Dante tells us in the _Vita Nuova_ that, on the death of Beatrice, he wrote a Latin letter to the chief persons of the city, concerning its desolate and widowed condition, beginning with the text of Jeremiah: “How doth the city sit solitary.” Neither this nor the letter mentioned by Leonardo Bruni, in which Dante described the fight at Campaldino, has survived. Many epistles ascribed to Dante were extant in the days of Boccaccio and Bruni. Bruni tells us that, after the affair at Lastra, Dante wrote for permission to return to Florence both to individual citizens in the government and to the people, especially a long letter beginning: “O my people, what have I done unto thee?” This may perhaps have been the letter which Bruni records, in which the poet defends his impartiality when the leaders of the two factions were banished; but there appears to have been another, denying that he had accompanied the Emperor against Florence. From one of these the perplexing fragment may have come, about his want of prudence in the priorate and his service at Campaldino. Giovanni Villani mentions three noble epistles, the style of which he praises highly: one to the government of Florence, “complaining of his unjust exile,” which is probably the lost letter mentioned by Bruni; the second, to the Emperor Henry, and the third, to the Italian cardinals, have both been preserved. Flavio Biondo, in the fifteenth century, professes to have seen letters at Forlì dictated by Dante, notably one addressed by the poet, in his own name and on behalf of the exiled Bianchi, to Can Grande della Scala concerning the reply of the Florentines to the ambassadors of the Emperor. There are now thirteen extant Latin letters ascribed to Dante. They have come down to us mainly in two fourteenth-century manuscripts; three have been preserved in Boccaccio’s handwriting in the Laurentian MS., known as the _Zibaldone Boccaccesco_; nine others in a Vatican MS., of which Boccaccio was perhaps the original compiler. Two of these latter have also been found in another MS. of the fourteenth century--the San Pantaleo MS. at Rome. No MS. of the letter to Can Grande is known earlier than the fifteenth century.[24]