The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

Crown at Rome, and died in the following year. “But the end of his career drew on,” says Milman, History of Latin Christianity, VI 520. “He had now advanced, at the head of an army which his enemies dared not meet in the field, towards Siena. He rode still, seemingly in full vigor and activity. But the fatal air of Rome had smitten his strength. A carbuncle had formed under his knee; injudicious remedies inflamed his vitiated blood. He died at Buonconvento, in the midst of his awestruck army, on the festival of St. Bartholomew. Rumors of foul practice, of course, spread abroad; a Dominican monk was said to have administered poison in the Sacrament, which he received with profound devotion. His body was carried in sad state, and splendidly interred at Pisa.

“So closed that empire, in which, if the more factious and vulgar Ghibellines beheld their restoration to their native city, their triumph, their revenge, their sole administration of public affairs, the nobler Ghibellinism of Dante foresaw the establishment of a great universal monarchy necessary to the peace and civilization of mankind. The ideal sovereign of Dante’s famous treatise on Monarchy was Henry of Luxembourg. Neither Dante nor his time can be understood but through this treatise. The attempt of the Pope to raise himself to a great pontifical monarchy had manifestly ignominiously failed: the Ghibelline is neither amazed nor distressed at this event. It is now the turn of the Imperialist to unfold his noble vision. ‘An universal monarchy is absolutely necessary for the welfare of the world’; and this is part of his singular reasoning: ‘Peace,’ (says the weary exile, the man worn out in cruel strife, the wanderer from city to city, each of those cities m’ore fiercely torn by faction than the last,) ‘universal Peace is the first blessing of mankind. The angels sang, not riches or pleasures, but peace on earth: peace the Lord bequeathed to his disciples. For peace One must rule. Mankind is most like God when at unity, for God is One; therefore under a monarchy. Where there is parity there must be strife; where strife, judgment; the judge must be a third party intervening with supreme authority.’ Without monarchy can be no justice, nor even liberty; for Dante’s monarch is no arbitrary despot, but a constitutional sovereign; he is the Roman law impersonated in the Emperor; a monarch who should leave all the nations, all the free Italian cities, in possession of, their rights and old municipal institutions.” ↩

The two noble families of Verona, the Montagues and Capulets, whose quarrels have been made familiar to the English-speaking world by Romeo and Juliet:⁠—

“Three civil brawls, bred of an airy word,
By thee, old Capulet and Montague,
Have thrice disturbed the quiet of our streets,
And made Verona’s ancient citizens
Cast by their grave beseeming ornaments,
To wield old partisans, in hands as old,
Cankered with peace, to part your cankered hate.”

↩

Families of Orvieto. ↩

Santafiore is in the neighborhood of Siena, and much infested with banditti. ↩

The state of Rome in Dante’s time is thus described by Mr. Norton, Travel and Study, pp. 246⁠–⁠248:⁠—

“On the slope of the Quirinal Hill, in the quiet enclosure of the convent of St. Catharine of Siena, stands a square, brick tower, seven stories high. It is a conspicuous object in any general view of Rome; for there are few other towers so tall, and there is not a single spire or steeple in the city. It is the Torre delle Milizie. It was begun by Pope Gregory the Ninth, and finished near the end of the thirteenth century by his vigorous and warlike successor, Boniface the Eighth. Many such towers were built for the purposes of private warfare, in those times when the streets of Rome were the fightingplaces of its noble families; but this is, perhaps, the only one that now remains undiminished in height and unaltered in appearance. It was a new building when Dante visited Rome; and it is one of the very few edifices that still preserve the aspect they then presented. The older ruins have been greatly changed in appearance, and most of the structures of the Middle Ages have disappeared, in the vicissitudes of the last few centuries. The Forum was then filled with a confused mass of ruins and miserable dwellings, with no street running through their intricacies. The Capitol was surrounded with uneven battlemented walls, and bore the character and look of an irregular citadel. St. Peter’s was a low basilica; the Colosseum had suffered little from the attacks of Popes or princes, neither the Venetian nor the Farnese palace having as yet been built with stones from its walls; and centuries were still to pass before Michel Angelo, Bernini, and Borromini were to stamp its present character upon the face of the modern city. The siege and burning of Rome by Robert Guiscard, in 1084, may be taken as the dividing-line between the city of the Emperors and the city of the Popes, between ancient and modern Rome.⁠ ⁠… Rome was in a state of too deep depression, its people were too turbulent and unsettled, to have either the spirit or the opportunity for great works. There was no established and recognized authority, no regular course of justice. There was not even any strong force, rarely any overwhelming violence, which for a time at least could subdue opposition, and organize a steady, and consequently a beneficent tyranny. The city was continually distracted by petty personal quarrels, and by bitter family feuds. Its obscure annals are full of bloody civil victories and defeats⁠—victories which brought no gain to those who won them, defeats which taught no lesson to those who lost them. The breath of liberty never inspired with life the dead clay of Rome; and though for a time it might seem to kindle some vital heat, the glow soon grew cold, and speedily disappeared. The records