Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/848

Rh 812 DANTE Exile. Dante s Ghibel- J in is in. sentences were passed in September 1311 and October 1315. The sentence was not formally reversed till 1494, under the government of the Medici. Dante received the news of his banishment in Siena. The exiles met first at Gargonza, a castle between Siena. and Arezzo, and then at Arezzo itself. They joined them selves to the Ghibellines, to which party the podestA Uguccione della Faggiuola belonged. The Ghibellines, however, were divided amongst themselves, and the Green Ghibellines were not disposed to favour the cause of the White Guelfs. They found a more sympathetic defender in Scarpetta degli Ordelaffi at Forli. From this place Dante probably went to Bartolommeo della Scala, lord of Verona, where the country of the great Lombard gave him his first refuge and his first hospitable reception. Can Grande, to whom he afterwards dedicated the Paradiso, was then a boy. Bartolommeo died in 1304, and it is possible that Dante may have remained in Verona till his death. In September 1303 the fleur-de-lis had entered Anagni, and Christ had a second time been buffeted in the person of his vicar. Boniface VIII. did not survive the insult long, but died in the following month. He was succeeded by Benedict XL, who did his best to give peace to his dis tracted country. Immediately after his accession he sent the Cardinal da Prato to Florence, who arrived there in March 1304. The people received him with enthusiasm ; ambassadors came to him from the Whites ; and he did his best to reconcile the two parties. But the Blacks resisted all his efforts. He shook the dust from off his feet, and departed, leaving the city under an interdict. Foiled by the calumnies and machinationsof the one party, the cardinal gave his countenance to the other. It happened that Corso Donati and the heads of the Black party were absent at Pistoia. Da Prato advised the Whites to attack Florence, deprived of its heads and impaired by fire. An army was collected of 16,000 foot and 9000 horse. Communications were opened with the Ghibellines of Bologna and Romagna. But the forces of the exiles, badly led, reached the gates of the city only to find themselves unsupported from within. They were driven to retreat, all hope of return became impossible, and Dante felt for the first time the full bitter ness of exile. It was after the failure of this ill-conceived attempt that Dante s wanderings really began. Filled with contempt at the baseness and incapacity of his fellow- sufferers, he wished that, disdaining the support of their companionship, he had stood alone, and made a party by himself. This, indeed, we must consider Dante to have done, if we would understand the real nature of his Ghibellinism. Dante had been born and bred a Guelf, and it was only under the pressure of inevitable necessity that he and his friends allied themselves with the other side. If we rise beyond the limits of mere local quarrels, we find in Italian bistoiythat the Guelf party was generally speaking favourable to liberty. The municipal privileges of the great Italian cities rose under the protection of the Popes, while the emperors only crossed the Alps to crush their ancient independence, and depress them beneath the yoke of some feudal representative. The horse of Barbarossa trampled upon the ashes of Milan, whereas the straw-built fortress of the Lombard league bore the name of Alexander. Had it not breathed the air of freedom, the life of Florence could not have survived the period of its infancy, stifled as it afterwards was by the preponderance of the Medici. Dante could not have been indifferent or ungrateful to the cause which had given to his beloved Italy all that made it valuable to the world. But he saw that the conditions of the time were altered, and that other dangers menaced the welfare of his country. There was no fear now that Florence, Siena, Pisa, Arezzo should be razed to the ground in order that the castle of the lord might overlook the humble cottages of his contented subjects ; but there was danger lest Italy should be torn in sunder by its own jealousies and passions, and lest the fair domain bounded by the sea and the Alps should never properly assert the force of its individuality, and should present a contemptible contrast to a united France and a confederated Germany. Sick with petty quarrels and dissensions Dante strained bis eyes towards the hills for the appearance of a deliverer; who should hush the jar of discord, discipline into effec tiveness the luxuriant forces of the peninsula, and, united in spiritual harmony with the vicar of Christ, show for the first time to the world an example of a government where the strongest force and the highest wisdom were inter penetrated by all that God had given to the world of piety and justice.^ In this sense and in no other was Dante a Ghibelline. The vision was never realized the hope was never fulfilled. Not till our own day has Italy become united and the &quot; greyhound of deliverance &quot; has chased from city to city the &quot; wolf &quot; of the papacy. But is it possible to say that the dream did not work its own realization, or to deny that the high ideal of the poet, after inspiring a long succes sion of minds as lofty as his own, has become after five hundred years embodied in the constitution of a state which acknowledges no stronger bond of union than a common worship of the exile s indignant and impassioned verse 1 It is very difficult to determine with exactness the order and the place of Dante s wanderings. Many cities and castles in Italy have claimed the honour of giving him shelter, or of being for a time the home of his inspired muse. He certainly spent some time with Count Guido Salvatico in the Casentino near the sources of the Arno, probably in the castle of Porciano, and with Uguccione in the castle of Faggiuola in the mountains of Urbino. After this he is said to have visited the university of Bologna ; and in August 1306 we find him at Padua. Cardinal Napoleon Orsini, the legato of the French Pope Clement V., had put Bologna under a ban, dissolved the university, and driven the professors to the northern city. In May or June 1307 the same cardinal collected the Whites at Arezzo and tried to induce the Florentines to recall them. The name of Dante is found attached to a document signed by the Whites in the church of St Gaudenzio in the Mugello. This euterprize came to nothing. Dante retired to the castle of Moroello Delia Spina in the Lunigiana, where the marble ridges of the Apennines descend in precipitous slopes to the Gulf of Spezzia. From this time till the arrival of the emperor Henry VII. in Italy, October 1310, all is uncertain. His old enemy Corso Donati had at last united himself with Uguccione della Faggiuola, the leader of the Ghibellines. Dante thought it possible that this might lead to his return. But in 1 308 Corso was declared a traitor, attacked in his house, put to flight, and killed. Dante lost his last hope. He left Tuscany, and went to Can Grande della Scala at Verona. From this place we may believe that he visited the university of Paris, studied in the Rue Fouarre, became acquainted with the Low Countries, and not improbably crossed the Channel and went to Oxford, and saw where the heart of Prince Harry was worshipped upon London Bridge. The election of Henry of Luxembourg as emperor stirred again his hopes of a deliverer. He left Paris and returned hastily to Italy. At the end of 1310, in a letter to the princes and people of Italy, he proclaimed the coming of the saviour ; at Milan he did personal homage to his sovereign. The Florentines made every preparation to resist the emperor. Dante wrote from the Casentino a letter dated March 31, 1311, in which he rebuked them for their stubbornness and obstinacy. Henry still lingered in Lombardy at the siege of Cremona, when Dante, on April 16, 1311, in a celebrated epistle, upbraided his delay, argued that the crown of Italy