people, in July 1258 the Ghibellines were expelled from the town, and the towers of the Uberti razed to the ground. The exiles betook themselves to the friendly city of Siena. Manfred sent them a reinforcement of German horse, under his kinsman Count Giordano Lancia. The Florentines, after vainly demanding their surrender, despatched an army against them. On the 4th of September 1260 was fought the great battle of Montaperti, which dyed the Arbia red, and in which the Guelphs were entirely defeated. The hand which held the banner of the republic was sundered by the sword of a traitor (Inf. xxxii. 106). For the first time in the history of Florence the Carroccio was taken. Florence lay at the mercy of her enemies. A parliament was held at Empoli, in which the deputies of Siena, Pisa, Arezzo and other Tuscan towns consulted on the best means of securing their new war power. They voted that the accursed Guelph city should be blotted out. But Farinata degli Uberti stood up in their midst, bold and defiant as when he stood erect among the sepulchres of hell, and said that if, from the whole number of the Florentines, he alone should remain, he would not suffer, whilst he could wield a sword, that his country should be destroyed, and that, if it were necessary to die a thousand times for her, a thousand times would he be ready to encounter death. Help came to the Guelphs from an unexpected quarter. Clement IV., elected pope in 1265, offered the crown of Apulia and Sicily to Charles of Anjou. The French prince, passing rapidly through Lombardy, Romagna and the Marches, reached Rome by way of Spoleto, was crowned on the 6th of January 1266, and on the 23rd of February defeated and killed Manfred at Benevento. In such a storm of conflict did Dante first see the light. In 1267 the Guelphs were recalled, but instead of settling down in peace with their opponents they summoned Charles of Anjou to vengeance, and the Ghibellines were driven out. The meteor passage of Conradin gave hope to the imperial party, which was quenched when the head of the fair-haired boy fell on the scaffold at Naples. Pope after pope tried in vain to make peace. Gregory X. placed the rebellious city under an interdict; in 1278 Cardinal Latini by order of Nicholas III. effected a truce, which lasted for four years. The city was to be governed by a committee of fourteen buonomini, on which the Guelphs were to have a small majority. In 1282 the constitution of Florence received the final form which it retained till the collapse of freedom. From the three arti maggiori were chosen six priors, in whose hands was placed the government of the republic. Before the end of the century, seven greater arts were recognized, including the speziali,—druggists and dealers in all manner of oriental goods, and in books—among whom Dante afterwards enrolled himself. They remained in office for two months, and during that time lived and shared a common table in the public palace. We shall see what influence this office had upon the fate of Dante. The success of the “Sicilian Vespers” (March 1282), the death of Charles of Anjou (January 1285), and of Martin IV. in the following March, roused again the courage of the Ghibellines. They entered Arezzo, where the Ghibellines at present had the upper hand, and threatened to drive out the Guelphs from Tuscany. Skirmishes and raids, of which Villani and Bruni have left accounts, went on through the winter of 1288-1289, forming a prelude to the great battle of Campaldino in the following summer. Then it was that Dante saw “horsemen moving camp and commencing the assault, and holding muster, and the march of foragers, the shock of tournaments, and race of jousts, now with trumpets and now with bells, with drums and castle signals, with native things and foreign” (Inf. xxii. 1, foll.). On the 11th of June 1289, at Campaldino near Poppi, in the Casentino, the Ghibellines were utterly defeated. They never again recovered their hold on Florence, but the violence of faction survived under other names. In a letter quoted, though not at first hand, by Leonardo Bruni, which is not now extant, Dante is said to mention that he himself fought with distinction at Campaldino. He was present shortly afterwards at the battle of Caprona (Inf. xxi. 95, foll.), and returned in September 1289 to his studies and his love. His peace was of short duration. On the 9th of June 1290 died Beatrice, whose mortal love had guided him for thirteen years, and whose immortal spirit purified his later life, and revealed to him the mysteries of Paradise.
Dante had first met Beatrice Portinari at the house of her father Folco on May-day 1274. In his own words, “already nine times after my birth the heaven of light had returned as it were to the same point, when there appeared to my eyes the glorious lady of my mind, who was by many called Beatrice who knew not what to call her. She had already been so long in this life that already in its time the starry heaven had moved towards the east the twelfth part of a degree, so that she appeared to me about the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw her about the end of my ninth year. Her dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her tender age. At that moment I saw most truly that the spirit of life which hath its dwelling in the secretest chamber of the heart began to tremble so violently that the least pulses of my body shook therewith; and in trembling it said these words, ‘Ecce deus fortior me qui veniens dominabitur mihi.’” In the Vita Nuova is written the story of his passion from its commencement to within a year after the lady’s death (June 9th, 1290). He saw Beatrice only once or twice, and she probably knew little of him. She married Simone de’ Bardi. But the worship of her lover was stronger for the remoteness of its subject. The last chapter of the Vita Nuova relates how, after the lapse of a year, “it was given me to behold a wonderful vision, wherein I saw things which determined me to say nothing further of this blessed one until such time as I could discourse more worthily concerning her. And to this end I labour all I can, as she in truth knoweth. Therefore if it be His pleasure through whom is the life of all things that my life continue with me a few years, it is my hope that I shall yet write concerning her what hath not before been written of any woman. After the which may it seem good unto Him who is the master of grace that my spirit should go hence to behold the glory of its lady, to wit, of that blessed Beatrice who now gloriously gazes on the countenance of Him qui est per omnia saecula benedictus.” In the Convito he resumes the story of his life. “When I had lost the first delight of my soul (that is, Beatrice) I remained so pierced with sadness that no comforts availed me anything, yet after some time my mind, desirous of health, sought to return to the method by which other disconsolate ones had found consolation, and I set myself to read that little-known book of Boetius in which he consoled himself when a prisoner and an exile. And hearing that Tully had written another work, in which, treating of friendship, he had given words of consolation to Laelius, I set myself to read that also.” He so far recovered from the shock of his loss that in 1292 he married Gemma, daughter of Manetto Donati, a connexion of the celebrated Corso Donati, afterwards Dante’s bitter foe. It is possible that she is the lady mentioned in the Vita Nuova as sitting full of pity at her window and comforting Dante for his sorrow. By this wife he had two sons and two daughters, and although he never mentions her in the Divina Commedia, and although she did not accompany him into exile, there is no reason to suppose that she was other than a good wife, or that the union was otherwise than happy. Certain it is that he spares the memory of Corso in his great poem, and speaks kindly of his kinsmen Piccarda and Forese.
In 1293 Giano della Bella, a man of old family who had thrown in his lot with the people, induced the commonwealth to adopt the so-called “Ordinances of Justice,” a severely democratic constitution, by which among other things it was enacted that no man of noble family, even though engaged in trade, could hold office as prior. Two years later Giano was banished, but the ordinances remained in force, though the grandi recovered much of their power.
Dante now began to take an active part in politics. He was inscribed in the arte of the Medici and Speziali, which made him eligible as one of the six priori to whom the government of the city was entrusted in 1282. Documents still existing in the archives of Florence show that he took part in the deliberations of the several councils of the city in 1295, 1296, 1300 and 1301. The notice in the last year is of some importance. The pope had demanded a contingent of 100 Florentine knights to serve against his enemies, the Colonna family. On the 19th of June we read in the contemporary report of the debate on this question in the Council of a Hundred: “Dantes Alagherius consuluit quod de servitio faciendo Domino Papae nihil fieret.” Other instances of his invariable opposition to Boniface occur. Filelfo says that he served on fourteen embassies, a statement not only unsupported by evidence, but impossible in itself. Filelfo does not mention the only embassy in which we know for certain that Dante was engaged, that to the town of San Gemignano in May 1300. From the 15th of June to the 15th of August 1300 he held the office of prior, which was the source of all the miseries of his life. The spirit of faction had again broken out in Florence. The two rival families were the Cerchi and the Donati,—the first of great wealth but recent origin, the last of ancient ancestry but poor. A quarrel had arisen in Pistoia between the two branches of the Cancellieri,—the Bianchi and Neri, the Whites and the Blacks. The quarrel spread to Florence, the Donati took the side of the Blacks, the Cerchi of the Whites. Pope Boniface was asked to mediate, and sent Cardinal Matteo d’Acquasparta to maintain peace. He arrived just as Dante entered upon his office as prior. The cardinal effected nothing, but Dante and his colleagues banished the heads of the rival parties in different directions to a distance from the capital. The Blacks were sent to Città della Pieve in the Tuscan mountains; the Whites, among whom was Dante’s dearest friend Guido Cavalcanti, to Serrezzano in the unhealthy Maremma. After the expiration of Dante’s office both parties returned, Guido Cavalcanti so ill with fever that he shortly afterwards died. At a meeting held in the church of the Holy Trinity the Whites were denounced as Ghibellines, enemies of the pope. The Blacks sought for vengeance. Their leader, Corso Donati, hastened to Rome, and persuaded Boniface VIII. to send for Charles of Valois, brother of the French king, Philip the Fair, to act as “peacemaker.” The priors sent at the end of September four ambassadors to the pope, one of whom, according to the chronicler Dino, was Dante. There are, however, improbabilities in the story, and the passage quoted in support of it bears marks of later interpolation. He never again saw the towers of his native city. Charles of Valois, after visiting the pope at Anagni, retraced his steps to Florence, entering the city on All Saints’ Day and taking up his abode in the Oltr’ Arno. Corso Donati, who had been banished a second time, returned in force and summoned the Blacks to arms. The prisons were broken open, the podestà driven from the town, the Cerchi confined within their houses, a third of the city was destroyed with fire and sword. By the help of Charles the Blacks were victorious. They appointed Cante de’ Gabrielli of Gubbio as podestà, a man devoted to their interests. More than 600 Whites were condemned to exile and cast as beggars upon the world. On the 27th of January 1302, Dante, with four others of the White party, was charged before the podestà, Cante de’ Gabrielli, with baratteria, or corrupt jobbery and peculation when in office, and, not appearing, condemned to pay a fine of 5000 lire of small florins. If the money was not paid within three days their property was to be destroyed and laid waste; if they did pay the fine they were to be exiled for two years from Tuscany; in any case they were never again to hold office in the republic. The charge in Dante’s case was obviously preposterous, though ingeniously devised; for he was known to be at the time in somewhat straitened circumstances, and had recently been in control of certain public works. But of all sins, that of “barratry” was one of the most hateful to him. No doubt the papal finger may be traced in the affair. On the 10th of March Dante and fourteen others were condemned to be burned alive if they should come into the power of the republic. Similar sentences were passed in September 1311 and October 1315. The sentence was not formally reversed till 1494, under the government of the Medici.