Dante's Inferno Analysis

Essentially, it is the Inferno itself that is the greatest representative source scholars have on Dante’s political response towards his exile. Conversations between Hell’s inhabitants and Dante the pilgrim, as well as the latter’s observations within the narrative, reflect Dante the author’s attitudes towards the historical events he had witnessed throughout his life. Dante’s Hell is fundamentally Christian, and takes shape around the entirety of biblical canon, for it was Christ’s battle within Hell that allowed for Dante the author to use Dante the pilgrim’s journey through Hell as a representation of the grace of redemption. To observe the sufferings of Hell’s inhabitants from various sins committed in the real world, Dante the pilgrim
Despite his strong alliance towards the Ghibellines, Farinata was hailed as the “savior of Florence,” by both sides Ferrante further states that Farinata’s detailed conversation with Dante, “reflects the [original] Florentine feud in miniature: because Dante’s ancestors were Farinata’s enemies, he forces Dante into an extreme Guelph position.” Despite their shared adoration for Florence, Dante the pilgrim – as well by extension Dante the author – and Farinata degli Uberti continue to embody their factional differences and verbally attack one another until Dante the pilgrim is called to move on.
Before Dante the pilgrim makes his way towards the simonaic Popes in the third Bolgia of the eighth circle, Dante the author, through the voice of Dante the pilgrim’s guide Virgil, makes an important elaboration about the reason as to why the sin of fraud was so heavily focused on:
But since fraud is found in humankind as its peculiar vice, it angers God more; so the fraudulent are lower, and suffer more unhappiness.
The political sins Dante the pilgrim encounters in the following Bolgias’ reflect this verse’s
These subsections resembled trench-like ditches, and the third Bolgia is reserved for the politically corrupt. The Simonists, guilty for buying and selling ecclesiastical offices and sacraments, strike a chord with Dante the author. In reality the fraudulent clergymen, located within Dante’s eighth circle of hell, were politically corrupt. To sum up their reality-based sins attributed to them: Pope Nicholas III, the first inhabitant of the third Bolgia was accused of not only simony but also of political nepotism. Pope Boniface VIII's desire for the papal growth was so strong that any and all obstacles, like the papacy itself as held by his predecessor Pope Celestine V, were dealt with in a un-Christian-like manner. Dante’s final pope residing within this Bolgia is Clement V, placed here as punishment for moving the Church to Avignon, France, and “thus betraying the hopes of the faithful that he would purge the church and the papacy of the desire for worldly power and riches.” Dante’s placement of the sinfully simonaic popes, both physically, upside down, and geographically, in the eighth circle of hell saved for the fraudulent, distorts their roles as priests and their obligations to maintain the sanctity of the Church and her sacraments. The first pope here that Dante the pilgrim meets is Pope Nicholas III. Born into the Orsisi family, he was a noble