A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

when the father - John of Gaunt - died, seized his inheritance. At this point he made the mistake of
setting out on a punitive expedition to Ireland, whose natives were even in those days causing the
English endless trouble. His cousin seized the opportunity to return to England and by the time
Richard hurried back his power was in ruins. He was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he
died - history claims he starved himself to death. And his cousin proclaimed himself King Henry
IV. The whole drama was to intrigue William Shakespeare - who, like Arnold Toynbee, was
fascinated by the ‘horrifying sense of sin manifest in the conduct of human affairs’ and its root in
human weakness, but whose sense of history was insufficiently developed to allow him to respond
with anything more than a facile pessimism.
Pessimism was also the response of the greatest poet of his time to the new chaos that was
destroying the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri was unfortunate enough to be born in Florence - in
1265 - a city that was permanently divided by political squabbles. The old quarrel between
followers of the pope and of the emperor - Guelphs and Ghibellines - had become endlessly
complicated by feuds between families. Four thousand Guelphs - the party to which Dante’s family
belonged - were killed at the battle of Montaperto five years before he was born. Ghibellines reentered
the city in triumph six years later, but were almost immediately driven out again when their
champion, the Staufer emperor Manfred, was defeated at Benevento.
Dante was in his mid-thirties when the pope - Boniface VIII -sent in a ‘referee’ to investigate the
latest outbreak of bloodshed between the factions; one of the results was that Dante, who had
changed sides, was sent into exile, blamed for problems with which he was completely
unconnected. For the last twenty-one years of his life he wandered from city to city, dreaming of
the family from which he was separated, and of Beatrice, a girl with whom he had fallen in love at
the age of nine and who had died in her twenty-fifth year. It was during this time that he wrote his
long poem, The Divine Comedy.
The poem is the story of a kind of dream voyage, in which Dante is guided through hell and
purgatory by Virgil, then through paradise by Beatrice. It is the first - and greatest - epic poem of
the Middle Ages, and a revelation of the medieval mind. But the reader who expects it to be a
revelation of the religious spirit of St Francis and Cluny will be disappointed. Most of the poem is a
piece of savagely satirical journalism, concentrating on personalities and events of the day - rather
as if a modern poet had written an epic called the Nixonad about Watergate and modern American
politics. And for most of its length, the tone is relentlessly negative, a mixture of spite and self-pity.
Dante seems to be completely in the grip of vengeful daydreams about people he hates - precisely
the kind of vengefulness we have come to associate with the criminal. The Comedy makes us aware
that there was something stuffy and petty about the medieval mentality. The human race was still
trapped in a kind of suffocating literal-mindedness.
The irony is that this poem created a new form of literature, and showed a way out of the trap.
What appealed to Dante’s contemporaries was not the unhappy politician, spluttering bile about his
enemies; it was the unhappy lover, dreaming about the dead woman he had never even kissed. With
unerring instinct, Dante had chosen the precise image that would appeal to a sentimental age: the
great poet, bowed down with the weight of unjust exile, separated by death from the woman he
loved. In the fourteenth century, the image of Dante had much the same kind of appeal as that of
Rudolph Valentino in the twentieth. Unintentionally, Dante had created the romantic cult of the
individual.