Saturday,
June 21, 2008
Dante Alighieri Pardoned 700 Years Later -
- What a Relief !!!!
The
ANNOTICO Report
Most
of us admire Dante for his being the Father of Western Literature. Few of us
know about his Political Involvement, and how it got him Sentenced to Death and
went into Exile from
Dante was
in the middle of the Guelphs and Ghibellines conflict,
and at the time of Pope Boniface VIII. Very interesting times!!!!
Return of Dante: the Guelphs
and the Ghibellines
The city
of
The
Independent.UK
Peter Popham
Thursday,
19 June 2008
Dante
Alighieri led two separate lives. As the author of The Divine Comedy he was the
genius whose evocations of hell, purgatory and heaven have held readers in
thrall ever since, who created literary models for the rest of Europe to follow
and brought Italian into being as a great literary language.
But
Dante was also a politician, and if, as Enoch Powell once said, "all
political careers end in failure", Dante's came crashing down when he was
still remarkably young. Checkmated by the cunning Pope Boniface VIII, he was
put on trial in
All that
happened 706 years ago, so it may seem a little late to do anything about it.
But this week
"It's
not a cultural rehabilitation," explained Dario Nardella,
the city's cultural commissar, "because that happened centuries ago: the
city long ago took Dante back in its heart. Rather it's an act of civic
rehabilitation, a way to re-establish the links between the city and the poet's
family, a gesture of esteem to erase the last remnants of hostility between
Dante and
The idea
did not meet with unmixed delight when it was debated by the committee.
"Many of my colleagues thought it was ridiculous," admitted Enrico Bosi, the councillor with Silvio Berlusconi's House of Freedom party who proposed the
idea. "They said it was superfluous, meaningless in today's world. Five councillors voted against, and many others didn't show up we were only quorate
by one vote."
Giovanni
Varrasi, a councillor with
the Green party, was one of the opponents. "Dante didn't ask to be
rehabilitated," he pointed out. "If he had asked for it while he was
alive they would probably have granted it. So the fact that he didn't ask for
it means that he had accepted his exile and his relations with
"The
whole thing is a manipulation of history and the idea of honouring
the aristocrat who is Dante's living heir [Conte Pieralvise
Serego Alighieri, a wine maker in Valpolicella]
is abnormal. The whole thing's a stunt, probably connected to that aristocratic
family," Mr Varrasi
added.
Dante
deeply resented his exile and plotted for years to get home. His bitterness found vent in Canto XVII of Paradiso:
(See Below)
Dante
Alighieri was born in
Broadly
speaking the Ghibellines backed the
The
White Guelphs, among whom Dante counted himself, were
the Liberal Democrats of their time. They strove to sit on the fence. They were for the pope,
but not very much for him. They thought he should have power, but not too much
power.
Dante's
political moment came in 1295 when the old aristocracy of the city was
banned from holding power and the rising middle class to which he
belonged was given its head. He was given a succession of political posts,
including ambassador to San Gimignano in 1300
and then in the same year was appointed "prior", one of the 100
leading citizens who ran the city in rotation. It was Dante's bad luck
that his rise to political power coincided with the papacy of Boniface VIII,
born Benedetto Caetani,
"a mysterious man," as the papal historian Eamon
Duffy describes him, "proud, ambitious, fierce" and also exceedingly wily.
Boniface
VIII showed a keen instinct for the Church's advantage. "It was
Boniface," writes Duffy, "who declared the first Jubilee or Holy Year
in 1300, when tens of thousands of pilgrims converged on Rome to gain
indulgences, adding enormously to the prestige of the papacy and the spiritual
centrality of Rome." All who visited St Peter's or St John Lateran
cathedrals that year after confessing their sins were promised "full and
copious pardon": the exercise "caught the imagination of
Europe", and so enriched
It was
Boniface, too, who in his bull of 1302, Unam Sanctam, laid matters clearly on the line: "It is
absolutely necessary for salvation that every human creature be
subject to the Roman pontiff."
Dante
had no hesitation in bowing to the pope's spiritual authority, but he and his fellow White Guelphs were strongly against the pope throwing his
temporal weight about in
When
Boniface sent another two-faced envoy to
Dante
began his wanderings. First stop was Verona, where Cangrande
I, one of the leading Ghibellines, became his host "the mighty Lombard" as Dante
wrote in Paradiso, whose home was his "earliest
refuge" and "earliest inn", and where his heirs have remained
ever since.
From
there he moved restlessly on to the courts of other mighty lords of central and
northern
But
finally the years of frustrated hopes hardened his heart: in 1315 he was
offered an amnesty, and friends and relatives wrote urging him him to come back. He rejected them
all, and in return was once again condemned to death, this time in company
with his children. He died in
NOTE:
Canto XVII of Paradiso:
"As forth from
by reason of his step-dame, false and
cruel,
so thou from
Thou shall abandon everything
Most tenderly, and this the arrow
is
Which fir st
the bow of banishment shoots forth
Thou shalt
have proof how savoureth of salt
The bread of others, and how hard a
road
The going down and up another's
stairs
Will be the bad and foolish
company
With which into this valley thou shalt fall..."
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