Brunetto Latini

He was of sufficient stature to be sent to Seville on an embassy to Alfonso X of Castile to seek help for Florence against the Sienese; the mission was unsuccessful.

On his return from Spain, travelling along the Pass of Roncesvalles, he describes meeting a student from Bologna astride a bay mule, who told him of the defeat of the Guelphs at the Battle of Montaperti.

In 1269, when the political situation allowed, he returned to Tuscany and for some twenty years held successive high offices.

In 1280, he contributed to the temporary reconciliation between the Guelph and Ghibelline parties, and in 1284 presided over the conference in which an attack on Pisa was agreed.

[1] He died in 1294, leaving behind a daughter, Bianca Latini, who had married Guido Di Filippo De' Castiglionchi in 1284.

While in France, he wrote his Italian Tesoretto and in French his prose Li Livres dou Trésor, both summaries of the encyclopaedic knowledge of the day.

The Italian translation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is often misattributed to Brunetto Latini: it is a work of Taddeo Alderotti instead.

Many of the characters in Dante's Inferno are also mentioned in the legal and diplomatic documents Brunetto Latini wrote in Latin.

Dante offers to sit down with him but that would only increase Latini's penalty; he and the other souls are doomed to keep moving aimlessly around the arena.

[3] Other critics point to the fact that, outside of The Divine Comedy, there are no firm historical records suggesting Latini was accused of sodomy or homosexual relations—and indeed he seemingly condemns it himself in the Tesoretto.

Yet, Latini started working in the treatise in 1260, before Dante was born, and thus in a very different cultural climate, when French was the language of aristocracy.