 Also according to the testimony of his own writing, Dante believed himself to be—or at least wished for his readers to believe him to be—a descendant of the ancient Roman families who founded Florence. In Paradiso 15, for instance, he claims that his great-great-grandfather Cacciaguida had been knighted by emperor Conrad and died fighting as a crusader in the Holy Land—a claim that a recent biographer has noted “might be traced back to Dante’s desire, particularly apparent at the time of the Commedia, to give dignity to a family which, in reality, could boast no noble roots nor any knights among it, least of all of imperial investiture” [Santagata (2016), 20].