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under any sky without first giving myself up inglorious, nay, ignominious, to the populace and city of Florence?
Nor shall I want for bread.’
Dionisi puts the date of this letter in 1315.1 He is certainly wrong, for the decree is dated December 11, 1316.
Foscolo places it in 1316, Troya early in 1317, and both may be right, as the year began March 25.
Whatever the date of Dante's visit to Voltaire's great Khan2 of Verona, or the length of his stay with him, may have been, it is certain that he was in Ravenna in 1320, and that, on his return thither from an embassy to Venice (concerning which a curious letter, forged probably by Doni, is extant), he died on September 14, 1321 (13th, according to others). He was buried at Ravenna under a monument built by his friend, Guido Novello.3 Dante is said to have dictated
1 Under this date (1315) a 4th condemnatio against Dante is mentioned facta in anno 1316 de mense Octobris per D. Rainerium, D. Zachario de Urbeveteri, olim et tunc vicarium regium civitatis Florentioe, etc. It is found recited in the decree under which in 1342 Jacopo di Dante redeemed a portion of his father's property, to wit: Una possession cum vinea et cum domibus super ea, combustis et non combustis, posita in populo S. Miniatis de Pagnlao. In the domibus combustis we see the blackened traces of Dante's kinsman by marriage, Corso Donati, who plundered and burnt the houses of the exiled Bianchi, during the occupation of the city by Charles of Valois. (See ‘De Romanis,’ notes on Tiraboschi's Life of Dante, in the Florence ed. of 1830, Vol. V. p. 119.)
2 Voltaire's blunder has been made part of a serious theory by Mons. E. Aroux, who gravely assures us that, during the Middle Ages, Tartar was only a cryptonym by which heretics knew each other, and adds: Il n'y a done pas trop à s'etonner des noms bizarres de Mastino et de Cane donnes d ces Della Scala. (Dante, heretique, revolutionnaire, et socialiste, Paris, 1854, pp. 118-120.)
3 If no monument at all was built by Guido, as is asserted by Balbo (Vita, I. Lib. II. Cap. XVII.), whom De Vericour copies without question, we are at a loss to account for the preservation of the original epitaph replaced by Cardinal Bembo when he built the new tomb, in 1483. Bembo's own inscription implies an already existing monument, and, if in disparaging terms, yet epitaphial Latin verses are not to be taken too literally, considering the exigencies of that branch of literary ingenuity. The doggerel Latin has been thought by some unworthy of Dante, as Shakespeare's doggerel English epitaph has been thought unworthy of him. In both cases the rudeness of the verses seems to us a proof of authenticity. An enlightened posterity with unlimited superlatives at command, and in an age when stone-cutting was cheap, would have aimed at something more befitting the occasion. It is certain, at least in Dante's case, that Cardinal Bembo would never have inserted in the very first words an allusion to the De Monarchia, a book long before condemned as heretical.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, Boston, 1876.
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