Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) wrote as many of his time, in comment of the current political and religious world in which he lived. In so doing he created a likely unintended controversy, with regard to the way in which things where done in the church and politics, which he disagreed with in many ways but attempted to pacify through his works, but especially through his Inferno. In his Inferno Dante described the individual pilgrimage of the soul and not through canon, but through creative intentions, largely driven by personal politics. Though some would say he did not stray from his Catholic faith the individual was not the focus of the answers to the divine in the church at the time, the papacy had final authority. .

             A Frenchman and Catholic wrote a little volume in which he set himself to answer the following question: "Did Dante return a better man from the other world?" He answers the question in the negative, taking into consideration the poet's tenderness for seductive sins, his lack of compunction for his own faults, and the fact that the only fault which seems to bother him there at all is the omission of a "vendetta." Although he accomplishes the formulas of penitence with a very good grace in Purgatory, he thinks a great deal more of earthly than of heavenly things, and shows himself to be rather an observer full of curiosity than a penitent. (Croce 81).

             The conflict would be a matter of coarse in a situation where one man chose to use his skill as a writer to basically judge his political and religious enemies, many of whom were lining the pockets of church officials for acceptance and absolution. Through his diagram of his ideas of the system of faith, life and death he created an antipapal document, in that his writing described failings of certain individuals who were in collusion with the Catholic Church and therefore the extant Catholicism of the time. .

             During this period ( 1304-8), papal policy -- largely influenced by cardinals Napoleone Orsini and Niccolò da Prato -- aimed to pacify the rival parties in the Italian peninsula.