Today in History—January 27: Dante’s Divine Justice
On this day in 1302, Italian poet Dante Alighieri was exiled from Florence. Sentenced by a court of his political enemies—and threatened with death if he returned—he spent the rest of his life wandering Italy.
But Dante wasn’t one to let his enemies have the last word. During his exile, he composed an epic payback poem: The Divine Comedy.
Dante’s troubles started well before his banishment, when he found himself tangled in the world of Florentine politics. He was born in 1265 to a family of moneylenders. Rather than follow in their footsteps, he became a writer. In 1300 he was elected prior, a high-ranking position in Florence’s courts.
At the time, the city was bitterly divided: dynasty against dynasty, nobles against merchants, supporters of the pope against supporters of the Holy Roman Empire. One political party in particular, the Guelfs, had broken into two factions: the Whites and the Blacks.
Dante supported the Whites, who gained power and exiled the Blacks. In retaliation the Blacks aligned with Pope Boniface VIII. Hoping to resolve matters with the pope, Dante and other officials went to Rome in October 1301. While he was away, the Blacks seized Florence, and Dante was put on trial for corruption. He was ordered to pay a fine and admit guilt. He refused. The sentence was then escalated to exile—if he returned, he would be burned alive.
Within a few years of his exile, he was crafting a long poem that would follow his fictional journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise. Painstakingly arranged, down to the number of lines in each stanza, The Divine Comedy makes order out of the chaos of Italian politics and resolves Dante’s yearning for redemption.
He began with the Inferno. (Writing about Hell fresh from the humiliation of exile had to have been cathartic.) Dante organized Hell into nine circles, each with its own category of sins and gruesome punishments tailored to fit the offenses. Then he populated each circle with a few of his enemies—including Boniface VIII, stuck in the eighth circle for simony (selling perks of the church). Boniface was still alive at the date of Inferno’s tale, but why let that detail get in the way of poetic justice?
The city council of Florence voted to exonerate Dante in 2008.
When Dante wasn’t casting his enemies into Hell, he was indulging in gross humor. One part of the epic poem describes a demon leader who signals his minions by making “a trumpet of his ass.”
But it wasn’t all jokes and vengeance. After the Inferno and Purgatorio, Dante ended with Paradiso, in which he has a vision of Heaven and at last attains spiritual redemption. He never did return to Florence though.
- 3: Canticles, or sections, in The Divine Comedy
- 5,000 florins: Fine Dante refused to pay
- 33: Cantos, or chapters in each section of The Divine Comedy—plus 1 extra in the Inferno
- 1671: Welsh pirate Henry Morgan lands at Panama
- 1880: Thomas Edison patents the incandescent lamp
- 1967: The treaty banning nuclear weapons in space opens for signing
