Whether his own
family was regarded among the first families of nobility or not, it is
certain that Dante enjoyed the honor of knowing that one of his
forebears, Cacciaguida, had been knighted by Emperor Conrad II on the
Second Crusade. Precocious Dante must have been, as a boy, with
faculties and emotions extraordinarily developed, for in his ninth year,
while attending a festal party, he 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.
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