How Dante’s Inferno Was a Fiery Act of Political Payback

On the dawn of Good Friday in 1300, Dante Alighieri followed the spirit of the ancient Roman poet Virgil into the underworld. So begins “Inferno,” the opening of Alighieri’s narrative epic The Divine Comedy. The sprawling work, completed between 1308 and 1321, contains over 14,200 lines that trace the Florentine poet’s allegorical journey through the Christian afterlife.

The juiciest section of Alighieri’s masterpiece is “Inferno.” After meeting Virgil in the dark woods, Alighieri and his classical counterpart travel throughout hell’s nine concentric circles. These rings form a funnel toward the center of the Earth, where the monstrous, three-headed Satan is entombed in ice.

Each circle is home to the increasingly wicked souls who are perpetually tormented in relation to their sins: the gluttonous wallow in icy filth, the greedy continually push heavy weights, and the wrathful fight and claw one another to reach the surface of the boiling River Styx. Torturing the damned souls are a succession of devils and mythical monsters, including three-headed hounds, arrow-shooting centaurs and hungry harpies.

While the journey is fantastical, Alighieri grounds his epic by weaving in the stories of several figures from his own day and age. These fictionalizations helped the poet set the record straight in the aftermath of his banishment from his native Florence in 1302 after his political faction lost power, explains Alison Cornish, a professor of medieval Italian literature at New York University and the president of the Dante Society of America. Alighieri would spend the rest of his life in exile.

By incorporating real historical details, Alighieri’s sprawling narrative resonates with readers centuries later. “On the one hand, The Divine Comedy is an autobiography,” Cornish says. “But it also uses the personal and the local in order to tell this universal story.” Here are a few of the real people Alighieri depicts in his descent through hell.

In the sixth circle of hell, Alighieri and his guide Virgil encounter the Florentine nobleman Farinata degli Uberti entombed in a flaming sarcophagus. Uberti was a leader of a group of feudal aristocrats known as the Ghibellines, who supported the authority of the Holy Roman Emperor. Many Florentine merchants, including Alighieri’s family, belonged to a faction called the Guelphs, who promoted the power of the papacy.

The two groups frequently quarreled, and the Guelphs were exiled from Florence twice in the 1200s. But shortly after Uberti died in 1264, the Guelphs returned to power in the city. In 1283, Uberti’s body was exhumed and posthumously condemned for heresy.

His soul does not fare any better in “Inferno.” As punishment for allegedly questioning eternal life, Uberti is interred in flames. Even worse: He shares his fiery coffin with a Guelph, emphasizing that the political divides in Alighieri’s day seemed eternal.

In the fifth circle of hell, Alighieri and Virgil board a boat to cross the underworld’s River Styx, which is filled with the flailing bodies of the wrathful. Alighieri recognizes one of the souls as Filippo Argenti, a Florentine magnate and a prominent Guelph.

While Alighieri and Argenti were both Guelphs, they were political foes (it’s rumored that Argenti’s brother even stole Alighieri’s land after his exile). This is because after the Guelphs vanquished the Ghibellines in Florence, the group splintered into the Black Guelphs, who still supported the pope, and the White Guelphs, who were wary of the papacy’s governing power.

Alighieri was a White Guelph, Argenti a Black Guelph. The divide between them persisted into the afterlife. In “Inferno,” the hot-tempered Argenti accosts his fellow Florentine and tries to board the boat. The other wrathful souls drag Argenti back into the river as he begins to tear at himself with his own teeth. Alighieri leaves his ranting rival behind: “We left him there; I tell no more of him.”

Alighieri had not seen the last Black Guelph of his journey. As the poet descends deeper into the eighth circle of hell, he reaches a lake of boiling tar filled with fraudulent officials accused of taking bribes for political favors. Keeping the sinners in the piping hot pitch are demons armed with grappling hooks.

According to Cornish, this enclave of hell was particularly important to Alighieri: After the poet was banished from Florence, his adversaries accused him of corruption. “He’s very bitter about that,” Cornish says. “He’s ready to admit a lot of sins, but he really refuted that he was a corrupt politician.” She thinks it’s no coincidence that the demons preventing the Black Guelphs from escaping are often depicted as little black devils.

Elsewhere in the eighth circle, Alighieri and Virgil come across another group of fraudulent sinners: members of the Catholic church accused of taking payments for church offices and sacred objects.

These corrupt clergymen, which include several deceased popes from Alighieri’s lifetime, are buried head-first in a steaming ditch while flames lick their exposed feet. Alighieri even learns that a hole is being kept warm for Pope Boniface VIII, who was still alive in 1300 when “Inferno” is set (Boniface died in 1303). Pope Boniface pushed papal power to its limits and supported the ouster of Alighieri and other White Guelphs from Florence.

Pope Boniface’s political ambitions dismayed Alighieri, who believed he should focus on his spiritual authority. However, a lack of a centralized emperor or king in medieval Italy had left a power vacuum that some popes were eager to fill. In Alighieri’s opinion, this diminished the church.

“Pope Boniface represents the church getting involved and meddling in secular affairs in a way that is extremely damaging,” Cornish says. “Once the Pope has an army and taxes he needs to collect and territory to conquer, you no longer have that spiritual guidance that’s uninfected.”

In the end, “Inferno” is far more than a vivid catalog of punishments and monsters. It is Alighieri’s deeply personal reckoning with the political and spiritual failures of his world.