fell in love with a little girl named
Beatrice Portinari, eight years old. "Although still a child" to quote
Boccaccio his earliest biographer "he received her image into his heart
with such affection that from that day forward never so long as he
lived, did it depart therefrom." She became the wife of Simone dei
Bardi, and died in her twenty-fourth year, the subject of many sonnets
from her mystic lover who, if he had never written anything else, would
have been entitled, by his book of sonnets, his New Life, to rank as a
poet of the first class.

Two years after the death of Beatrice, Dante married Gemma Donati, a
member of an old aristocratic family of Florence and by her had four
children. In the period between the death of Beatrice and his marriage
he had seen military service, having borne arms as a Guelph at the
battle of Campaldino (Purg. V, 91-129) in which the Florentines defeated
the Ghibelline league of Arezzo and he took part at the siege of Caprona
and was present at its surrender by the Pisans (Inf., XXI, 95.) When he
was thirty years old he became a member of the Special Council of the
Republic, consisting of eight of the best and most influential citizens
and in 1300, at the age of thirty-five, midway in the journey of his
life, he was elected one of the six Priors (chief magistrates of his
city) for the months of June and July. Shortly after this Dante with
three others went to Rome on an embassy to Pope Boniface VIII to get
that pontiff's veto to the intervention of Charles de Valois, brother
of Philip IV of France, in the affairs of Florence. But there was delay
in the transaction of the business and that gave the stranger time to
win the city by treachery. When the news reached Dante, he hurried
homeward. At Sienna he learned that his house had been pillaged and
burned and he himself had been accused of malfeasance in office. Without
a trial he was condemned to a heavy fine and to perpetual banishment
under penalty that if he returned he would be burned alive. Then began
his twenty years' exile--years in which he went sometimes almost begging
and at all times even when he was an honored guest in the home of
nobility--knowing as only an exile can know "how bitter is the bread of
dependence and how steep the stranger's stairs." It was during his exile
that Dante completed his immortal Divina Commedia, the child of his
thought "cradled into poetry by wrong." Dante never again saw Florence
for which he