In March 1304, Benedict sent Cardinal Nicolò da Prato to Florence to mediate between the parties. On this occasion Dante composed Epistle I, on behalf of the exiles gathered in Arezzo; the letter accepting his mediation was sent to the Cardinal, but the Blacks succeeded in wrecking the negotiations and forced the Cardinal to leave the city after he had issued an interdict. On the death of Benedict in July 1304, the Whites and Ghibellines took up arms again. Their defeat at La Lastra above Florence (July 20, 1304) ended all hope for the exiles. Dante had already expressed his dissent regarding the decision taken: supporting a policy of reconciliation, he had long since refused to take up arms against his native city and made "a party by himself". Evidence of this attitude can be found in his other works of these first years of exile - in the envoy of the canzone "Three Women Have Come Round My Heart" (1304), in a moving reference to Florence in De vulgari eloquentia ("Of Eloquence in the Vulgar Tongue") and in the Convivio ('"The Banquet"); later, this attitude developed into an expressive pathos that animates the episode of Farinata degli Uberti in Inferno, X, representing the exaltation of magnanimous patriotic love. Forced to wander about Italy alone in poverty (he went to Forlì and Verona in 1303), seeking protection and friendship, Dante's only comforts were study and poetry. Between 1304 and 1306 he was taken in by Bologna, a favourable environment for studies in philosophy, law, and rhetoric. Two of his major works were begun here: Il convivio and the De vulgari eloquentia, which were written to console himself for his painful solitude and also to show himself to Florence and the world as a man of culture, a philosopher and a poet, whose perspectives of thought and art were enlarging far beyond the "municipal" dimensions of his early years. These two works, both of them unfinished, were permeated by a deep nostalgia for his distant native city.