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January 1302Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Dante Is Exiled From Florence and Writes the Divine Comedy

A false corruption charge and a death sentence send Florence's greatest poet into permanent exile

On the timeline · around January 1302 · Medieval Italy and the City-StatesMedieval Italy and the City-StatesRenaissance and Foreign RuleDante Is Exiled From Florence and Writes the Divine Comedy100011001200130014001500

Quick facts

Exiled
January 1302
Sentence if he returned
Death by burning
Divine Comedy completed
c. 1319
Died in exile
September 13, 1321, Ravenna

What happened

Dante Alighieri, a Florentine poet active in the city's factional politics, was charged with corruption by officials from a rival political faction in January 1302. The charges were fabricated, but the sentence, to be burned at the stake if he returned to Florence, was real, and Dante left the city rather than face it. He never returned, spending the rest of his life moving through central and northern Italian courts while his wife Gemma Donati and their children remained in Florence. It was during this wandering exile that Dante wrote his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, an epic poem imagining a journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, which he completed around 1319. He died of malaria in Ravenna on September 13, 1321, still in exile.

Why it matters

The Divine Comedy became one of the founding works of the Italian vernacular language and one of the most influential poems in European literature, but it was written entirely in exile by a man permanently barred from the city that inspired much of its imagery and politics. Dante's fate is a vivid illustration of how violent and personal Florentine communal politics could be even in a city that would soon become a center of the Renaissance.

How we know

Dante's exile, the fabricated corruption charges, and his death in Ravenna are documented in Florentine civic and judicial records of the period and in early biographical accounts written by fellow Florentines, including Giovanni Boccaccio, who lectured publicly on Dante's work in Florence starting in 1373.

Sources

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