Commentary Purg XIV 118-120

To conclude the brief list of families, Dante refers to the Pagani.  They were Ghibelline lords of Faenza.  Rather than praise their good early stock, Dante fixes on their 'Devil,' Maghinardo Pagano da Susinana, a truly impressive warrior and statesman.  A Ghibelline, he also favored the Florentine Guelphs because of their decent treatment of him when he was a child and in their protection.  On one side of the Apennines he fought on the side of Guelphs; on the other, of Ghibellines.  What undoubtedly took any possibility of a dispassionate view of this extraordinary man from Dante was the fact that he entered the city in November 1301 at the side of Charles of Valois, the French conqueror of Florence (in collaboration with Corso Donati).

      Maghinardo is the only name mentioned in this passage of a person alive at the imagined date of the vision (he died in 1302).  Everyone else is of thirteenth-century provenance, and of the persons and events datable in this welter of historical material, nothing before 1200 or after 1293 is alluded to, thus reinforcing the notion that Dante is talking, through the mouth of Guido del Duca, of the 'good old days' in Romagna.  A similar and longer discourse in historical romanticism will be put forth by Cacciaguida in Paradiso XVI, an entire canto given over to the moral supremacy of a Florence that is now long gone.