During the early years of the fourteenth century Italy was in turmoil. Factional conflicts divided citizens of the same city against one another, while the great medieval institutions of Church and Empire struggled to impose their authority over the peninsula. Against this political background, and in exile from his beloved Florence, Dante wrote the letters contained in this volume. The themes of the letters are those same political concerns which Dante expounds in his treatise the Monarchia and which will be familiar to any reader of the Commedia: his support for the Empire and his disapproval of the political ambitions of the papacy. But far from being dry or formulaic political tracts, these letters are impassioned and rhetorically sophisticated pieces of writing, which reflect, on many different levels, the concerns of Dante's great poetic masterpiece.Claire Honess has produced a modern and accessible translation of these letters, accompanied, for the first time in English, by a wide-ranging introductory essay and by full explanatory notes on the texts themselves. This volume will be a valuable tool for students of Dante and of this period in medieval Italian history, for scholars, and for the general reader.