The treatise 'De monarchia', in three books, originally written in Latin, here in an English translation, contains the mature statement of Dante's political ideas. In it he propounds the theory that the supremacy of the emperor is derived from the supremacy of the Roman people over the world, which was given to them direct from God. As the emperor is intended to assure their earthly happiness, so does their spiritual welfare depend upon the pope, to whom the emperor is to do honour as to the first-born of the Father. The date of its publication is almost universally admitted to be the time of the descent of Henry VII. into Italy, between 1310 and 1313, although its composition may have been in hand from a much earlier period. The book was first printed by Oporinus at Basel in 1559, and placed on the Index of forbidden books. This edition is annotated with more than 450 notes.

A Latin treatise on secular and religious power by Dante Alighieri, who wrote it between 1312 and 1313. The great Italian poet turns his hand to political thought and defends the reign of a single monarch ruling over a universal empire. He believed that peace was only achievable when a single monarch replaced divisive and squabbling princes and kings.

A book of religious and political philosophy.

Dante’s Latin treatise Monarchia inscribes itself within the long medieval conflict between Pope and Emperor and the debate that opposed the theorists of theocracy to the supporters of the empire. The Monarchia, traditionally assumed to be a subversive work as its tormented reception testifies – it remained listed in the Index of Prohibited Books from 1559 to the end of the 19th century – results from the strong connection Dante emphasized between politics and ethics. The bene esse of human beings is the crucial issue that the treatise discusses since its very beginning. More than focusing on power and sovereignty, the Monarchia aims to demonstrate that the government of a single universal ruler guarantees the achievement of the natural goal of human life. The central role assigned to the Emperor discloses, in fact, the importance the poet gives to earthly happiness and to the temporal dimension of humanitas. The essays in this volume are the result of the first International Symposium of the Global Dante Project of New York, a scholarly initiative committed to the systematic study of the whole of Dante’s opus. Held in 2015 and devoted to the Monarchia, this inaugural event saw the participation of scholars from Europe and the USA who investigated Dante’s political treatise addressing diverse issues and from multiple and innovative methodological perspectives. The fertile discussion generated on that occasion and the insights it produced animate this book.

The reader should not be mistaken. This is not a book of stories like The Divine Comedy. It is an essay (as we would call it today) by Dante Alighieri about the power struggle in his time. De Monarchia is a political work; in fact, it had great political influence. Motivated to write it around 1313, during the unsuccessful siege that Henry VII of Luxembourg subjected the city of Florence to, Dante seeks to contribute to eradicating the prevailing anarchy in Italy and specifically in the city of Florence with this work. He dreams of a social order that establishes peace and, in a clearly Ghibelline tone, uses a logical rhetoric based on the Scholastics, the Greek and Roman classics, the historians Livy and Orosius, Marcus Tullius Cicero and Aristotle, and the Bible, elaborating a set of ideas that go against the papal bull Unam Sanctam of 1302, by Pope Boniface VIII. Therefore, De Monarchia is a treatise on the conflict between temporal and spiritual power. The theme was already controversial at the time: the relationship between the authority represented by the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and the authority of the Pope. Dante's point of view is known, since during his political activity he fought to defend the autonomy of the government of the city of Florence from the interference of Boniface VIII. Chronologically, De Monarchia should be placed after the treatise De vulgari eloquentia and before Paradiso, that is, in a period between the second and third parts of The Divine Comedy. The original was written in Latin and is composed of three books, but the most significant is the third, in which Dante more explicitly confronts the theme of the relations between the Pope and the Emperor.