Oh Dante was definitely doing what we would consider political commentary nowadays. The problem is that at some point people took his weird but respectable work of political, theological, and philosophical commentary a bit too literal. Pretty sure before Dante hell was seen as a void or as a permanent and irrevocable separation from God, though there were outlyers due to pagan influence for example I remember coming across a letter where a Norse monk was getting annoyed with the fact that peasants had synchronized Helheim and hell as concepts.