Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) was a Florentine poet, political thinker, and moral philosopher, widely regarded as the greatest writer of the Italian Middle Ages and one of the foundational figures of European literature. Born into a minor noble family in Florence, he served in civic offices of the Florentine republic until his exile in 1302 after the victory of the Black Guelphs, after which he never returned to his city. His literary output includes the Vita Nuova, the philosophical Convivio, the Latin treatises De vulgari eloquentia and Monarchia, and above all the Commedia, completed shortly before his death in Ravenna. The Commedia established the Tuscan vernacular as a literary language and exerted a shaping influence on theology, political thought, and poetic form in the centuries that followed.
