Political degradation was not all. The Roman Curia became a collection of men of pleasure. The ambitious Popes, even Boniface, had had a touch of the heroic in them, and erred through pride, arrogance, and hate; but these Avignonese Popes, though some of them were good men, suffered the papal court to become a place of amusement, banqueting, and dissipation. CHAPTER XVI LAST FLICKER OF THE EMPIRE (1309-1313) After the Papacy had been dragged in servitude to France, the Empire, like a dying soldier who gets on his feet to shout one shout of triumph over his enemy's fall, made a last gallant effort to recover life and strength. The effort was very gallant but very ineffectual, and owes its chief celebrity to its connection with the great man, who summed up and reiterated the Imperial creed, somewhat in the same way that Pope Boniface had summed up and reiterated the papal creed. Both creeds were dead, but each man believed his fervently, and as Boniface's bulls set forth the doctrines of Hildebrand and Innocent III, so Dante's treatises and letters set forth the beliefs of Barbarossa and Frederick II. The year of Boniface's jubilee is the year to which Dante assigns his journey to the abodes of departed spirits, and as the jubilee marked the close of the mediaeval Papacy, so the "Divine Comedy" marks the close of mediaeval theology, and Dante himself stands as the greatest mark at the boundary between the old world passing away and the modern world coming in. Giovanni Villani, who was about fifteen years younger, described him in this way: "He was deeply versed in almost all learning, although he was a layman; he was a very great poet, a philosopher, and a complete master of rhetoric in prose and verse as well as in public speech; a most noble writer, very great in rhyme, with the most beautiful style that ever was in our language up to his time and since. In his youth he wrote the book on 'The New Life of Love,' and then when he was in exile he composed twenty ethical poems and many admirable poems on love; and he wrote among others three noble epistles; one he sent to the government of Florence, complaining of his banishment from no fault of his; another he sent to the Emperor Henry, when he was at the siege of Brescia, blaming him for his delay, in the tone of a prophet; the third to the Italian cardinals, during the vacancy after the death of Pope Clement (V), that they should come to an accord and elect an Italian Pope; all in Latin, in lofty style, with excellent reasonings and appeals to authority, which were much praised by men of judgment. This Dante by reason of his knowledge was somewhat arrogant, haughty, and disdainful, and, like an ungracious philosopher, he could not talk easily with unlearned men; but because of his other merits, the learning and the worth of this great citizen, it seems fitting to give him perpetual remembrance in this chronicle of mine, notwithstanding that