Historical Background

Part II: The New Life

Last updated 8/01/2022.

Part 1 | Part 3

In Inferno 10, as Dante and Virgil make their way past the tombs of the heretics, Farinata degli Uberti hears them chatting from inside his tomb and recognizes the poet’s Tuscan accent. He suddenly speaks while rising from the tomb, inviting Dante to stay awhile. He watches in silence as Dante shrinks back to Virgil like a startled child; as Virgil chides Dante to turn around and look; and as Virgil uses his hands to push Dante back to the tomb, like a father forcing an introduction between reluctant playmates. Dante stands before the tomb, at a loss for words, while Farinata looks him up and down contemptuously; and finally, the great Ghibelline leader asks, “Who were your ancestors?” (10.42).

Dante readily tells him of his Guelph ancestry, and Farinata raises his brows before making his response (10.46-48):

“They were fiercely hostile,” he uttered then,
“to me, my forebears, my party—so averse
that two times I expelled and scattered them.”

He is alluding to the two times the Guelphs were exiled from Florence (in 1248, after the Uberti colluded with Frederick II; and in 1260, after the Battle of Montaperti). Dante no longer hesitates; perhaps emboldened by familial and partisan pride, he gives tit for tat to Farinata (10.49-51):

“If they were driven out, then they returned
from every side,” I answered him, “both times;
and yet for yours, that art was not well learned.”

Farinata had died in Florence in November 1264. He was of course alive in 1251, when the Guelphs returned to Florence the first time, shortly after Frederick’s death. But he was not alive when the Guelphs returned the second time, after Manfred’s death in 1266. Nor was he alive when the Ghibellines were exiled in 1267; the Uberti were never to return. The bad news is more painful to Farinata than even his eternal punishment.

Their conversation is interrupted when another soul pops his head up beside Farinata in the tomb, and begins speaking to Dante. It is Cavalcante de’ Cavalcanti, the father of Dante’s close friend Guido Cavalcanti. They speak a little about Guido, but all the while Farinata waits unmoving: “[he] did not move his head, / nor bend his ribs, nor even change his face” (10.74-75).

When Cavalcante falls back into the tomb, Farinata continues where he left off in his conversation with Dante, as if they were never interrupted. Perhaps, at this point, Dante believes he’s delivered the final blow in their verbal sparring match, having drawn on events after Farinata’s death, which Farinata could not possibly outdo. But, as Farinata himself will soon reveal to Dante, though the damned cannot see the present, they are privileged to know the future (if only dimly). So, in a final act of one-upmanship, Farinata gives Dante a vague prophecy of his uncertain future: within fifty moons, Dante too will know the burden of exile.

Dante’s exchange with Farinata reveals much about the nature of the political situation in Florence. For Farinata, Dante’s ancestry is more important than the man; their political differences are stronger than their common bond as citizens of Florence; and his party’s ill fortune on earth is more severe than his own damnation. Farinata’s overbearing concern with ancestry and political alignment was not exclusive to him, but characteristic of Florentine elites in general. Dante traces the evils which beset the Florentines to their pride in family and party, their envy of the other, and their greedy impulse to elevate one’s own at the expense of others. As Dante says elsewhere, “pride, envy and avarice are the three / sparks that have set the people’s hearts ablaze” (6.74-75).

The exchange also presents the whole drama of Dante’s political career. He was born into a Guelph family of minor nobility, just at the end of the great Guelph-Ghibelline conflict. He grew up hearing stories about the rivalry from the Guelph perspective, and maybe he proudly believed he was lucky enough to have been born on the right side of history; for, although his ancestors had been twice exiled, they ultimately won Florence for themselves. But perhaps inevitably, the unified Guelphs, left to their own devices, split into two factions, igniting a new rivalry in Florence that would result in the expulsion of Dante and many others. And whereas Farinata had died peacefully in Florence before his party’s downfall and permanent exile, Dante would die a stranger in a strange land, never to return to his beloved home.

• Dante’s Ancestors (before 1265)

• Birth, Baptism and Beatrice (1265-1283)

• Love and Strife in Florence (1280-1288)

• The Battle of Campaldino (1289)

• Death of Beatrice (1290)

• Anno Dominae (1290-1293)

Much of what is known about Dante’s ancestry comes from the Comedy itself. In the middle three cantos of Paradise (15-17), he meets and speaks with his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida, a crusader who died in the Holy Land, who explains his ancestral origins; though not all of his given genealogy is corroborated by documentary evidence, enough of it checks out that there is no good reason to doubt it.

Cacciaguida was a son of the Elisei, an ancient noble family of Florence with Roman origins (Dante also alludes to his family’s Roman origins in Inferno 15). The Elisei lived within the “ancient circle,” the original wall around Florence in Cacciaguida’s time. New walls were built around the city as it expanded, culminating with one built during and shortly after Dante’s lifetime; but those houses inside the ancient circle belonged to the oldest aristocratic families in Florence, which had formative roles in the city from the time of its founding. When Cacciaguida married, he moved his new family outside of the ancient circle to establish his own home, in the area where the Alighieri would live until Dante’s exile.

Cacciaguida’s wife was a noblewoman from the Po Valley (some say from Ferrara, specifically) named Alaghiera. They had two sons, Preitenitto and Alaghiero—the latter, named after his mother, was Dante’s great-grandfather from whom the Alighieri family name derives (the now-standard spelling, with an i rather than an a, was popularized by Boccaccio). Alaghiero married a sister of Gualdrada dei Ravignani (“the good Gualdrada” of Inferno 16.37, who was Guido Guerra’s grandmother).

Alaghiero and his wife had two sons, Bello and Bellincione; the latter was Dante’s grandfather. Bello’s family carried on the aristocratic status of his ancestors, and his descendants took on his name as their surname. Thus, in the beginning of Inferno 29, Dante searches for his father’s cousin (Bello’s son) Geri del Bello, who was murdered by members of another family and had not yet been avenged. When Florence was divided by the struggle between pope and emperor, both Bello and Bellincione sided with the Guelphs. Bellincione played a significant role in the Guelph cause, and he was among the many who were exiled first in 1248 and again in 1260; hence Farinata’s gibe at Dante’s ancestors, “two times I expelled and scattered them” (Inferno 10.48). Bellincione died in 1269, a few years after returning from exile, when Dante would have been three or four years old.

Bellincione’s branch of the family, for whatever reason, did not retain the high aristocratic status of Bello’s. Bellincione had six sons, all of whom were businessmen like their father; the eldest, Alighiero, was Dante’s father. At least some of them, including Alighiero, were apparently involved in moneylending. However, Dante does not encounter his father among the souls of the usurers (those who make money on interest) in the seventh circle of Hell (Inferno 17); in fact, he does not encounter his father at all in the Comedy, nor does he mention his father in any of his work.

All in all, Alighiero seems to have been a rather ordinary businessman, with little to his name for a man of noble birth. Though he was a Guelph, Alighiero was allowed to stay in Florence in 1260 even as his father and other Guelphs were kicked out. It could be that he just wasn’t important enough to be exiled, whether because of his lowly status or because we wasn’t active in the party. It has also been conjectured that Alighiero’s first wife, Bella, was the daughter of Durante degli Abati; if true, his wife’s affiliation with the powerful Abati family, who were Ghibellines, may be the real reason Alighiero was spared from exile. In any case, while the Guelphs were in exile, Alighiero and Bella were still in Florence in the late spring of 1265, when their only son Dante was born.

Dante Alighieri was born in Florence in the year 1265 under the sign of Gemini (May 13 to June 12 on the Julian calendar), probably in late May, less than a year before Manfred’s death at Benevento, and nearly two years before the return of the Guelph exiles and the final expulsion of the Ghibellines from Florence. He may have been named after his maternal grandfather, Durante degli Abati (Dante is short for Durante), if indeed Durante was his grandfather. He was baptized in the Baptistery of San Giovanni, which had so nearly been destroyed by the Ghibellines during the first Guelph exile. The Baptistery only held baptisms two days a year, on the day before Easter and the day before Pentecost. Depending on his actual birthdate, Dante could have been baptized as a newborn (Pentecost fell on May 25 in 1265); but it seems more likely that he was baptized the following spring (Easter and Pentecost fell on March 27 and May 16 in 1266).

His mother Bella did not bear him any siblings, and she died when he was very young. He never mentions her in his writing, except for a glancing reference in Inferno 8.45. When Dante was five or six years old, his father Alighiero remarried to a woman named Lapa. Alighiero and Lapa had at least two children together, Dante’s half-brother Francesco and half-sister Tana (short for Gaetana); there may have been another half-sister whose name is unknown, and whose son (Dante’s nephew) was a close friend of Boccaccio. In Vita Nuova 23, Dante mentions a woman who is “joined to me by the closest blood ties,” likely a reference to his half-sister; otherwise, he does not mention his siblings in writing.

Most of what we know of Dante’s early life comes from the poet’s own hand. In the Vita Nuova (New Life), which Dante completed before the age of thirty, he tells the story of his love for a woman named Beatrice. The little book is a wellspring of information on Dante’s early life; but it is not a memoir, and many details are omitted in service to the book’s theme. Other details may be gleaned from Dante’s other works, including the Comedy and his unfinished philosophical treatise, the Convivio (Banquet).

Sometime before his birthday in the spring of 1274, Dante saw Beatrice Portinari for the first time, when both were eight years old—or as Dante figures it, nearly at the beginning of her ninth year on earth, and nearly at the end of his. The young Beatrice was wearing a red dress with a girdle, and Dante was so struck by her appearance that, as he says, “From then on… Love dominated my soul” (Vita Nuova 2). It was the defining moment of his childhood.

His infatuation with Beatrice was never destined to become a physical relationship—in those days, arranged marriages between noble families were customary, and Dante was betrothed to another woman, Gemma Donati, when he was just eleven years old; Beatrice likewise was betrothed at a young age. Nevertheless, Dante’s passion for Beatrice did not extinguish, but developed into something beyond what a physical relationship could offer; he came to believe that the mere sight or thought of her could bring him closer to God, and in many ways she became his personal spiritual savior. Throughout his youth, he would often seek her out just to steal a glimpse of her; but Beatrice never so much as spoke to him. One almost wonders, from reading the Vita Nuova, if she was even aware of him.

Then in the spring of 1283, exactly nine years to the day after he had first seen her as a child, at the ninth canonical hour of the day (around 3 PM), he saw her dressed all in white, walking in the street between two older women; and this time, as she passed, she turned to Dante and greeted him. His father had died not long before, leaving Dante the head of the Alighieri household before the age of eighteen, and we can speculate that Beatrice’s greeting may have been sympathetic in that regard; but Dante makes no such speculation in the Vita Nuova, nor any mention of his father’s death. Her greeting sent him into a stupor, and he went straight home to his room and fell asleep thinking of her. There, he had a mysterious and vivid dream, in which he saw Love, personified as a terrifying and joyful lord, holding Beatrice asleep in his arms; she was naked and wrapped in a red cloth. In one hand, Love held a burning heart; and telling Dante that the heart was his, he woke Beatrice and made her devour it. Then Love began weeping, and rose with her into the sky.

Upon waking, Dante wrote a sonnet describing the dream (his earliest known poem), which he sent out to a number of famous poets. The first stanza of the sonnet exhorts its readers to write a response. You can almost feel the audacity of it: this kid, not even eighteen years old, sends his little poem out to the best masters of the craft in Tuscany, asking them all to send back their thoughts. Yet it worked: a number of poets responded, perhaps finding Dante’s poem (or maybe his nerve) remarkable.

Among those who responded was the poet Guido Cavalcanti, whose father Cavalcante Cavalcanti appears in the tomb alongside Farinata in Inferno 10. Guido answered Dante’s sonnet with a clever one of his own, which addresses the form as well of the content of Dante’s original—among other parallels, each line of Guido’s sonnet rhymes with the corresponding line in Dante’s. The exchange of poems would mark the beginning of a close friendship; in Vita Nuova 3, Dante intimates that Guido became his best friend thereafter. Born in the period between the two Guelph exiles, Guido was about ten years Dante’s senior; a contemporary describes him as courtly and bold, but disdainful, solitary and studious. As an established older poet, Guido also became something of a mentor to Dante in his craft, and they continued sharing poems and ideas over the next fifteen years. Together with several other Tuscan poets, they made up the school of vernacular poetry which Dante himself would later name the Dolce Stil Novo (“Sweet New Style”); they wrote lyrical poetry dedicated to love, beauty and nobility, consciously modeled on the work of the Provençal troubadours of previous generations.

In the years after the death of Dante’s father, we may suppose another mentor took Dante under his wing: Brunetto Latini. Brunetto was an unusually well-educated public notary, Guelph statesman, and master rhetorician from Florence. He may have helped the young Dante hone his skills in philosophy, politics, and rhetoric; and more significantly, he seems to have been a person Dante admired and respected. He was about forty-five years older than Dante, and in Inferno 15 Dante speaks of him reverently as a teacher and father figure, although no independent confirmation of their personal relationship exists. Whatever the true nature of their bond, it is clear from Inferno 15 that Brunetto had a profound moral and intellectual impact on Dante as he matured into a young man.

After Beatrice’s first greeting and Dante’s fantastical vision of Love, his mind was even more absorbed with her. Others began to clearly recognize the effects of love on him; but he wished to keep the object of his love a secret. One day in church, as he was staring in awe at Beatrice, it happened that another girl was sitting halfway between them, so that it became apparent to others that Dante was staring at her rather than Beatrice. Dante seized on the opportunity to make the other woman a “screen” to conceal his true love of Beatrice; he allowed others to gossip, and even fed the rumors by writing “certain little things in rhyme” for the screen lady, as she is called (Vita Nuova 5). When he did write about Beatrice, he was careful not to identify her explicitly; for instance, he wrote a poem naming the most beautiful women in Florence, in which her name was ninth on a list of sixty. This went on for several years, until one day the screen lady had to move away from Florence; Dante wrote a final poem to her lamenting her departure, though he asserts that Beatrice was its true inspiration.

Meanwhile, Florence continued to be plagued by political discord. Some of the Guelphs in power were making tenuous bonds with the Ghibelline exiles; one Guelph nobleman named Buonaccorso, of the powerful Adimari family, had even married his son Forese to the daughter of Guido Novello, who was still in charge of the exiled Ghibellines. The Guelphs, seeking to make peace with the exiles, sent to Pope Nicholas III in 1280, asking him to mediate negotiations between the two parties. Of course, the Guelphs were the party of the pope, but Nicholas III was actually a decent choice as a neutral mediator. He had interests in supporting a peace with the Ghibellines as a means of checking the power of Charles of Anjou, who by now controlled a strong military presence in southern Italy and Sicily. In his short tenure as pope, Nicholas had forced Charles to resign his terms as senator in Rome and vicar in Tuscany; Nicholas then promoted his own brother Matteo to fill the vacant senate seat, and his nephew Cardinal Latino as vicar of Tuscany. (Incidentally, Dante encounters Pope Nicholas III in the eighth circle of Hell in Inferno 19, where he is condemned for such blatant nepotism and ecclesiastical corruption; in line 99, the poet alludes to Nicholas’ agenda against Charles of Anjou.)

So the pope sent his nephew, Cardinal Latino, to Florence to mediate the peaceful return of certain Ghibelline exiles. Both parties agreed to give the cardinal power of arbitration; one of the signatories on the Guelph side was Dante’s friend Guido Cavalcanti. Most of the Ghibellines were allowed to return as long as they agreed to certain concessions, and they were even given a share of control in the commune’s surrounding territories. Latino appointed eight Guelphs and six Ghibellines to govern the city itself, and he enacted municipal laws intended to penalize both parties for infringing on their agreements. Some of the more powerful Ghibelline families, such as the Uberti, remained in exile; but under Cardinal Latino’s arrangement, even the exiles enjoyed greater privileges, such as a daily stipend from the commune and the freedom to use their possessions as they pleased.

Still, the balance of power was skewed toward the Guelphs. Over time, they repealed the various concessions they had made under Latino’s mediation. They took away the exiles’ stipends first, and soon declared them to be rebels. They used their political clout to ensure that Guelphs—not Ghibellines—filled vacancies in the city’s offices. Thus the Ghibelline party was again effectively driven out of Florence. But the overbearing power of the Guelph nobility (known as the magnati, or “magnates”) remained a point of contention among the lower classes of the city (known collectively as the popolo, or the “people”). The popolo of Florence grew progressively emboldened in their oppression; and they were still more emboldened by the news of a popular revolt in Sicily against Charles of Anjou, known as the Sicilian Vespers (beginning on Easter 1282, the rebels successfully ousted Charles from the island within six weeks; they massacred thousands of foreign nobles in the process).

In June 1282, intending to curb the abuses of the magnates, the popolo of Florence elected three citizens as leaders of the city’s guilds and merchants, who enacted new ordinances to protect the lower classes. At the end of their two-month term, these three were replaced by six elected citizens—one for each sesto (“sixth,” referring to the six divisions of the city). The six guild leaders were called Priors (priori); they were given two-month terms, and each citizen could only serve as Prior once every two years (three years after 1290). For the duration of their term, Priors were isolated in a tower with six servants, six guards, and permission to bear arms, so that the powerful magnates would not be able to threaten them. At first, only members of the seven major guilds were eligible to become Priors (judges and notaries; cloth merchants; money changers; wool workers; physicians and apothecaries; silk workers and mercers; and furriers). Eligibility was later expanded to include members of the five middle guilds in 1287 (butchers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, master builders, and used-cloth dealers), and members of the nine minor guilds in 1291 (wine sellers, innkeepers, oil merchants, cheese merchants, tanners, armorers, ironworkers, girdlemakers, and bakers).

The Priors put themselves in charge of the wealth of the commune, and they drafted laws intended to make magistrates deal more equitably with everyone and to stem the ability of the magnate class to oppress the weak. But the Priors elected were mostly among the wealthiest of the popolani (a popolano is one of the popolo), many of whom were related by marriage to magnate families. The office became rife with corruption. Rather than manage the commune’s treasure, the elected Priors often plundered it; and through a system of bribery and favoritism, the new laws rarely applied to the magnates and rich popolani. The lower popolani continued to suffer as a result.

Despite the trouble at home, Florence became embroiled in yet another conflict with the Ghibellines. In June 1287, the city of Arezzo banished the Guelph party with the aid of the Ghibelline exiles from Florence. The Ghibellines began using Arezzo, just thirty-five miles southeast of Florence, as a base to launch raids into Florentine territory, hoping once again to conquer Florence and reestablish their party’s dominance in the region. In response, Florence and the other Guelph cities of Tuscany went to war with the Aretines. In June 1288, they launched a coordinated expedition against Arezzo. Though they devastated the surrounding countryside, the Guelphs failed to penetrate the city itself; and the Aretines ultimately repelled them with a successful ambush attack on the Sienese contingent of the Guelph forces at Pieve al Toppo (“Church at the Stump,” alluded to in Inferno 13.121).

Dante very likely rode with the Florentines in this June 1288 campaign against Arezzo, just after his twenty-third birthday. In Vita Nuova 9, he remarks that, sometime after the departure of the screen lady, “something happened by which I had to leave [Florence],” noting also that he “was in the company of many.” Perhaps this venture and the Aretine campaign are one and the same. In any event, the journey was dismal for Dante, because he was riding away from Beatrice. On the road, he imagined he saw Love tagging along “as a wanderer, dressed thinly and in miserable clothes” (Vita Nuova 9). This vagrant Love called out to Dante by name, and instructed him to turn his attention to a second screen lady, whom he named before disappearing.

Upon his return to Florence, Dante obeyed Love’s instruction and focused all his outward affections on the second screen lady—so much so that the ruse backfired and gossip began spreading about them. And due to the gossip, when Beatrice next passed him on the street, she refused to greet him as she had before. Dante was devastated. He went back to his room and fell asleep in tears; and just as he had seen a vision of Love after Beatrice’s first greeting, now again he saw Love sitting in his room, this time as a young man dressed in white and weeping. Love told him to drop the act and write a poem for Beatrice. When he awoke, Dante wrote Beatrice a rather whimsical ballad, in which the poet speaks to the poem itself, asking it to bring his lady a message of his faithfulness (Vita Nuova 12).

Soon thereafter, one of Dante’s friends brought him to a house where a number of ladies were gathered around a newly married bride at her husband’s table (as they were obliged to do by Florentine custom). Dante asked his friend why he had brought him here, to which his friend replied, “To make sure that they are worthily served” (Vita Nuova 14). You can almost see him winking—no doubt he thought he was doing Dante a favor, to put him in the company of so many beautiful women. But as soon as Dante spoke to the women, he felt a nervous tremor in his heart, and he pretended to lean against a fresco on the wall to hide his condition. Glancing up at the women, he realized Beatrice was among them, and he nearly fainted. The women, and Beatrice with them, started mocking Dante for swooning; and his friend drew him from the room by the hand. When his friend asked him what had happened, Dante replied, “I took my feet from there into that part of life from which one cannot go on with an intention to return” (Vita Nuova 14).

Dante’s reaction to seeing Beatrice among the ladies in the wedding party was perhaps exacerbated by the thought of his lady’s own marriage. Though the exact date is unknown, sometime before 1288 Beatrice had married Simone de Bardi, a son of a prominent banking family. The marriage was almost certainly arranged for political and social advantage, but you can imagine the toll it must have taken on the young enamored Dante. Dante too had entered an arranged marriage, probably between 1285 and 1290. His wife Gemma Donati came from one of the most powerful families in Florence; but her dowry was small, and the marriage may have arisen out of convenience, since the Alighieri and Donati families owned adjacent properties.

Gemma would bear Dante four children over the next decade and a half: three sons, Giovanni (whose existence is attested in only a single document), Pietro and Jacopo; and a daughter, Antonia. Dante never wrote a word about his wife or children, and we may only speculate as to why. Boccaccio, who wrote a biography of Dante, claims that the marriage was unhappy; but there is no evidence to back up these claims, and it is seems just as likely that Dante wished to respect the privacy of his immediate family. In any event, while Dante was obsessing over Beatrice and writing poetry about women all over Florence, he was also settling into married life; and whatever she may have thought about it all, Gemma’s perspective will always remain a mystery to us.

In broader Tuscany, the Ghibelline party continued to gain traction. After the failed expedition against Arezzo in June 1288, the Florentines received word that the Ghibellines had seized control of another Tuscan city, Pisa, and exiled its Guelphs. The Guelph leader in Pisa, Count Ugolino della Gherardesca, had conspired with his Ghibelline rival, Archbishop Ruggieri, to betray the Guelphs and seize Pisa for himself. But once the Guelphs were gone, Ruggieri betrayed Ugolino in his turn: he roused the people against the count and imprisoned him, along with two of his sons and two of his grandsons, in a tower known as the Mew (where the city’s eagles were kept; a mew is a loft for molting birds). In March 1289, the Ghibellines nailed shut the door to the tower, and allowed Count Ugolino and his children to starve to death; thereafter, the infamous Mew came to be known as the “Torre della Fame” (“Starving Tower”). In the Inferno, Dante finds Count Ugolino among the traitors in Canto 32, devouring the skull and brains of Archbishop Ruggieri. In the following canto, in one of the most famous episodes of the Comedy, Ugolino recounts the story of his death by starvation.

In May, Charles II of Anjou (eldest son of Charles of Anjou, whose defeat of Manfred and Conradin had crippled the previous generation of Ghibellines) rode through Florence on his way to be crowned King of Sicily and Naples (Apulia) by Pope Nicholas IV. He stayed three days in Florence before heading off towards Siena. A rumor quickly reached Florence that the Ghibellines of Arezzo were planning to intercept Charles II along the road. Charles had only a small escort with him, and hardly a year had passed since he had been released from captivity in Aragon, where he’d spent four years as a prisoner of war. Charles was a powerful ally against the Ghibellines, and the Florentines would not sit idly by and let him get captured again, or worse. They sent eight hundred horsemen and three thousand foot soldiers after Charles to escort him to Siena, and they got him safely there without a peep from the Aretines.

The stakes were high for the Tuscan Guelphs; with Arezzo and now Pisa already fallen, they knew the Ghibelline momentum had to be stopped. Charles granted them a war captain with a small cavalry, as well as permission to use his royal standard in battle, and they returned to Florence to muster an attack on Arezzo immediately. On June 2, 1289, they marched out with a force of sixteen hundred horsemen and ten thousand foot soldiers, mostly Florentines but with contingents from their Guelph allies. Dante, who had just turned twenty-four years old, was riding with them.

They set about ravaging the lands belonging to Count Guido Novello—the Ghibelline who had been podestà of Florence after Montaperti, and was now podestà of Arezzo—in hopes of drawing out the Aretines. Like clockwork, the Ghibellines marched out of Arezzo with eight hundred horsemen and eight thousand foot soldiers; despite their inferior numbers, they challenged the Florentines to a formal engagement. On June 11, both sides prepared their ranks for battle on the plain of Campaldino, fifteen miles north of Arezzo. The Florentine Guelphs arrayed their shields (each painted with the ensign of the Guelph commune, a red lily on a white field) in unbroken lines before their cavalry. Seeing this from across the open battlefield, the Bishop of Arezzo, who was nearsighted, reportedly asked, “What are those walls?” He was answered, “The shields of the enemy.”

Dante rode with the Florentine cavalry in the front ranks. He alludes to the scene (as well as the Aretine campaign of the previous year) in the opening lines of Inferno 22:

I have seen horsemen move their camp away,
and launch a strike and muster up a crowd,
and sometimes draw away for their escape;

throughout your homeland I’ve seen mounted scouts,
O Aretines, and I’ve seen raiders roam,
the clash of contests and the rush of jousts;

One of the Florentine captains, Vieri de’ Cerchi, insisted on fighting in the front despite having a crippled leg; and rather than forcing any man to join him against his will, he had his own sons and nephews ride in the front ranks with him. This act of valor earned his renown among the Florentines. The front cavalry were flanked by infantry, lancemen and crossbowmen, with additional infantry bringing up the rear. Far at the back were the contingents from Lucca and Pistoia, led by Corso Donati (a cousin of Dante’s wife Gemma Donati), who was then podestà of Pistoia; they were told to hold their position until ordered otherwise.

When the fighting started, Guido Novello immediately fled the field, along with the hundred and fifty horsemen under his command—just as he had fled Florence during the Guelph uprising after Montaperti. But the rest of the Aretines charged headlong into the Florentine front. The Florentines were taken aback. Their cavalry were pushed back against the footsoldiers, and many were thrown from their horses; some of the Aretines on foot were ducking under the horsemen and gutting their horses with knives. Arrows came down like rain, and the dust of thousands of feet and hooves choked the battlefield. But the Florentines held their ground, fighting furiously as their flanking forces worked to enclose the attacking Aretines. Dante was in the thick of the fray.

As the fighting intensified, Corso Donati was keen to jump in, despite the order to stay put. Growing more and more impatient, he finally said, “If we lose, I shall die in battle with my citizens; and if we win, let him come who will to Pistoia to condemn us.” Then he led his Pistoiesi and the Lucchese reserves into the enemy’s flank; their intervention saved Florentine lives and carried the Guelphs to victory over the Aretines. Like Vieri de’ Cerchi, Corso’s boldness on the battlefield earned him respect among his peers. As Guelphs, Vieri and Corso fought as allies at Campaldino, but they were destined to play pivotal roles in the future of Florence as political adversaries. Their valor here would seal their places as men of influence in the coming decade—even Dante’s fate would hang in the balance between them.

When the fighting stopped, seventeen hundred Aretines were dead, and even more were taken prisoner. A number of Ghibelline leaders had died in battle, including Buonconte da Montefeltro (son of Guido da Montefeltro, who appears in Inferno 27) and many of the exiled Florentines. By contrast, no man of note on the Guelph side had died in the battle, though many were wounded. Back in Florence, the Priors of the Guilds had fallen into an uneasy sleep in their chamber at the hour the battle was won. They were all awakened by a knocking at the door, and a voice crying, “Get up—the Aretines are defeated!” But when they opened the door, no one was outside; and miraculously, no one else had heard a thing. It wasn’t until that evening that a messenger arrived with news of the victory.

In Vita Nuova 19, Dante says that, while traveling along a road beside a clear stream, he was gripped by a sudden impulse to write something in praise of Beatrice. His tongue, moving as if by itself, spoke the opening line of a poem: “Ladies who have an intellect of love.” He memorized the words until he returned to Florence, at which point he began composing a canzone (a type of song similar to a ballad) from those first words. One wonders, since the timing would be about right, if these lines came to Dante on the road to Campaldino, beside the clear stream of the Arno. In the canzone, Dante remarks that Heaven’s only defect is not having Beatrice; and he has God tell the saints in Heaven that they must suffer in peace, for their hope (Beatrice) shall, at His pleasure, remain

where there’s someone waiting to lose her,
and who shall say in Hell: O evil-born
I’ve seen the hope of the beatified.

This part of the canzone stunningly anticipates Beatrice’s untimely death and Dante’s journey to the underworld; and it seems fitting that, after returning from the brutal battle at Campaldino, the poet would be preoccupied with death and Hell in the back of his mind.

The Battle of Campaldino all but destroyed the Ghibellines in Tuscany, but there was still the matter of Pisa to attend to. The Pisans had murdered Count Ugolino and exiled the rest of the Guelphs; and the Florentines, hot off their victory at Campaldino, could not let it stand. Along with their allies from Lucca, they marched west into Pisan territory in August and began decimating the countryside. Again, Dante rode with them.

Also alongside them was a hotblooded Guelph from Pistoia named Vanni Fucci (nicknamed “the beast”). In Inferno 24, Dante encounters Vanni Fucci among the thieves in the eighth circle of Hell, where he remarks that he “saw him as a man of blood and heat,” implying that he had met him in real life (24.129). Though it isn’t known for certain, Dante did have the opportunity here, during the campaign against Pisa, to meet Vanni Fucci; and who knows what atrocities he may have witnessed to form his opinion of the man.

Among other exploits, the Florentines and their allies laid siege to the castle of Caprona (just east of Pisa on the River Arno), which surrendered in eight days. The people in the castle were allowed to come out under a pact of safe conduct from the Florentines and Lucchesi. In Inferno 21, Dante finds himself among a group of devils who have promised not to attack him; he recalls the fear he saw on the soldiers issuing out of the castle of Caprona (21.94-96):

I’ve seen the same fear in the infantry
who emerged from Caprona under pact,
seeing themselves among their enemies.

At Caprona, Dante played the part of the devils, watching the Pisans emerge fearfully from the castle at the mercy of their enemies. The inversion of his comparison is remarkable. After the campaign against Pisa, Dante and the Guelphs returned to Florence exuberantly, having eradicated the Ghibellines from Tuscany.

At the end of that year, on December 31, 1289, Beatrice’s father Folco Portinari died. Folco was an important citizen, having served three times as Prior of Florence; he was buried in the chapel of the Hospital of Santa Maria Nuova, which he himself had founded in the previous year (the hospital is still in active use today). At the funeral, Dante wept in silence as he listened to the women come and go who had been with Beatrice in her grief.

A few days later, in January 1290, Dante was overcome by an illness that left him bedridden for nine days. On the ninth day, the thought came to him that Beatrice, too, must one day die. He closed his eyes in grief, and a delirious vision came to him, which Dante describes in Vita Nuova 23. He saw women with loose hair who said to him, “You too will die;” then others with strange and horrible faces who said, “You are dead.” In the vision, the sun went dark, the stars wept, the earth quaked, and birds fell dead from the sky—omens of death, and clearly reminiscent of the miracles that accompanied Jesus’ death on the cross. Then he imagined that a friend came to him and said, “Now don’t you know? your miraculous lady is gone from this world.” Through his tears, he saw angels ascending with a little white cloud, singing “Hosanna in the highest”—the words of the multitude surrounding Jesus as He entered Jerusalem (Mark 11:10, Matthew 21:9). Then he seemed to see the body of Beatrice herself, dead and serene, covered with a white veil; he called upon Death to take him as well.

As Dante rolled in his bed, muttering aloud in delirium, a woman at his bedside broke into tears—she may have been Dante’s half-sister Tana, as Dante says she “was joined to me by the closest blood ties” (Vita Nuova 23). There were other women in the room who drew her away, and came to Dante’s side to wake him up. He doesn’t name the women, but it is reasonable to assume his wife Gemma was there, and perhaps his stepmother Lapa. Dante started awake with the words, “O Beatrice,” but the women did not seem to understand him through his sobbing. He proceeded to tell them everything about his vision, except the name of Beatrice. Afterwards, he wrote a canzone about the whole ordeal.

Sometime later, Dante was sitting by himself when he suddenly felt the presence of Beatrice. Looking up, he saw a young woman named Giovanna walking towards him, who was the lady of his best friend Guido Cavalcanti; just as Dante wrote poetry for Beatrice, so Guido wrote poetry for Giovanna, who was called Primavera (“Spring”). And following after Giovanna came Beatrice, and they passed Dante one after the other. In Vita Nuova 24, Dante explains that, in addition to “spring,” the name Primavera (prima verrà) means “she will come first;” and that, just as John the Baptist came first before Jesus Christ, so Giovanna (whose name is the feminine Italian form of John) came first before Beatrice.

Here Dante is applying a dictum from Roman law (from the Corpus Juris Civilis, also known as the Code of Justinian), “Nomina sunt consequentia rerum” (“Names are the consequence of things”), which Dante himself quotes in Vita Nuova 6. As was common in medieval interpretations of history, he is also interpreting his own life as if it were a book, reading it allegorically as well as literally. By now it may be clear what Beatrice had become for Dante: his own personal Jesus, the woman who would lead him to Christian salvation and bliss. In this vein, Dante writes that she “was called Beatrice by many who knew not what to call her” (Vita Nuova 2)—which is only possible if her name is interpreted as a nomen omen (a name with meaning, just like Giovanna/Primavera). The name Beatrice means “she who confers beatitude;” beatitude (or bliss) is the highest possible happiness, and in the Christian worldview, the source of beatitude can be nothing other than God. Thus even Beatrice’s name lends itself to Dante’s interpretation of her as an allegorical figure of the Christ (who is God in the flesh in Christianity) in his life. And like Jesus, as Dante’s delirious dream foreboded, Beatrice was destined to die before her time. Incidentally, Dante’s full name (Durante) means “enduring,” which speaks to his enduring legacy as well as the hardships he endured in his life after exile.

Dante wrote a sonnet about the incident with Giovanna and Beatrice; and not long after, he wrote two more sonnets in praise of Beatrice. He claims that the effects of her grace were not uniquely felt by him, but that others would run to see her in the street and genuflect upon her greeting. But she remained a paragon of humility, inspiring humility in her admirers and in the ladies who accompanied her.

Then on June 8, 1290, having written two sonnets about Beatrice’s effect on others, Dante sat down to write a poem about her effect on himself. In Vita Nuova 27, he says he decided to make it a canzone, not believing himself able to narrate it in the brevity of a sonnet. But the poem that follows abruptly ends after fourteen lines—a sonnet after all—and Vita Nuova 27 ends as well, without any further explication of the unfinished canzone.

The following section begins cold with the words of the prophet Jeremiah from Lamentations 1:1, “How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow!” Dante reports that, as he was working on the canzone, having finished only the first stanza, his beatified Beatrice died. Dante declines to provide any details about her death, citing three reasons: it is beside his purpose; it is beyond his capabilities as a writer; and it would necessitate self-praise, which he says is reprehensible. This last reason is the most interesting, and we may only speculate why the circumstances of Beatrice’s death would bring about praise for Dante.

We know the exact date and hour of her death because Dante goes to great lengths, in Vita Nuova 29, to connect the year, month, and day to the number nine. She died in 1290, the ninth decade of the century; June, corresponding to the ninth month of the Syrian calendar; in the first hour after sunset on the 8th, or the first hour of the 9th according to the Arabian reckoning, which defined the start of each day at sunset rather than sunrise. In short, Beatrice died just after 6 PM on June 8, 1290 (on the Julian calendar in use at the time). He goes on to say that Beatrice is connected to the number nine because, just as the root of nine is three (three times three is nine), so Beatrice is a miracle whose root is the miraculous Trinity (God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who are both three and one). The number nine likewise echoes repeatedly throughout the Comedy; its connection to the miraculous, and its connection to Beatrice and the Holy Trinity, are crucial to understanding its numerological significance.

In the Vita Nuova, every poem is accompanied by a prose breakdown, in which Dante attempts to explicate the poem by dividing it into bitesize segments. Before Beatrice’s death, the prose breakdowns follow the poems; after her death, they precede them. As Dante explains, the effect is to make those poems after Beatrice’s death seem “widowed” from their explications (Vita Nuova 31). The inversion is also reminiscent of the calendar year, which counts down to the advent of the Christ (BC), then inverts and begins counting up (AD). In this way, Beatrice’s death becomes the centerpiece of the Vita Nuova in same way Jesus’ death is the centerpiece of history from the Christian perspective.

After her death, Dante wept for Beatrice until his eyes were wept out; then he wrote a canzone about her. In the canzone, he uses the name Beatrice for the first time in verse in the Vita Nuova (though he did use the shortened form Bice in Vita Nuova 24). Her name appears in verse three times in the little book—twice in this poem, once in a later poem—all three times after her death. And as the poet promised, the canzone ends widowed, without any further prose in Vita Nuova 31.

Shortly thereafter, Dante was approached by a man whom he says was his second-best friend after Guido Cavalcanti—probably Beatrice’s brother Manetto Portinari, who was also Guido’s friend, and who had been appointed guardian of Beatrice’s unmarried younger sisters after their father’s death. Dante writes that “he had such blood ties to this glorious lady, that no one else was closer to her” (Vita Nuova 32), and in Vita Nuova 33 he outright says that it was her brother. That Dante was so close with Beatrice’s brother reveals much unspoken about the poet’s relationship with Beatrice. Could he really have been such close friends with her brother, and yet so distant from her? Might there have been a more casual relationship between them than is hinted at in Dante’s work? We can only speculate.

Manetto asked Dante to write him something about “a lady who was dead,” meaning Beatrice. In response, Dante wrote a beautiful sonnet expressing his own sorrow, but in such a way that it would seem he had made it for Manetto. He also wrote a canzone from Manetto’s perspective in the first half, and from Dante’s in the second half—but again, written in such a way that it would seem entirely made for Manetto to an unwary reader. The canzone ends with a kind of apotheosis of Beatrice (Vita Nuova 33):

because the pleasure of her beauty,
departing from our sight,
became a great spiritual beauty,
which spreads throughout Heaven
a light of love that greets the angels
and makes their subtle high intellect
marvel, so noble is it there.

He gave both poems to Manetto, telling him they were composed for him alone.

On June 8, 1291—exactly a year after Beatrice’s death—Dante sat drawing an angel upon some wooden tablets, his mind completely absorbed with thoughts of Beatrice. Suddenly he was aware of people standing over him, watching him draw. They were men of some importance, so he stood and duly greeted them; but it was clear they had been there awhile, and Dante excused himself by saying, “Another was with me just now, so I was lost in thought”(Vita Nuova 34). After they left, when he’d returned to his drawing, he was struck with the idea to write a sonnet to mark the anniversary of Beatrice’s death. Intriguingly, Dante wrote two versions of the first four lines of the resulting sonnet—two beginnings, one focused on where she’s gone (to Heaven), the other focused on the effect of her departure on those she left behind (on earth).

The Comedy similarly has two beginnings, of a sort. Inferno 1 begins with Dante lost in a dark forest, then Virgil rescues him, and it ends with Dante full of resolve and ready for the journey ahead; but Inferno 2 takes a backward step—Dante loses his resolve almost immediately, then Virgil tells him how the heavenly Beatrice sent him to his aid, and the canto ends with Dante resolute again. Two beginnings—one focused on where Dante is lost (in the dark forest, on earth), the other focused on the effects of his distress on those who loved him (in Heaven). Clearly, there are interesting parallels between the Comedy and the sonnet with two beginnings in Vita Nuova 34, even if they are only coincidental (or subconscious on the poet’s part).

Some time later (in September 1291, according to Convivio 2.2), Dante was reminiscing and grieving alone when, becoming aware of himself, he looked up to see a beautiful young woman watching him from a window—“una gentile donna” (“a gentle woman”), as he calls her (Vita Nuova 35). He could see compassion and pity in her, and he felt tears welling up; but he walked away so she wouldn’t see him cry. Concluding within himself that Love (the personified Love of his dreams) must be with her, he wrote a sonnet about the whole encounter. Afterward, he began to seek out the same woman as a means of expressing his grief—for her compassionate mien and her look of love would pull the tears from his eyes. Over time, the sight of her began to make him happy. But it was bittersweet; in his heart, he felt unfaithful to Beatrice. He wrote a sonnet in which his heart reprimands his eyes, and reminds them to be faithful to Beatrice.

Thus Dante equivocated between desire and guilt—a battle, as he puts it, between his heart and soul. He wrote a sonnet about his inner turmoil, this battle of thoughts, in which his heart and soul speak to one another about his inconstant contemplation of a new love. Then one day, at the hour of nones (nine hours after sunrise, or about three in the afternoon), he had a vision of Beatrice as he had first seen her, as a young girl dressed in red. The vision returned his thoughts to her, and caused him to repent his desire for the woman in the window. He writes in Vita Nuova 39 that his many sighs manifested how much he began to think of Beatrice “with all my shameful heart,” and he wept so much that purple rings formed around his eyes. Afterwards, he wrote a sonnet to prove his renewed devotion to Beatrice.

Elsewhere, Dante tells a different story. In Convivio 2.12, he says that he was inconsolable for quite some time after he lost “the first delight of my soul,” which is to say, Beatrice. In his despair, he turned to Boëthius’ Consolation of Philosophy and Cicero’s On Friendship for guidance. In these books, he found not only a path to the consolation he sought, but a whole new world of authors and learning and books, “just as it happens that a man goes searching for silver and finds gold unintentionally” (Convivio 2.12). In short, he found philosophy, which he personifies as a woman (following Boëthius, whose book is an extended conversation with Lady Philosophy): “And I would imagine her as a gentle woman (una donna gentile), and I couldn’t imagine her in any way but compassionate; wherefore so willingly my sense of truth would look upon her, that I could hardly turn it away from her” (Convivio 2.12). For some thirty months, Dante pursued his new lady in philosophical texts and religious schools—perhaps at the Florentine churches of Santa Maria Novella (a Dominican church), Santa Croce (Franciscan), and Santo Spirito (Augustinian), from which he would have inherited the major theological perspectives of Christianity in his time. His newfound love of philosophy annihilated all thought of anything else—including Beatrice.

It’s not exactly a leap to connect the woman in the window with Dante’s personification of philosophy: he uses the same term for them both (donna gentile); he assigns them the same attributes (beauty and compassion); he finds consolation in both of them after Beatrice’s death; and in the very means of consolation, he’s led astray by both, as they evict all thoughts of Beatrice from his mind. The clear connection has led scholars to argue that the woman in the window is fictional and merely an allegory of philosophy—the personification made flesh by the author of the Vita Nuova. If true, it would cast doubt on all the autobiographical aspects of Dante’s little book. If the woman in the window wasn’t real, then might Beatrice be a fiction too? What else might be merely an allegory?

It’s true that Dante is not a reliable narrator; historical truth is always subservient to his thematic and artistic goals. In Vita Nuova 25, for instance, he addresses the patent absurdity of speaking of Love as if it were a human being; and he essentially excuses himself by saying that it is a poetic device, citing the classical Latin poets as precedents for such devices. (But he notes that only a poor poet dresses up his poem with figures and rhetorical color without knowing the meaning behind them; and he and his best friend Guido Cavalcanti know of many poets, he says, who write so insipidly.) So if Dante’s personification of Love is a poetic device, what of his dreams and visions? He has four elaborate visions of Love personified in the Vita Nuova—did he really experience these, or are they poetic fictions created to suit the book’s themes? It is impossible to know. But either way, the visions are remarkable, and they’re something of a precursor to the extended vivid experience that is the Divine Comedy.

As for the woman in the window, it seems likely that she is both real and an allegory. Dante came to view the events of his life not as historical accidents, but as part of God’s providential narrative—in the same way, medieval exegetes read the events of the Bible as literal truth with literary purpose, and they interpreted human history as a great volume authored by God. This perspective allows Dante to analyze his own life as if it were a text, assigning allegorical meaning to his actual acquaintances as if they were characters in a story. In the wake of Beatrice’s death, perhaps his eyes found respite in the woman in the window, while his mind found peace in philosophy. Dante saw a correspondence between his personal and intellectual lives: the woman in the window corresponded to philosophy; Beatrice corresponded perhaps to religious devotion or theology, which he had turned away from in his ravenous pursuit of knowledge.

It was during this time, or shortly after it, that Dante composed the Vita Nuova (probably 1292-1293, though some scholars date it as late as 1295). The poems had been written over the previous decade, but the prose connecting those poems into a narrative was entirely new. The title, the New Life, refers both to Dante’s youth and to his life made new by Beatrice. No doubt he discussed his ideas for the little book with his best friend and literary mentor Guido Cavalcanti—in Vita Nuova 30, Dante casually mentions that he wrote the book for Guido, and he notes that Guido agreed with him that it should written in the vernacular Tuscan dialect rather than in Latin. I imagine their relationship as somewhat akin to that between T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound: they would discuss poetry together, and poets, and each other’s work and their beautiful ladies; they’d write each other poems and offer edits and suggestions on what to work on next. Perhaps Guido even helped Dante decide what poems to include in the Vita Nuova. A remarkable feature of the book, given what we know of Dante’s life, is how incredibly focused the narrative is. Dante never mentions the death of his father, his marriage (or Beatrice’s), his part in the city’s wars against Arezzo and Pisa… I like to pretend (it probably isn’t true) that Guido Cavalcanti is partly responsible for the book’s focus, having the young Dante rearrange scenes and excise entire poems from the manuscript, just as Pound sliced down Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land. And the sharp thematic focus of the Vita Nuova is nothing next to the Comedy, in which Dante crafts meaning into every little detail.

The final three sections of the Vita Nuova foreshadow the Comedy in interesting ways. In Vita Nuova 40, Dante sees pilgrims passing through Florence on their way to Rome—in the Comedy, Dante himself is a pilgrim who passes through Dis (the city in the center of Hell) on his way to a heavenly Rome (the city of God in Paradise). In the next section, two ladies send him a request for some of his poetry, and in response he writes a sonnet in which his thought (in the form of a sigh, or as he calls it, a “pilgrim spirit”) ascends to Heaven in pursuit of Beatrice (Vita Nuova 41)—mimicking the overall sweep of the Comedy, in which the pilgrim Dante journeys to Heaven in pursuit of her. And in the last section, Dante says that “a miraculous vision” came to him, “in which I saw things that made me decide to say nothing more of this blessed lady until such time as I am able to more worthily treat of her” (Vita Nuova 42)—what else could this vision have been except an early conception of the Comedy? In other words, the idea for the Comedy was nascent in Dante before he was even thirty years old. “And to come to that,” he concludes in Vita Nuova 42, “I’m studying as much as I can, as she truly knows. So that, if it pleases Him by whom all things live that my life endures for some years longer, I hope to say of her what has never been said of any other woman.”

Part 1 | Part 3