SOURCES OF OUR KNOWLEDGE OF DANTE OUR best knowledge of Dante we gain from his published works. Beginning with the quaint sonnet which he wrote when a youth of eighteen, after Beatrice had saluted him with such ineffable courtesy, and closing with the visio Dei, we have a marvelous self-revelation of the mind of the great Florentine. We must remember, however, that Dante is fashioning his works after poetical ideals, and we reach reliable historical data only by the patient stripping off of symbol and allegory. The historical and poetical are so intermingled that the creations of the imagination must not be mistaken for accurate statements of fact. Next in importance to Dante's self-disclosure in his works is our knowledge of him derived from his early biographers. We are exceedingly fortunate in possessing a reliable account of the impression the poet made upon his contemporaries. Pope Boniface VIII. proclaimed a jubilee lasting through the year 1300. Among the throngs which went to Rome was a young man whose mind was stirred to its depths by the sights and associations of the sacred city. "And I," writes Giovanni Villani,1 "finding myself on that blessed pilgrimage in the holy city of Rome, beholding the great and ancient things therein, and reading the stories and the great doings of the Romans, written by Virgil, and by Sallust, and by Lucan, and Titus Livius, and Valerius, and Paulus Orosius, and other masters of history, which wrote alike of small things as of great, of the deeds and actions of the Romans, and also of foreign nations throughout the 1 Selections from the Croniche Fiorentine of Villani, trans. by Selfe and Wicksteed, p. 321. world considering that our city of Florence, the daughter and creature of Rome, was rising, whilst Rome was declining, it seemed to me fitting to collect in this volume and chronicle all the deeds and beginnings of the city of Florence, in so far as it has been possible for me to find and gather them together, and to follow the doings of the Florentines in detail, and the other notable things of the universe in brief, as long as it shall be God's pleasure; in hope of whose grace rather than in my own poor learning, I have undertaken the said enterprise; and thus in the year 1300, having returned from Rome, I began to compile this book, in reverence to God and the blessed John, and in commendation of our city of Florence." Having a clear mind, and being accustomed to business and the observation of mankind, in his Cronica Fiorentina, which extends from Biblical times down to 1346, he has given us a vivid description of the intellectual, political, and economic life of his native city. Being a contemporary of Dante, the description of him is of incomparable value. I GIOVANNI VILLANI'S ACCOUNT OF DANTE1 IN the month of July, 1321, died the poet Dante Alighieri of Florence, in the city of Ravenna in Romagna, after his return from an embassy to Venice for the Lords of Polenta, with whom he resided; and in Ravenna before the door of the principal church he was interred with high honor, in the habit of a poet and great philosopher. He died in banishment from the community of Florence, at the age of about fifty-six. This Dante was an honorable and ancient citizen of Porta San Piero at Florence, and our neighbor; and his exile from Florence was on the occasion of Charles of Valois, of the house of France, coming to Florence in 1301, and the expulsion of the White party, as has already in its place been mentioned. The said Dante was of the supreme governors of our city, and of that party although a Guelf; and therefore without any other crime was with the said White party expelled and banished from Florence; and he went to the University of Bologna, and afterwards to Paris, and into many parts of the world. This was a great and learned person in almost every science, although a layman; he was a consummate poet and philosopher, and rhetori 1 Cronica, lib. ix. cap. 136. Tr. in Napier's Florentine History, book i. ch. 16. |