Helena that dangled in space above a Cyrian mountain.
But his most vivid pictures are of his time in the Holy
Land. He made three excursions while in Palestine: to
the Jordan (which he compares to a Russian river, the
Snov) and the Dead Sea, to Bethlehem and Hebron, and
to Damascus. On this last expedition he accompanied
Baldwin, whose armed escort gave him access to places
no Christian pilgrim would normally visit. Toward the
end of his stay he remained in the Jerusalem House, a
Christian hostel, for sixteen months, recording minute
observations about Jerusalem from this vantage point
near the Tower of David. On his return voyage to
Constantinople, his ship was plundered by four pirate
galleys; narrowly escaping with his life, he thanked
God for his good fortune.
Daniel’s depiction of the Holy Land is invaluable as
a record of conditions at the beginning of the twelfth
century. He writes of the unsettled world of Palestine:
Muslim raiders approached the walls of Christian Jeru-
salem and constantly attacked Christian travelers on the
road from Jaffa to Jerusalem; armed escorts were needed
for Christians on roads leading out of Jerusalem toward
the Sea of Galilee or Nazareth; panthers and wild asses
lurked on the west side of the Dead Sea, and lions hunted
below the Jordan valley. But he also includes happier
details—the date palms by Jericho, the genial relations
between the Greek and Latin monasteries—as well as
the conventional connections between geography and
sacred story—the Sea of Sodom that oozes a vile and
stinking breath, the stone column of Lot’s wife near
Segor. Daniels is a sharp and observant eye, if at times
also credulous and inaccurate. Along with blunders in
topography come detailed records of ritual and liturgy;
along with errors in distance and confusion of names
come accounts of life under the crusader government
of Jerusalem.
Further Reading
Beazley, C. Raymond. The Life and Journey of Daniel, Abbot
of the Russian Land. Trans. John Wilkinson. In Jerusalem
Pilgrimage 1099–1185. Ed. John Wilkinson. Hakluyt So-
ciety, 2nd series, 167. London: Hakluyt Society, 1988, pp.
120–171.
Wright, Thomas, ed. Early Travels in Palestine. London, 1848;
rpt. Hew York: AMS, 1969.
Gary D. Schmidt
DANTE ALIGHIERI (1265–1321)
The Divine Comedy or Divina commedia of Dante
(Dante Alighieri) is a classic of western literature. Gen-
erations of readers have valued it as much for continuing
and transforming the epic tradition of Homer’s Iliad
and Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid as for initiating the
Renaissance tradition of the long poem. From Dante’s
poem to Milton’s Paradise Lost unrolled a single cycle
of European literature that fused the forms and structures
of the classical epic, the theology and religious passion
of Christian belief, and the forces of contemporary ex-
perience in stunning poetic achievements.
Because Dante’s great poem became recognized a
classic, it continued to enter into the lives of readers
even when the epic cycle that it had helped initiate lost
impetus and was replaced by other forms of literary
expression. In fact, Dante’s Divine Comedy has the kind
of power and appeal unique to a classic: successive eras
have found refl ected in it their own intellectual concerns;
and just as a river takes on the coloration of the many
terrains through which it passes, so Dante’s poem has
accumulated the tones of many successive readings.
Yet although Dante has become, as Ben Jonson
said of Shakespeare, a fi gure for all time, he was still
of a time. The Divine Comedy may have taken on the
attributes of a living, growing organism, but it was
nevertheless a product of medieval Italian culture. This
masterpiece needs to be considered in light of the evo-
lution of Dante’s own poetic practice and theory, his
attitude toward the newly emergent Italian language,
his own acquisition of scholastic philosophy, the new
mediating role of the lay philosopher, the vicissitudes
of Dante’s own political career both within and outside
his native Florence, and the crucial changes in the large
public forces that fashioned Dante’s own life and times
and the Italian culture of his day.
One factor that makes this larger frame so necessary
is Dante’s own nature and temperament—his willing
engagement with the most powerful forces of his time.
Although in the Divine Comedy he chastises himself for
heedlessness, he makes the dominant historical events
of his day and the major elements of his culture not the
background but the foreground of his poem: in fact,
its very substance. Like many of the poets who would
follow him over the next three centuries, Dante himself
was a considerable public fi gure.
Dante was born, as he tells us, under the sign of
Gemini (21 May–20 June). He passed his youth in an
ascendant, triumphant Guelf Florence, which, in league
with the papacy and France, had fi nally, after nearly fi fty
years of intermittent strife, succeeded in defeating and
permanently banishing the Guelfs’ adversaries, the Ghi-
bellines. As a young man Dante was a loyal son of the
commune, imbued with the civic humanism of Brunetto
Latini, who after his return from exile in 1266 became
the spiritual mentor of an entire generation of young
Florentines. In two instances in the Commedia, Dante
personally recalls battles fought by the Florentine com-
mune at Campaldino and Caprona, indicating that he
himself was present. In many respects Dante belonged
to a jeunesse dorée, a group of golden youths—as he
indicates, for example, in Paradiso 8, when he recordsDANIEL THE ABBOT