Book i. cannot be much later than the beginning of that year. Dante’s

evident friendly feeling for Bologna (which altered before he wrote the _Commedia_) may be connected with the time when the Florentine exiles were welcomed in that city, before the decree of expulsion in 1306. It has sometimes been thought that Book ii. may be a much later piece of work, produced as a poetical textbook at Ravenna in Dante’s last years, and broken off, as Boccaccio suggests, by his death. Nevertheless, when the tone of the work and the probable dates of the lyrics quoted be taken into account, it seems more probable that what we have of the _De Vulgari Eloquentia_ was written between 1304 and 1306; it represents part of the labours which were interrupted by the advent of Henry VII., or abandoned when the poet turned to the _Divina Commedia_.

2. _The “Monarchia”_

THE EMPIRE.--Upon all the political life of mediaeval Italy lay the gigantic shadow of a stupendous edifice, the Holy Roman Empire. Although the barbarians had struck down the body of the Empire of Rome, the spirit of Julius Caesar was mighty yet, as in Shakespeare’s tragedy. The monarchy of Augustus, of Trajan, of Constantine and Justinian, still lived; not in the persons of the impotent Caesars of Byzantium, but in those of the successors of Charlemagne. From the coronation of Otto the Saxon (962) to the death of the Suabian Frederick II. (1250), the mediaeval western world saw in the man whom the Germans recognised as their sovereign the “King of the Romans ever Augustus,” the Emperor-elect, who when crowned at Rome would be “Romanorum Imperator,” the supreme head of the universal Monarchy and the Vicar of God in things temporal, even as the Pope was the supreme head of the universal Church and the Vicar of God in things spiritual. In the eyes of Dante, the Papacy and the Empire alike proceeded from God, and were inseparably wedded to Rome, the eternal city; from which as two suns they should shed light upon man’s spiritual and temporal paths, as divinely ordained by the infinite goodness of Him from whom the power of Peter and of Caesar bifurcates as from a point (_Purg. xvi._ 106-108, _Epist._ v. 5).

PAPAL CLAIMS.--With the increase of their temporal power, the successors of Hildebrand, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, had extended their authority from spiritual into purely secular regions. For them the imperial dignity was not of divine origin, but the gift of the Church to Charlemagne and his German successors. “What is the Teutonic King till consecrated at Rome?” wrote Adrian to Frederick Barbarossa: “The chair of Peter has given and can withdraw its gifts.” In the interregnum that followed the fall of the house of Suabia, the Popes had claimed to exercise imperial rights in Italy, with disastrous results. They had joined the sword with the pastoral staff; and the Church, by confounding in herself the two governments, had fallen into the mire (_Purg._ xvi. 109-112, 127-129). And this tendency in the Papacy culminated in the extravagant pretensions of Boniface VIII., in his relations with both the Empire and France, and his famous Bull _Unam Sanctam_ (November 1302), declaring that the temporal power of kings is subject to the spiritual power of the priesthood, and directed by it as the body by the soul.

DATE OF THE “MONARCHIA.”--The _Monarchia_ is Dante’s attempt to solve this burning mediaeval question of the proper relations of Church and State, of spiritual and temporal authority. Although it is undoubtedly the most famous of his prose works, the most widely divergent views have been held as to its date of composition. If the _Vita Nuova_ is the most ideal book of love, the _Monarchia_ is one of the most purely idealistic works ever written on politics. Even as Beatrice is the most glorious lady of the poet’s mind, _la gloriosa donna de la mia mente_, so the temporal monarchy or Empire is to be considered by the poet in its ideal aspect according to the divine intention, _typo et secundum intentionem_ (_Mon._ i. 2). Like the _Vita Nuova_, and unlike any other of Dante’s longer works, the _Monarchia_ contains no mention of the poet’s exile, and no explicit references or allusions to contemporary events or persons. From this, and other considerations, it has sometimes been held that the _Monarchia_ was written during his political life in Florence. Boccaccio, on the other hand, declares that Dante made this book on the coming of Henry VII., and the trend of criticism to-day is to accept 1313 as the approximate date. There are, however, scholars who consider it more probable that the _Monarchia_ was written towards the close of the poet’s life.