The Journey Takes Place in 1300
The action is dated to Holy Week of 1300, which tradition places on Good Friday, and 1300 was a Jubilee year: Pope Boniface VIII proclaimed a Jubilee, granting remission of sins to whoever went to Rome, and the city filled with pilgrims, Dante among them. The date matters for the reading, because everything that happens after 1300 appears in the poem as prophecy on the lips of the dead, including Dante's own exile, which he was already living when he wrote.
Florence Divided
Dante was born in Florence in 1265, into a family of means but without nobility, which claimed descent from one of the city's founding families. Florence was divided between Guelphs, partisans of the pope, and Ghibellines, partisans of the emperor. In power, the Guelphs split into Whites, tied to the Cerchi family and defenders of popular participation, and Blacks, tied to the Donati family and closer to the pope. Dante was a White Guelph. He fought in the Florentine cavalry at Campaldino, in 1289, and in 1300 was one of the six priors, a magistracy of about two months, elected by the guilds to take power from the nobility.
The Banishment
During Dante's priorate, the priors exiled leaders of both parties, among them the poet Guido Cavalcanti, Dante's friend, who contracted malaria and died. Corso Donati, leader of the Blacks, conspired with Boniface VIII, who sent Charles of Valois to Florence as a peacemaker. In October 1301 the Whites sent ambassadors to the pope, possibly with Dante among them; while the pope kept them waiting, Charles of Valois handed the city over to the Blacks, who banished the Whites. Dante was sentenced to exile, to a heavy fine, and to the loss of his property, accused of being a Ghibelline and of having diverted public money. He passed through Verona, where he was welcomed by Bartolomeo della Scala, and through Bologna, changing cities and serving several lords, and he died in exile, in Ravenna.
Much of the Inferno is the settling of accounts for this defeat: Dante places Florentines, living and dead, inside the poem and makes the dead judge the living who still govern the city, and the dead who speak with him, from Ciacco to Brunetto, announce what will happen to him.
Dante Before the Inferno
He studied the trivium and quadrivium and read the classics, among them Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Cicero, and Statius; Brunetto Latini, who reappears in canto XV, was one of his teachers. From the age of seventeen his sonnets, from the time of courtly love, were in circulation. He wrote the Vita Nuova, poems dedicated to Beatrice Portinari, whom, according to tradition, he met at the age of nine and who died in 1290, at twenty-four, and the Convivio, in which he links Beatrice to Theology and a second woman, the Donna Gentile, to Philosophy. In Latin, he began the De Vulgari Eloquentia, in defense of the vernacular, the very language in which he wrote the poem.
A Journey to the Other World Was Already a Genre
The journey of a living man to the world of the dead was a common theme in the Middle Ages, used to teach through the fear of hell, and Dante did not invent it from nothing. The closest model is Book VI of the Aeneid, in which the Sibyl leads Aeneas to the underworld, where he meets his father, Anchises, and sees the future of Rome; the Odyssey has another descent, in Book XI. The Spanish scholar Miguel Asín Palacios pointed out, in 1919, similarities between the Commedia and earlier Arabic narratives about the journey to the afterlife.
In both ancient poems the hero descends to the world of the dead and returns as he was. Dante is the only one who returns changed, because his journey is the only one that crosses the three realms to the end, and the Inferno is the first stage of that change.
How the Inferno Is Built
The Inferno is a funnel dug beneath Jerusalem, which descends in nine circles to the center of the Earth. The order of the circles is the one Virgil explains in canto XI, drawing on Aristotle's Ethics:
- Circle 1, Limbo: the virtuous without baptism, and Virgil himself. The punishment is the absence of hope, not torment.
- Circles 2 to 5, incontinence: lust, gluttony, avarice and prodigality, wrath. Appetite overcame reason.
- Circles 6 and 7, heresy, in tombs ablaze within the city of Dis, and violence: against one's neighbor, against oneself, and against God and nature.
- Circle 8, Malebolge: fraud against those who did not particularly trust the one who deceived them, in ten ditches.
- Circle 9, Cocytus: treachery, fraud against those who did trust, in four zones of ice, with Lucifer at the center.
The order holds that the sins of desire are the lightest and those of corrupted intelligence the gravest. Dante places the lustful near the entrance and the traitor at the bottom because fraud uses what makes us like God to undo the bond between people.
The Title, the Language, and the Form
The poem is called Commedia; the «Divina» was added later and is attributed to Boccaccio. It is written in the vernacular Tuscan, not in Latin, and it is because of this choice that literary Italian exists. The stanza is the terza rima, ABA BCB CDC, in which each stanza links the next by a rhyme, and the chain closes only in the last verse. The first of the 34 cantos of the Inferno is the prologue of the entire poem; the three realms have 100 cantos in all.
A Poem with More Than One Sense
In the letter to Cangrande della Scala, which accompanies the dedication of Paradise, Dante says that the meaning of the work is not simple but polysemous, because one is the literal sense and another the sense of the things signified. The Inferno itself warns, in canto IX, that there is a doctrine hidden beneath the veil of the verses.
Allegory is not an ornament stuck onto the poem: it is the instrument with which Dante placed within the vision of the other world everything that exists, from Beatrice and the streets of Florence to the pope and the emperor, and for this reason the episodes of flesh and blood, such as Francesca, Ugolino, and Ulysses, sustain the doctrine instead of competing with it.