forgotten
MVP SEASON ENDED
January 27, 1302
Florence, Italy
Dante Alighieri, star of the Florence White Guelphs and league MVP last year, is out for the season after sustaining an injury in a heated contest against the Black Guelphs last night.
The veteran Dante has always been a fierce competitor and fan favorite. He’ll be missed.
The normally raucous Florentine crowd fell silent when, early in the game, a vicious hit was put on Dante. He was obviously dazed by a blow to the head. The team trainer later reported that Dante was seeing stars. One teammate claimed he was seeing angels and demons.
Some locals expressed concern at the increasing violence of the game. One frustrated White Guelph fan vented,
“There’s too many injuries nowadays. There ought to be some kind of concussion protocol or something.”
But Florentine fans are taking it in stride. One spectator, wearing a new Black Guelph jersey, wasn’t bothered by the violence. He let his opinion be known:
“Gimme a break, that’s why they wear helmets. Get up and get back into the game.”
One smiling boy spoke for all the fans when he said,
“That’s Florence.”
But seriously…
1/1/25
Thirteenth century Florence was divided into two warring factions, reinforced by complicated family loyalties. The two sides were known as the Ghibellines and the Guelphs. Ostensibly the beef was over support of the Pope versus the Holy Roman Emperor, but it had the feel of a rivalry for the sake of rivalry.
It was almost a game, but a deadly game with far-reaching consequences.
After petty fracases, assassinations and reprisals, the Ghibellines won a pitched battle in 1260 at Montaperti, and banished the Guelphs.
In an attempt to wipe out the memory of their enemies, the victors were about to burn down the entire city. One man persuaded them to limit the damage: they only destroyed 103 palaces, 580 houses, and 85 towers.
This game was for more than bragging rights.
New Enemies
The Guelphs came back and won the rematch in 1289 at the Battle of Campaldino. But the spirit of rivalry wouldn’t let the Guelphs enjoy their power.
These passionate, contentious people, living and dying shoulder-to-shoulder for generations while they squabbled and intermarried, were locked together in a struggle of love and hate among family, friends and neighbors. They just couldn’t get along.
So they turned on each other, dividing into two camps- the White Guelphs, led by Vieri de’ Cerchi, and the Black Guelphs, led by Corso Donati.
The Cerchis and the Donatis were next-door neighbors. Corso himself had been married to a Cherchi.
Dante came from the same neighborhood. His wife was a cousin to Corso Donati, but he sided with the Whites- a fateful decision.
A Pilgrim
Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 into the odd, compulsive balance between Heaven and Hell that was Florence. He was firmly rooted in city politics, serving a term as prior (one of six city leaders), cavalryman, and ambassador. Yet he was also a dreamer, idolizing a woman named Beatrice as the ideal of feminine beauty and goodness.
He was also gifted with an intense capacity for spiritual truths and introspection. And the unique ability to document his quest in words of vibrant imagery.
His political decisions would oust him from his home; his religious yearnings would take shape in a poem about a pilgrim trying to make his way through Hell to Heaven.
Exile
On January 27, 1302, Dante was in Rome as a Florentine ambassador. He was tried in absentia and sentenced to death. This was payback: Dante had participated in the decision to exile a Black Guelph two years earlier.
He would never return to Florence.
His loss was literature’s gain; in exile he wrote the Divine Comedy, the great allegorical religious poem of the Middle Ages.
The Poem is a three-part journey, through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise.
The rhythms of life in Florence had been marriages and communion and feast days, punctuated by petty squabbles and betrayals leading to violence.
Dante now experienced the rhythm of exile, on the move from city to city as he could find a patron- from Casentino to Verona to Ravenna, where he finished his poem- always yearning to be welcomed back to his beloved Florence.
Other exiles were allowed to return. Dante’s mentor, the poet Brunetto Latini, began, while in exile, a poem called the Tesoretto- a visionary journey like the Divine Comedy. He was invited back to Florence- and never completed it.
At the start of Paradiso XXV, Dante expressed his hope of return:
Should it ever come to pass that the sacred poem
To which heaven and earth have set their hand
So that it has made me lean through many a year,
Should overcome the cruelty that shuts me out
From the fair sheepfold where I used to sleep,
A lamb, for the wolves who war upon it
With a changed voice now, and with changed fleece,
I will return a poet, and at the font
Of my baptism I will take the laurel crown.
Vengeance
He would never achieve his dream of returning to his beloved Florence in triumph.
The city he loved, the city that inspired him, the city he put on the literary map… in her vengeance never let him back into the fold.
In fact, his death sentence was later extended to his three sons; the Florentines had long memories when wiping out the memory of a foe.
Florence would experience future glory days, when the powerful banking house of the Medici ruled the city-republic; and Michelangelo and Botticelli, inspired by her sights and nourished by her culture, gave visual shape to the Renaissance.
But it was the irrational cauldron of murderous, peevish, vengeful family skirmishing of the thirteenth century that inspired a forgotten native son, driven to forlorn exile, to create the greatest poem ever written.
Sources
Dante, R. W. B. Lewis
Dante: the Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, Barbara Reynolds
