HKB
[Footnote 34: Inf. c. 3, 60.]
A French prince was sent by the Pope to mediate and make peace in Florence. The Black Guelfs and Corso Donati came with him. The magistrates were overawed and perplexed. The White party were, step by step, amused, entrapped, led blindly into false plots, entangled in the elaborate subtleties, and exposed with all the zest and mockery, of Italian intrigue--finally chased out of their houses and from the city, condemned unheard, outlawed, ruined in name and property, by the Pope's French mediator. With them fell many citizens who had tried to hold the balance between the two parties: for the leaders of the Black Guelfs were guilty of no errors of weakness. In two extant lists of the proscribed--condemned by default, for corruption and various crimes, especially for hindering the entrance into Florence of Charles de Valois, to a heavy fine and banishment--then, two months after, for contumacy, to be burned alive if he ever fell into the hands of the Republic--appears the name of Dante Alighieri; and more than this, concerning the history of his expulsion, we know not.[35]
[Footnote 35: Pelli, Memorie per servire alla vita di Dante. Fir. 1823, pp. 105, 106.]
Of his subsequent life, history tells us little more than the general character. He acted for a time in concert with the expelled party, when they attempted to force their way back to Florence; he gave them up at last in scorn and despair: but he never returned to Florence. And he found no new home for the rest of his days. Nineteen years, from his exile to his death, he was a wanderer. The character is stamped on his writings. History, tradition, documents, all scanty or dim, do but disclose him to us at different points, appearing here and there, we are not told how or why. One old record, discovered by antiquarian industry, shows him in a village church near Florence, planning, with the Cerchi and the White party, an attack on the Black Guelfs. In another, he appears in the Val di Magra, making peace between its small potentates: in another, as the inhabitant of a certain street in Padua. The traditions of some remote spots about Italy still connect his name with a ruined tower, a mountain glen, a cell in a convent. In the recollections of the following generation, his solemn and melancholy form mingled reluctantly, and for awhile, in the brilliant court of the Scaligers; and scared the women, as a visitant of the other world, as he passed by their doors in the streets of Verona. Rumour brings him to the West--with probability to Paris, more doubtfully to Oxford. But little certain can be made out about the places where he was an honoured and admired, but it may be, not always a welcome guest, till we find him sheltered, cherished, and then laid at last to rest, by the Lords of Ravenna. There he still rests, in a small, solitary chapel, built, not by a Florentine, but a Venetian. Florence, "that mother of little love," asked for his bones; but rightly asked in vain.[36] His place of repose is better in those remote and forsaken streets "by the shore of the Adrian Sea," hard by the last relics of the Roman Empire--the mausoleum of the children of Theodosius, and the mosaics of Justinian--than among the assembled dead of S. Croce, or amid the magnificence of S. Maria del Fiore.[37]
[Footnote 36: See Dr. Barlow's Sixth Centenary Festivals of Dante. (1866.)]