Dante Alighieri

Dante Alighieri was a Florentine poet, political thinker and exile whose Divine Comedy, an imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven, is one of the great works of world literature. Writing in the Tuscan vernacular rather than Latin, he did more than anyone else to establish the language that became standard Italian, and he is often called the father of the Italian language. His poem sums up the learning, faith and politics of the medieval world while speaking in an intensely personal voice.

Dante was born in Florence in 1265, probably in late May or early June, into a family of minor nobility of modest means. His mother died when he was young and his father when he was in his teens. Florence was then a rich and turbulent commune, divided between the Guelphs, who generally supported the papacy, and the Ghibellines, who backed the Holy Roman Emperor. Dante's family were Guelphs.

According to his own account, he first saw Beatrice, generally identified as Beatrice Portinari, when both were nine, and again nine years later. She married another man and died in 1290, aged about 24. Dante transformed her into an image of divine love. Around 1294 he wrote the Vita Nuova, "New Life", a short book mixing love poems with prose explaining how they came to be written, which tells the story of his love for her and ends with a promise to write of her what had never been written of any woman. He was associated with the poets of the "sweet new style", including his friend Guido Cavalcanti, who wrote refined lyrics about love.

Dante's own marriage, to Gemma Donati, had been arranged when he was a boy; they had at least three children. He fought as a cavalryman for Florence against Ghibelline Arezzo at the battle of Campaldino in 1289, and studied philosophy and theology at the city's religious schools.

In the 1290s Dante entered public life, enrolling in the guild of physicians and apothecaries, as the law required. By then the victorious Guelphs had split into two factions, the Whites and the Blacks. Dante, a White, served as one of the city's six priors, its highest office, for two months in 1300. The Blacks were backed by Pope Boniface VIII, whose ambitions in Tuscany Dante opposed. In 1301, while Dante was on an embassy to the pope in Rome, Charles of Valois entered Florence as the pope's peacemaker and the Blacks seized power.

In 1302 Dante was convicted in his absence on charges of corruption, almost certainly politically motivated, fined and banished; a second sentence condemned him to be burned alive if he returned. He never saw Florence again. For nearly twenty years he lived as a guest of lords in northern Italy, including the della Scala family of Verona, and spent his last years in Ravenna under its ruler, Guido Novello da Polenta. He placed great hopes in the emperor Henry VII of the Holy Roman Empire, who came to Italy in 1310 to restore imperial authority, but Henry died in 1313. Dante died in Ravenna of a fever, probably malaria, on the night of 13 to 14 September 1321, after returning from an embassy to Venice. He is buried there, and Florence's repeated requests for his remains have been refused.

In exile Dante wrote several works of prose. The Convivio, "Banquet", left unfinished, was meant to bring philosophy to readers who knew no Latin, presenting commentaries on his own poems in Italian. De vulgari eloquentia, written in Latin, is a pioneering treatise on language which argued that the spoken vernacular was nobler than Latin and searched for an "illustrious" Italian fit for high poetry.

His most important political work, Monarchia, argues that humanity needs a single universal emperor to secure peace and justice, and that the emperor's authority comes directly from God rather than through the pope. Church and empire, he held, have separate purposes: one leads people to happiness in the next life, the other to happiness in this one. The argument was so unwelcome to the papacy that the book was publicly burned in 1329 and later placed on the Catholic Index of prohibited books. Dante's thought, which drew on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and other scholastic writers yet departed from them freely, is an important part of medieval philosophy.

Dante probably began the Commedia around 1307 to 1308 and finished it shortly before his death. He called it simply a comedy, because it moves from misery to happiness and is written in a mixed, everyday language; the adjective "divine" was added by admirers, starting with Boccaccio. The poem has 100 cantos in three parts, Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso, and is written in terza rima, interlocking three-line stanzas that Dante invented.

The poem is set at Easter 1300. Lost in a dark wood in the middle of his life, Dante is rescued by the Roman poet Virgil, who leads him down through the nine circles of Hell, a funnel inside the earth where sinners suffer punishments that mirror their sins, and then up the mountain of Purgatory, where souls are cleansed. At its summit Beatrice takes over as his guide and leads him through the heavenly spheres to a final vision of God, "the love that moves the sun and the other stars".

The Comedy is crowded with real people: popes, emperors, Florentine politicians, friends and enemies, many placed in Hell with savage precision, including Boniface VIII, whose damnation is foretold. In Limbo, the first circle, Dante meets the virtuous pagans, among them Homer, Socrates and Plato, and Aristotle, "the master of those who know". The poem is at once a political satire, an encyclopedia of medieval science and theology, and the story of one man's moral conversion. Its vivid imagery, from the frozen lake at the bottom of Hell to the speech of Ulysses about sailing beyond the known world, has been endlessly retold.

Within decades of his death the Comedy was being copied, commented on and publicly lectured upon; Boccaccio gave public readings in Florence in 1373. Petrarch and Boccaccio built on his example, and together the three made Tuscan the literary language of Italy, which became the basis of modern Italian. Artists from Botticelli to Rodin and William Blake illustrated the poem, and it has been translated into English more often than almost any other foreign work. For the nationalists of the nineteenth century he became a prophet of a united Italy, and he stands at the threshold of the Renaissance, a medieval poet whose concern with the individual soul and with classical writers looked forward to the age that followed.