Epic fail (or, Florence changes the locks)

It happened in November, 1266.  Historian Ferdinand Schevill calls it "a fatal act of pusillanimity".  Historian John M. Najemy says it was "an incomprehensible mistake".  Machiavelli observed that the perpetrator "decided to save himself by fleeing rather than fighting", having "abandoned [the city] out of vileness."

Giovanni Villani, writing perhaps three decades after the event, says that the man in question "had done very foolishly in departing from the city of Florence, without stroke of sword and not driven thence" -- an act which ultimately left him "gloomy and shamed," but "after a thing ill-judged, and worse carried out, repentance is in vain."

So who was the guy who got such consistently bad press, and what exactly did he do, or fail to do?

That would be the Ghibelline leader, Guido Novello.  He is not to be confused with the better-known historical figure of Guido Novello da Polenta, who Automatic Translation would probably render as New Guy of Cornmeal Grits; that was a later Guido.  Nor is he to be confused with his cousin, Guido Guerra, who fought for the opposite side -- though I have seen him so confused, in history books that ought to know better, thus causing the whole Guelf-Ghibelline thing to make even less sense than it actually did, which is going some.

Guido's family was the Conti Guidi, the counts who from ancient times had held sway in the Casentino region (the upper Arno valley in eastern Tuscany).  There they maintained several strong castles, including this one at Poppi, which has a very cool museum about the Battle of Campaldino and is a fascinating place to visit:

This particular version of the castle is a little later than Guido Novello's time, but it was built over a previous fortress and was held by the Conti Guidi.

The Conti Guidi consisted of many families, and by the middle of the 13th century, some were solidly Ghibelline while others espoused the Guelf party.  Their heraldic devices tended toward the use of red and white, and lions of white on red or red on white, sometimes separate, sometimes merged:

In this illustration you see another Guidi device (St. Andrew's cross, quartered, red and white, and no, that's not proper heraldic language), on the flag that's falling from the tower.  Here a Florentine army is destroying another castle belonging to the Conti Guidi, considering it a threat; this incident took place in 1153.  The castle was called Monte di Croce.  (You can see this device also in the illustration at the top of this post.)

Though Guido had some Guelfs cluttering up his family tree, he himself was staunchly, yea even rabidly, Ghibelline (meaning, to oversimplify, one who backed the emperor in the empire's ongoing squabbles with the papacy over various manifestations of temporal power).  He was married to an illegitimate daughter of the late (by 1266) Emperor Frederick II, making him the brother-in-law of Manfred, who at that time was the voice of the empire.  Two of his children were named Federico and Manfredo.  (This reminds me a lot of the scene in Life Is Beautiful, the film set in Italy in 1939 in which the character played by Roberto Benigni is trying to figure out the politics of a man he has just encountered.  The question resolves when the man calls his children:  "Benito!  Adolfo!")

Federico, by the way, ended up in Dante's Purgatorio among the sodomites.

Here's the situation, as briefly as I can tell it (HUGE oversimplification alert):

Guelfs and Ghibellines in Florence have been duking it out (and this is before Florence had dukes) for quite a while, first with one party in power, then the other.  When one party is in power, the other is in exile (at least the more important members are), and the winners are gleefully trashing the homes, businesses, and fortified towers of their absent adversaries.  In 1250, the Primo Popolo, a group of non-noble, non-magnate, and emphatically non-feudal businessmen representing Florence's rising commercial sector took advantage of the chaos and took over the government.  They had a great ten-year run, with many accomplishments, but the nobles who ran the two major parties, whether in town or in exile, never stopped trying to make a comeback.

In 1258, the Ghibellines were in exile, mostly living in the Ghibelline city of Siena.  The Primo Popolo was drawing closer to the Guelf party because war was brewing with Siena over control of nearby territories.  This war, which deserves a bunch of blog posts all of its own, took place in 1260, and to the surprise of the Florentines (and quite possibly everybody else as well), the Ghibellines, including the Sienese and the Florentine exiles, won the day.  Back came the Ghibellines, out went the Guelfs, and the Primo Popolo might as well never have existed.

Battle of Montaperti

Ghibelline rule was harsh and unpopular.  The Ghibelline general who had spearheaded the victory at Montaperti was made vicar-general for all of Tuscany, and he appointed Guido as podestà (mayor and head magistrate) for Florence.  This turned out to be almost as much of a headache as an honor, partly because Guido was stuck with paying and supporting all the German mercenaries who had made the Ghibelline victory possible.  Guido applied drastic taxes, and the Florentine people resented it - and him, and his party.  Eventually  Manfred recalled the general, having need of him in Sicily, and Guido got bumped up to the vicar-general job.  It didn't make his life any easier.

Meanwhile, the Florentine exiles, and their Guelf counterparts elsewhere in northern and central Italy, had not been idle.  They wanted to eliminate the threat of Manfred, and eventually, at the battle of Benevento, they did.  (They also eliminated Manfred.)

Battle of Benevento

They had a lot of help from Charles of Anjou, but that's another story.

So here's Florence, with Guido the Ghibelline in charge, and suddenly the tide has turned in favor of the Guelfs, with Manfred out of the picture.  Guido is desperately trying to hold on.  He waffles between trying to win over the people by restoring some of their privileges (you know, the ones he took away from them in the first place), and trying to stomp on them so hard that they can't offer any resistance.  Nothing was working.  Also, the pope (Clement IV) had insisted on putting two Bolognese nobles, who were also friars of a peacekeeping order, one each Guelf and Ghibelline, in as a sort of podestà committee.

These two had put in place a council of 36 men, nobles and non-nobles, Guelf and Ghibelline, and with a greatly increased representation for the guilds, not insignificantly including a federation and military alliance of the guilds, designed to protect the populace should anyone attempt to take over lordship of the city.  The 36 let some Guelfs back in and arranged some peacemaking marriages between the parties (see my earlier blog posts on that, here and here). 

And that brings us up to the moment:  Guido is hard-pressed for money, he's unpopular, and when the 36 refused to approve a tax to allow Guido to pay off his Germans, he lost his cool completely.  He had assembled a formidable Ghibelline army, drawing on Ghibellines from elsewhere in Tuscany, because he knew he was losing control of the situation.  Now, with this provocation,  Florence's Ghibellines, led by the Lamberti, rioted and assaulted the guildhall where the 36 were meeting.  Villani says they were yelling, "Where are these 36 thieves?  We'll cut them to pieces!"

The 36, quite naturally, ran for their respective homes.  Guelf and Ghibelline forces squared off in the streets.  As Villani puts it, with typically Florentine priorities, "All the shops were closed, and every man flew to arms."

Members of the populace gathered in one spot and started to erect barricades.  Guido's force advanced against the people, and some of his Germans managed to get inside the barricades.  The people, however, defended their makeshift fortress with crossbows and by hurling missiles from towers and houses.  Many of Guido's men died there.

Guido realized he wasn't getting anywhere, so he reversed his banners and headed to the palace where the podestà committee was, and demanded the keys of the gates of the city so he could depart.  He also demanded an escort from among the 36, fearing that the people would attack him with missiles hurled from their houses, and so he had on one side Cerchio dei Cerchi, and on the other Uberto de'Pucci, two great leaders.  The friars yelled from the palace that Uberto and Cerchio should persuade the count to return to his house.  They even promised to pay the soldiers themselves.

But Guido was having none of it.  He wanted out, and out he went, with his Germans and his Ghibellines.  They wound their way around to a gate and as Villani says, "sallied forth," and as they were leaving, "stones were cast upon them", but they proceeded to Prato, where they arrived in the evening of St. Martin's Day, 11 November, 1266.

Why did he go?  Some say he intended all along to return from a more strategic direction - that it was only a temporary retreat.  Others accused him of cowardice.  Villani says that having reached Prato, Guido "perceived that they had done very foolishly in departing from the city of Florence without stroke of sword and not driven thence, and they perceived that they had done ill, and took counsel to return to Florence the following morning."  However it was, the next morning Guido (and his Germans and his Ghibellines) rode back to Florence, armed to the teeth, and demanded entry.

And now it was the Florentines who were having none of it.  Fearing Guido's vengeance, they had agreed not to open the gates.  Florence was surrounded by strong walls and full moats.  The Ghibellines tried to storm the gate, but they were repulsed by crossbows and other missiles.  (See illustration at top of post.)

(Here I am reminded a bit of the taunting scene from Monty Python's Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which can be viewed here:)

As Machiavelli put it, "His plan did not succeed, for the people who had been able to drive him out only with difficulty were able to keep him out with ease."  That's what those walls are for, I guess.

And that was it for Ghibelline control in the city of Florence, henceforth solidly the Guelfest of the Guelf.  Ghibelline power ended, for Guido and all the others, not with a bang but with a whimper.


Images in this post are in the public domain, with these exceptions:  both coats of arms involving lions are licensed to Sailko via the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license, Wikimedia Commons.

Till Vendetta Do Us Part: Peacemaking Marriages I

"To the bride!"

Throughout the 13th century in Florence, every time the internecine violence reached a point where everyone agreed something had to be done, efforts to make peace - whether instigated from within the city or from outside - involved contracting marriages between the two warring families. 

In this post I'd like to give a little bit of background for this peculiar practice (which is certainly not unique to Florence, nor to the 13th century, but which still strikes me as a little strange, and probably thought up by somebody male.)  Imagine that you are a young (perhaps very young) woman in Florence.  You have been told all your life that the members of another faction are your bitter enemies, the devil incarnate.  Perhaps they have caused members of your family harm, or threatened to.  And now - suddenly - you're going to marry one.  You're going to have his children, and they and you will be under his absolute control.  If his family turns on yours again, too bad - your loyalties must now lie with your husband.

I'm going to list a few of the best-known occasions where this technique was employed through the century, mention a few specific pairings, and then, in my next few blog posts, I want to give a little post-wedding history for three of the couples.  But it won't make sense without a little historical and political background; hence the divided post.

We'll pass over the peacemaking marriage famously proposed in 1216, because I can't discuss it here without introducing spoilers for anyone who might want to read my book.   And I would really like for you to read my book.  Suffice it to say that a knight, one Buondelmonte dei Buondelmonti, in an effort to resolve a conflict, was betrothed to a young woman whose family was allied with the powerful Uberti family, and "happily ever after" is not exactly how it went.

Marriage of Buondelmonte, by Saverio Altamura (1858-60 ca.)

In spite of that, 23 years later the Buondelmonti and the Uberti tried it again.  This time it was a granddaughter of Buondelmonte, whose name we don't know, promised to Neri Piccolomino degli Uberti, the grandson of Schiatta degli Uberti (who's also in A Thing Done).

Do you think that turned out any better?  No?  Very good - full marks for that answer.  We'll return to the unfortunate couple in next week's post.  For now, we will take a look at the rest of the 13th century.

By 1267, when a whole cluster of these marriages appears, party lines have been more firmly drawn.  With the clarity of hindsight we can see that the Buondelmonti were ringleaders in the proto-Guelf (pro-papal) party, though it was not yet called that, and the Uberti were the stalwarts at the head of the proto-Ghibelline (pro-imperial) party, also not yet called that.   This party division was not specific to Florence; it was to be found across Italy.

In the 13th century Florence had a pattern of upheaval that consisted of first one party gaining the ascendancy and then the other.  The party on top typically would exile the leaders of the opposition, and then the prevailing party would seize and destroy (or redistribute) the property of the exiles, up to and including pulling down their towers and destroying their homes.

The Wheel of Fortune

Then, when the wheel of Fortune turned, the triumphant exiles would return and cast out the other guys, and would then have a go at the property their enemies had been forced to abandon (including getting as much of their own side's property back into the hands of its original owners as they could). 

This resulted in a lot of rubble in the streets and a lot of very annoyed people.  It could mean total ruin for a family, but often it did not, because even then wealthy Florentines tended to have investments outside the city.  And nobody ever bothered exiling anybody except the rich and powerful.

So the exiles would leave, grumpily making their way toward a nearby city with a government sympathetic to their party, or in some cases to their own country castles and lands, to set up a shadow government, try to attract allies, plot and scheme, and then, when they thought the time was right, to make their own bid for power.

The 1267 nuptials followed a six-year period of Ghibelline supremacy and Guelf exile.  The Ghibellines' triumph at the bloody battle of Montaperti on September 4, 1260 had naturally resulted in an exodus of Florentine Guelfs.

Battle of Montaperti

But on February 26, 1266, it was the Guelfs' turn to triumph, in the battle of Benevento, north of Naples.  Moreover, Manfred, the son of the late Emperor Frederick II, was killed in that battle, leaving the Ghibelline party not much to rally around in the way of an imperial force.

Battle of Benevento

And yet the Ghibellines hung on in Florence, and the Guelfs didn't return for over a year.  It was a struggle for the Ghibellines, because the populace, weary of both the major parties, managed to move themselves into leadership positions, displacing the Ghibellines and resisting efforts by the Guelfs to take advantage of the Ghibellines' rudderless state and return.  It got to the point where the Ghibelline forces were mobilizing to square off against members of the populace, when a Ghibelline leader made what military strategists generally refer to as a Dumb Move.

Guido Novello, of the Conti Guidi (long a power in Tuscany), led his troops out of the city in order to come in again from a more strategic angle.  And while the Ghibellines were outside the city walls, the populace closed the gates.

Conti Guidi

Conti Guidi (variant)

Imagine that.  You try to get yourself into a better position, and while you're out maneuvering (and being out-maneuvered), those insolent plebs you were about to attack go and change the locks.  Machiavelli, who believed that Guido fled the city in fear of the people, says in his Florentine Histories, "...for the people who had been able to drive him out only with difficulty were able to keep him out with ease."

Chronicler Giovanni Villani says that when the dejected Ghibellines reached nearby Prato, "they bitterly reproached each other, but after a thing ill-judged, and worse carried out, repentance is in vain."  Hmmm.  "A thing ill-judged."  That would make a great title...

Thus did the Ghibellines go out with a whimper, never to have the rulership of Florence again.  Next the pope, Clement IV, persuaded the reluctant populace that they really should re-admit the exiled Guelf (pro-papal, remember?) party.  Popes in those days could be extremely persuasive; thus it was that the Guelfs returned, in April of 1267.

Clement IV, a persuasive pope

That sets the stage for the 1267 marriage contracts.  The defeated Ghibellines had trickled back, the Guelfs came home, and the pope wanted everyone to make peace.  

Among the couples united in that effort:  Iacopa, whose father was Guido Novello (remember the locked-out Ghibelline?), betrothed to Forese di Bonaccorso Adimari.  Bonaccorso, Forese's father, was caption of the Florentine Guelfs for over thirty years, so it doesn't get much Guelfer than that.  Bonaccorso's brother Bindo affianced Selvaggia degli Ubaldini, the daughter of a prominent Ghibelline house.

Adimari

Ubaldini

 Marriages were contracted between the Ghibelline Strinati family and the Guelf della Tosa.  That peace lasted for a time, but it must have been brittle - in 1301, we learn from chronicler Neri Strinati, the della Tosa attacked and robbed the Strinati houses, and "again in the same night the gang of the Medici [allied with the della Tosa] came to our house," where they stole everything that was left, and, as Strinati says in his Cronichetta, they "left the children, male and female, naked in their cribs, carrying off the clothing and bed linens."  One wonders if any of those children might have had a della Tosa grandmother.

della Tosa

Two other marriages were contracted at that time, both of which we will look at more closely in the next few blog posts:  Guido Cavalcanti (poet, and Dante's "first friend") was promised to Beatrice, daughter of the late Ghibelline leader Farinata degli Uberti (Guido Novello's predecessor); and Beatrice's brother Azzolino was given for wife Ravenna Donati.  Ravenna was the sister of Corso Donati, who I've often written about in these posts, and the daughter of Simone Donati, who played a role in the tale of the 1239 marriage that I'll recount in an upcoming post.  She was also a cousin of Dante's wife, Gemma Donati.

Cavalcanti

Donati

The Florentines were still at it in 1279, when the papal legate Cardinal Latino Malabranca Orsini arrived to make peace between warring factions (which by then included Guelfs arguing with other Guelfs, as well as Guelfs vs. Ghibellines).  Among the squabbling Guelf families he united were the Adimari (like Bonaccorso, above) and the Tosinghi; and the Donati (Ravenna's family) and the Pazzi.

Cardinal Latino

I have a theory that Gemma Donati's father Manetto promised his daughter to Dante (which he did in 1277, when Dante was 12 and Gemma probably younger) because he didn't want her to be available for such a peacemaking marriage.  As a leader in Florence and a prominent Guelf, he would have known early that efforts were afoot to have a papal peacemaker come to the city, and he also would have known that his own family would be one of the first to be considered for peacemaking unions.

I like to think that he wanted to spare his daughter such a fate, and so he arranged for her early betrothal to the poet-to-be, who lived a few doors down the street and was of a lower social station than the Donati.  Perhaps Manetto decided that to keep his daughter safe and nearby, he was willing to give the new couple a great deal of financial help, if needed, if it would keep her free of a union with a hostile family.  (He did indeed provide a lot of financial backing for Dante, all the way up to the point where Dante was exiled, and presumably assisted Gemma afterwards.)

In 1290, the Florentines were still making these marriages.  In that year, the priors not only mandated two marital liaisons between the della Tosa and the Lamberti, they actually pledged 1400 lire of the city's money toward the necessary dowries.  Such a deal - peace, if it works, and the woman's father doesn't even have to provide the dowry.


Next week:  the fate of Unknown Buondelmonti Lady and Neri Piccolomino degli Uberti.

Images in this post are in the public domain, with the exceptions of the heraldic devices of the Adimari, the Conti Guidi (two lions), the Cavalcanti, and the Ubaldini, which are from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported, created by Massimop; and the heraldic devices of the Uberti, the Conti Guidi (one lion) and the della Tosa, which are also from Wikimedia Commons and under the same licensing agreement, created by Sailko; and the picture of Pope Clement IV, also from Wikimedia Commons, same license, created by Marianne Casamance.