Florence
Florence rejoice... all the deep of Hell resounds with thy name! (Inferno: XXVI, 1-3)
Despite crossing through the bowels of the earth and the spheres of Heaven, the most important location in the Divine Comedy is perhaps Florence, though the narrative never takes us there. The Commedia is at its heart a poem about exile, both as allegory (the soul’s exile from God) and literal (Dante’s exile from his home). As a result, the text often meditates on the politics of Florence – usually with understandable venom – and many prominent figures of the city feature heavily.
Dante’s exile came about as a result of dabbling in politics. In the late 13th century, two major parties controlled Florence: the Black Guelphs who were nominally aligned with the Pope, and the White Guelphs who supported independence for the city-state. By the time of Dante’s birth though, these positions had become so entrenched that they were often little more than an excuse for factional conflict. Dante’s family were White Guelphs, and he rose to prominence among the group as a young politician, being elected to Florence’s Council of Priors in the year 1300.
This distinction came at an unfortunate time. With papal support, the Black Guelphs overthrew the White government, resulting in a spree of violence and political reprisals against the former rulers. While travelling to Rome to entreat Pope Boniface VIII for peace (fruitlessly, it turns out), Dante was falsely accused of corruption by the Blacks. To compound matters, the Whites labelled him a collaborator for attempting to deal with the papacy. Dante’s assets were confiscated and, therefore unable to pay the fine levied against him (and unwilling to plead guilty to crimes he had not committed), he was exiled for life. Should he return, he would be burned at the stake.
Dante never again set foot in the town he had both governed and fought for, and his bitterness against this injustice, those responsible for it, and those who stood by as it happened, is a recurring theme throughout the Commedia.
Depictions of Dante that incorporate Florence – as does the frontispiece from the Ashendene imprint of the Works of Florentine Dante Alighieri, above - often draw from a tradition that shows the city as it was more than a century after the poet’s death: the exterior of Brunelleschi’s famous duomo on the Florentine cathedral, which is so noticeable in these examples, was completed in 1436. Yet Dante’s legacy as one of the early humanists was such that he is credited as being one of a select group who laid the groundwork for the Renaissance that was to follow. This reputation was already becoming concrete by the time Dante died, and as such, his name is conspicuous among many significant histories of the Renaissance period.
The Florentine banker Giovanni Villani (c. 1276–1348), inspired after a tour of Rome during its jubilee year celebrations in 1300, composed his own history of the city state in his Nuovo Cronica. This includes the first known biography of Dante, and quotes extensively from the Comedy. Despite a less than glowing assessment of Dante’s character as aloof and arrogant (modern historians believe Villani was carefully distancing himself from a figure known for criticising Florence), early translations of the Cronica into English prompted a resurgence of scholarship around the Divine Comedy.
Dante’s ongoing importance during the Renaissance is highlighted by his inclusion in the writing of another famous Florentine exile, Niccolò Machiavelli. Driven out due to charges of conspiracy and - like Dante – links to republican politicians, Machiavelli was nevertheless commissioned to write an Istorie fiorentine in 1520, which details the conflict between the Black and White Guelph factions. His later, infamous manifesto The Prince also quoted from the Divine Comedy and, in debt to the earlier work, was written in the Italian vernacular.
