Gradually the Guelfs recovered, and in 1266 they completely and finally crushed their enemies at Benevento. Thus ended the worst of this partisan strife from which, as Machiavelli was to write, “there resulted more murders, banishments and destruction of families than ever in any city known to history.”

Dante Alighieri had been born the preceding year, 1265, toward the end of May; he was a year old when his family (a typically Guelf mixture of lesser nobility and burgher) must have joined in the celebration of their party’s victory. His whole impressionable childhood was undoubtedly filled with stories of the struggle so recently ended. The fascination it had for him is evident in the Comedy, where it is an important factor in the Inferno and the lower, “material” portion of Purgatory.

Our actual knowledge of Dante’s life is disappointingly small, limited to a few documents of record. The biographies, beginning with Boccaccio’s about fifty years after his death, are largely hearsay, legend and deductions based on his works and the meager references scattered through them. We know that his mother died when he was very young, that his father remarried, and that Dante was completely orphaned in adolescence. This is thought to account for a certain hunger for parental affection which can be noted in the Comedy. He doubtless received the normal education of the day for his class, and perhaps more, for his bent must have been clearly intellectual and literary. That he took an early interest in the vernacular lyric only recently borrowed from the Provençal is demonstrated by poems dating from his middle or late ’teens. It was through this activity that he made his closest friendship, that with Guido Cavalcanti, who was a gifted poet some years Dante’s senior.

Most of our impressions about his youth are gleaned from his first work, in the planning of which Cavalcanti had a part. Called La Vita Nuova (“The New Life”), it was deliberately written in the vernacular in 1292 to celebrate the most important influence in Dante’s life, his love for Beatrice Portinari. It is made up of sonnets and longer lyrics interspersed with prose passages which explain and narrate the circumstances under which the poems had been composed years earlier. An astonishing feature of the book is the careful symmetry of its arrangement where the balance of three, nine and ten foreshadows the elaborate design which will be worked out in the Comedy. Very briefly, it is the story of a boy of nine suddenly awaking to love at the eight of a girl of almost the same age; of a second encounter at the age of 18 when a greeting is exchanged; of tribulations and misunderstandings leading to her disapproval; of her sudden death when the poet was 25, his grief and attempted consolation by another girl; finally of a “marvelous vision” of his Beatrice when he was 27, thus completing the trinity of “nines” and determining him to write no more of her until he could do so worthily. Although it is autobiographical, the Vita Nuova is not an autobiography; it is a delicate and sensitive analysis of emotions. Such facts as enter into it assume an air of strange unreality.

From our small array of factual data we learn that Dante’s life in this period included other things than tremulous sighs and visions. In 1289 he took part in the battle of Campaldino and the capture of Caprona. In 1295 appears the first record of his political activity. In the same year he made himself eligible for public office by enrolling in a guild, the Apothecaries’, where the books of that day were sold. In the following year it is recorded that he spoke in the “Council of the Hundred.” By 1299 he had advanced to fill a minor ambassadorship. In the meantime he married Gemma, sister of his friend Forese Donati and of the hot-tempered Corso. As the mature but still youthful Alighieri was playing an ever more prominent role in politics, familiar tensions were once again building up within the republic. Thirty years without a serious threat from their common enemy put too great a strain on Guelf unity; and again it was a murder, though in nearby Pistoia, which precipitated open conflict. The Florentines took sides and in the late spring of 1300 the two parties, called “Blacks” and “Whites,” fought in the streets. It was at this particular moment that Dante’s political career was crowned with the highest success and he was elected one of the six supreme magistrates, called priors. Himself a moderate White, he found it necessary during the two-month term to join in banishing his brother-in-law, Corso Donati, and his “first friend,” Guido Cavalcanti, as ringleaders respectively of the Blacks and Whites. (Cavalcanti died very soon of an illness contracted during his banishment.) As friction continued, the Blacks conspired for the intervention of the Pope, Boniface VIII, who was delighted with the chance to strengthen the Papacy’s claim on Tuscany. In spite of frantic White opposition he sent Charles of Valois ostensibly as impartial arbitrator and peacemaker. What the Pope’s secret orders were became instantly apparent when Charles was admitted in November 1301, for he set upon the Whites, admitted the banished Blacks and stood by as they gave themselves over to murder and pillage. The matter was then legitimized by a series of “purge trials” of the sort only too familiar to us. Among those accused, and of course convicted, of graft and corruption in office was Dante Alighieri.