Like most artists, the content of Dante’s works are deeply rooted in the context of the time.  Most specifically, Dante’s Divine Comedy is irrefutably tied to the political strife of late-thirteenth-century Florence, Italy.  Like a majority of Europe, Italy in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries was a stage for the all too apparent power struggle between church and state.  Following the death of the last legitimate Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, the premier Italian party, the Guelph’s, separated into two factions:  the White party, who supported the Holy Roman Empire; and the Blacks, who supported papal governmental control.  Dante, an influential White Party leader, unfortunately found himself on the losing end of the Florentine power struggle, which ultimately led to his long, arduous, and melancholy exile.  Dante’s hardships in public policy and his disdain of the papal followers, namely Pope Boniface, helped him shape the Hell he conveyed in his Divine Comedy – a hell in which Pope Boniface and his followers most surely have a seat.