Dante writes the Divine Comedy

Dante, a Florentine White Guelph who had served as one of the city’s priors in 1300, was sentenced to exile in March 1302, after troops of Charles of Valois, sent at the request of Pope Boniface VIII, had helped the Black Guelphs to power. He never returned. He lived for a time at Verona under the della Scala, and in 1316–1318 (the sources differ) he settled in Ravenna at the invitation of its lord, Guido da Polenta; he died there on the night of 13–14 September 1321, of malaria caught on an embassy to Venice. The poem was written in these years of wandering: Italian scholars date the beginning of the Inferno to 1304–1305 or 1306–1307; by one widely used dating the Inferno belongs to about 1306–1309, the Purgatorio to about 1308–1312 and the Paradiso to about 1315–1321, and the Paradiso was finished at Ravenna. No manuscript in Dante’s own hand survives, but the Italian Dante Society lists some 800 copies from the 14th and 15th centuries.

The Comedy has 14,233 lines in terza rima, the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme whose first use is attributed to Dante, arranged in three cantiche of 33 cantos each and an introductory canto. Its action is set at Easter 1300: Virgil guides the poet through Hell and most of Purgatory, Beatrice through the heavenly spheres and Bernard of Clairvaux in the last cantos. The poem draws on scholastic theology, above all on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas — in the Heaven of the Sun Aquinas himself tells the life of St Francis of Assisi — and is full of the politics of Florence and Italy: prophecies of Dante’s exile, his longing for a strong emperor and the damnation of some of his opponents.

The earliest known use of the adjective “divine” for the poem is in Boccaccio’s life of Dante, the Trattatello in laude di Dante (first version in the 1350s), and in 1373–1374 Boccaccio lectured publicly on the Comedy in the church of Santo Stefano di Badia in Florence. The first printed edition appeared in 1472, and the title Divina Comedia (“Divine Comedy”) first appeared in print in Lodovico Dolce’s edition of 1555. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio became known as the “three crowns” of Italian literature.