During Henry’s short reign the Ghibeline cause looked up; nor was his death in 1313 so fatal a blow to it as might have been expected. Several powerful leaders arose, one of whom, Uguccione della Faggiuola of Pisa, won back most of Tuscany for his party. In 1315 he inflicted a severe defeat on the Florentines and their allies at Montecatini, on the border of the Florentine and Lucchese territories; but he was unable to follow up his success so far as to enter the city. Some two months later a third sentence went forth against Dante, in which his sons were included, condemning them, as Ghibelines and rebels against the Commonwealth and people of Florence and the statutes of the Guelf party, to be beheaded whenever taken. It has been plausibly suggested that the two events were not unconnected; and as it is hardly likely that at the age of fifty Dante would have taken a prominent part in the actual fighting, we must suppose it to have been as a leading adviser of the enemy that he was specially obnoxious to the ruling powers at Florence. The chief importance, however, which Dante’s exile has for us, is that with it his great literary activity began. He had, of course, written all his life; and it is quite possible even that some portion of the _Commedia_ had been composed before he left Florence. The story told by Boccaccio is well known. Commenting upon the opening words of Canto viii., he tells us that the preceding portion of the poem had been written before the final catastrophe, and left behind by Dante in his flight, not being discovered for some years. In any case, the _Vita Nuova_ was written, as he himself tells us, before he was twenty-five; and a good deal of the _Convito_, a work which looks very much as if it had first come into existence as the contents of notebooks, in which materials to be afterwards worked into the great poem were jotted down, was no doubt in writing. But it is to Dante’s twenty years of exile that we owe in their completed form the works which place him not only among the world’s five or six greatest poets, but in an eminent position among philosophers, theologians, statesmen, and men of science.