Historical Asides
A1: Dante’s Birthdate
Last updated 02/03/2022.
Dante was born in late May (perhaps May 27) in the year 1265. We can determine the year and approximate date of Dante’s birth from his own writings—but it’s a bit complicated, so strap in. We’ll do it in stages.
Before anything else, have a look at my notes about medieval dates and times. Here, we will be using the Julian calendar for dates; and the convention that January 1 is the first day of the new year.
Dante’s Birth Month (and Day)
In Paradise 22.112-117, Dante indicates that he was born when the sun was in the constellation Gemini:
O glorious stars, o light pregnant
with great virtue, by which I recognize
all (such as it is) my genius,
the one who fathers every mortal life
was born with you and hid within you,
when I first felt the Tuscan air.
On the Julian calendar in Dante’s lifetime, the sun was in Gemini from May 13 to June 12. This is the broadest possible range for Dante’s birthday.
Boccaccio, in his biography of Dante, claimed that Dante had told a friend that he was born in May. If we accept this as a fact, it narrows Dante’s birthday to the range from May 13 to May 31.
Finally, in their book Time and the Crystal, Robert Durling and Ronald Martinez suggest that the numbering of the cantos in Paradise may be related to the actual date on which Dante was born. Since the pilgrim Dante remains in Gemini from Canto 22-27, they argue, and since “the terms in which Dante relates his departure from Gemini are particularly appropriate to birth,” they “incline toward May 27 as the date Dante knew or supposed to be his birthday” (page 85, and note 32).
So there you have it. Dante may have been born on May 27; or (with a bit more certainty) May 22-27; or (almost certainly) May 13-31; or (definitely, according to the poet in his own work) May 13-June 12. “Late May” seems accurate enough.
Dante’s Four Stages of Human Life
In Convivio 4.24, Dante asserts that the span of a human life can be divided into four stages:
Youth (adolescenza), ages 0-25
Adulthood (gioventute), ages 25-45
Old age (senettute), ages 45-70
Elderly age (senio), ages 70+
Life in the womb is kind of a 0th stage, which Dante does not name.
Note that Dante’s stages align with the biblical expectation of a human lifespan: “The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away” (Psalm 90:10).
Famously, Dante opens the Comedy with the words, “In the middle of the journey of our life” (Inferno 1.1). If we interpret that phrase in a strict sense, the exact middle of the prototypical human lifespan would be 35 years old (half of 70, and halfway through Dante’s “adulthood” stage). Moreover, the journey of the Comedy is precisely dated with respect to the death of Jesus (see Inferno 21.112-114 and note); so we know that the journey begins on the night of April 7, 1300 (some scholars prefer March 24, but we won’t get into that here; it’s not relevant for our present purposes). So, if Dante is 35 (or nearly so) at the start of the Comedy, then he must have been born in 1265. This implies that the Comedy begins about a month or two before his 35th birthday.
This is as far as most commentators go, when dating Dante’s birth. It happens to be correct, but I always found the reasoning to be shaky, since it depends on such a precise interpretation of a rather loose phrase (that is, “in the middle” does not necessarily imply “in the exact middle”). So can we do better? I think so. Dante gives us precise information about the time of Beatrice’s death; and we can piggyback on this information to determine the date of Dante’s birth. It’s coming; bear with me.
Relative Age of Dante and Beatrice
In Vita Nuova 2, Dante writes: “Nine times already, after my birth, had the [sun] returned almost to the same point, along its proper orbit, when [Beatrice] first appeared to my eyes.” This implies that he first saw Beatrice just before his ninth birthday (since he would turn nine exactly when the sun returned to the same point for the ninth time). Moreover, he writes, “She had been in this life so long already, that in her time the [stars] had moved east by one part in twelve of one degree, so that she appeared to me almost at the beginning of her ninth year, and I saw her almost at the end of my ninth” (Vita Nuova 2). Note that Dante and Beatrice are both eight years old in the scene (not nine, as some commentators have it); for in their first year of life, they were not yet a year old (so they were one in their second year of life, two in their third year, and so on).
Now according to Ptolemy, the fixed stars traverse an independent orbit from west to east (relative to the solstices) at a rate of about one degree per century (Almagest 7.2). So if the stars have moved “by one part in twelve of one degree” (five arcminutes), then about eight years and four months have passed since Beatrice’s birth (that is, one twelfth of a century; you can check my math).
So when they first met, Beatrice was eight years and four months old. This implies that Dante was at most eight months older than Beatrice (since they were the same age when they met).
As an aside, it’s worth noting that there’s a possibility (given that his birthday was in late May) that Dante first saw Beatrice on, say, April 25, just before his ninth birthday. If this were so (and it is pure speculation, though within a plausible range of dates), and Beatrice’s birthday were four months earlier, then there is at least a possibility that Beatrice—who would eventually become a figure of the Christ in Dante’s life and work—was born on December 25. Wouldn’t that be something?
Beatrice Dates Dante (Finally!)
To determine the year of Dante’s birth, we can follow a trail of bread crumbs which precisely dates Beatrice’s death and birth.
In Vita Nuova 29, Dante goes to great lengths to connect the day, month, and year of Beatrice’s death to the number nine: she died, he says, in the ninetieth year of the thirteenth century (1290); in the ninth month of the Syrian calendar (June; he says the first month of the Syrian calendar corresponds to October); on the first hour of the ninth day of the month by Arabian reckoning (the first hour after sunset on the eighth; the Arabian day began at sunset, twelve hours before the start of the canonical Christian day at sunrise). So Beatrice died, according to Dante’s own testament, at around 7 PM on June 8, 1290.
In Purgatory 30.124-126, Beatrice says:
As soon as I was on the threshold
of my second age and changed life,
he took himself from me, and gave himself to others.
She is alluding to her death. She also indirectly tells us how old she was when she died, by alluding to Dante’s four stages of life. The “second age” is adulthood, which begins at age 25; so if Beatrice died “on the threshold” of her second age, she was 24 years old when she died in June, 1290. Dante, if his birthday was in late May, would have just turned 25.
This is enough to clinch it: if Dante turned 25 in late May, 1290, then he had to have been born in late May, 1265.
Quod erat demonstrandum.