Florence, 1289: A knock at the door, a voice bringing news - but nobody there

It happened on June 11, 1289.  The city of Florence waited, tense and anxious, for news from the battlefield.  Some 25 miles to the east, in the region known as the Casentino, a vast Guelf army was squaring off against a Ghibelline force from Arezzo.  Most of the Guelfs were from Florence, but there were also fighters from Pistoia, Lucca, Siena, and Prato.

The two sides were very nearly equal in size:  10,000 infantry each, with the Guelf army possessed of a slightly larger complement of cavalry than the Ghibelline force.  Florence's contribution to the campaign had been some 1600 knights, as well as another 600 mounted warriors from the ranks of the wealthier members of the populace.  (For context, at this point Florence's total population was nearing 125,000, with another 400,000 people living in the surrounding countryside.)

Diorama of the Battle of Campaldino, Casa di Dante

Florence's Priors, the six men holding the city's highest government office, had met with the war captains and the councils before the battle and had had a hand in deciding military goals and strategies, marching routes, and what supplies to carry.  The army had marched away to a great din of bells on June 2, combining with Guelf forces from other cities on its way, covering ground, trashing the occasional castle, camping in the countryside.  As always, messengers arrived regularly in the city with updates on the army's progress.

Now, however, the Priors waited impatiently to learn the results.  Having slept poorly the night before, knowing the battle was coming soon, the priors had returned to their chambers for an afternoon nap in the tower of the Castagna, the spartan tower where they lived during their two-month term, which was due to end in a few days.

Torre della Castagna

It is not entirely clear whether they retired to individual chambers, as would have been the case a few years later, when the city's Priors took up residence in the Palazzo della Signoria (now called the Palazzo Vecchio, or Old Palace), which didn't exist yet in 1289.   In the much older and smaller Castagna, they may have been sleeping in dormitory-like conditions in a single large chamber.

Palazzo della Signoria

Suddenly, in the middle of the afternoon, the exhausted lawmakers heard a loud knock on their doors (or door), and a voice crying, "Arise, for the Aretines are defeated!"

Joyfully, they sprang out of their beds and ran to receive the messenger.

There was no one there.

Their servants had heard nothing.  No one had seen anyone.  The Florentine people marveled, wondering whether this mysteriously-delivered news could be true.  Many said it must be merely rumor.

But when the real, flesh-and-blood messenger arrived around Vespers, the city learned that the news was true indeed, and that the victory had been won at exactly the time the priors had been roused from their rest by the mysterious voice.

Florentine Guelfs outside Arezzo

Giovanni Villani reported this incident, and he tells us that the Priors took all possible measures to discover any natural source for the voice and the knocking, but found none.  He vouches for the truth of this, for he says he saw and heard it himself.

Leonardo Bruni, writing about a hundred years later in his Historiae, was even less skeptical.  He says:

For it is not strange  to believe that the same divine grace by whose favor victory is won, should by the same favor give swift news to those whom he has helped.

 There are a couple of caveats:

• Giovanni Villani, depending on which birthdate you accept for him, might have been only a nine-year-old at the time, or, at best, a teenager.  He might have been part of the excited crowd outside, but he probably was not in the tower.
• A slightly earlier chronicler, Dino Compagni, was one of those Priors, and his record of the Battle of Campaldino does not mention the incident.

Did it happen?  We'll never know.  But it makes a good tale for the season.

Happy Halloween!

Images in this post:  Photo of doorknocker is licensed to Massimilianogalardi; photos of diorama and Castagna are licensed to Sailko; photo of Palazzo della Signoria is licensed to Jojan; photo of door is licensed to Xenophon.  All are Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported licenses, via Wikimedia Commons.  Pictures of messenger and of Guelfs outside Arezzo are in the public domain.

Silly hats in the Renaissance (or: What were they thinking?)

 

Your blogger is feeling whimsical today.  Having recently perused quite a lot of Renaissance portraits for another project, I find that I'm struck by how utterly ridiculous a lot of the headgear is.  Now, I realize that fashions change (some of them not nearly fast enough), but really, is there any excuse for some of these hats?   Take a look, and see what you think.

They divide nicely into categories, I find, categories which might be expressed by the thoughts of the wearer:

I'm wearing a silly hat, and it's very embarrassing.

I'm wearing a silly hat, and I think it's pretty funny.

 

He's wearing an even sillier hat than mine.  Heh! 

We are wearing the sofa cushions - it's the latest rage.

Except for me .  I'm wearing the whole sofa. 

You think you've got problems - I'm wearing a large vegetable.
 

The shape is what it's all about, wouldn't you say?

And size definitely matters.

We women are particularly vulnerable to the "Help!  It's eating my face!" look.

We, on the other hand, believe it's all about tasteful ornamentation.

Maybe I should have bought false hair that matched my real hair.

Hah!  My hat is even sillier than your hat!

And that is our art history blog post for today.  With any luck, history will return next week.

Images in this post are in the public domain by virtue of antiquity.

Readers: What are you missing that's just a click away?

Not too long ago, I belatedly became aware of something that has changed the way I approach reading books on my Kindle.  It was this:

A friend, writing to tell me she was enjoying my novel A Thing Done,  made a few comments about the story and then said, "But I still have no idea where you got that title."

Wait - hadn't she read the Dante excerpt at the beginning?  The one that included the famous quote my title comes from?  (A phrase Dante didn't originate, by the way, but was quoting.)

No.  Obviously, she hadn't.  Because, as it turns out, she was reading it on her Kindle, and starting where it plonked her down when she opened the book.  On Page 1.  Which meant no Dante quote, no dedication, no acknowledgement page, no table of contents for her.

Curious, I checked out a bunch of the books on my own Kindle.  (Most of them are historical novels, which probably influences the kinds of information authors offer their readers.)  I found the same situation throughout:  the book is handed to you, open to Page 1, and anything before the pagination starts, you need to page-back to find.

But do you want to?  Does anybody actually want to read a Table of Contents unless they're using it to navigate within the book?

If it consists of things like "Chapter 20:  Page 240; Chapter 21:  Page 252" etc., then probably not.  But some people give their chapters names, and those names form an interesting pattern - a pattern the author intended for you to see.

And it isn't just Tables of Contents, either.  Among the things I found when I systematically went back through all those books and did the requisite page-backing were these:

• Maps
• Quotes
• Character lists
• Author notes
• Author bio
• Glossaries and pronunciation guides
• Lists of previous books, sometimes with review quotes
• Dedications
• Acknowledgements
• Disclaimers
• Awards
• How an army was structured (in a culture that would be unfamiliar to most readers)
• Significant information about the book - for example, that it was a retelling of a classic novel in a new time and place

I don't know if this is true of all e-readers.  I don't even know if it is true of all Kindles.  But it clearly is true for at least some of us reading in this way.

For me, many of these are not throw-aways.  I want to see them.  And I will, from now on, because I will page my way back until I reach the cover, every time, to make sure I'm not missing anything I don't want to miss.

It seems to me that if an author puts a map, or a glossary, or a list of characters, or a quote, or information about the nature, structure, or purpose of the book at the beginning, it's because he/she wants the reader to have that information.  Naturally the reader can refuse this gift, just as the reader can decide not to read the book at all.  But if these things are placed there, is it not likely that a reader might want to at least be aware of their existence before making that decision?

Take maps, for example.  Maps can be beautiful.  They can be interesting, and surprising, and offer information that will make a big difference in your reading experience.  I actually bought a globe when I started reading Dorothy Dunnett's novels, the better to try to keep up with her characters and their travels.  Maps, if you know they exist, may well be something you refer to repeatedly as you go through a book.

Information about the author, her previous books, her award history - I've done internet searches to learn these things, only to find out later that the information I wanted was right there in the front of the book.

Dedications.  Okay, many are private in nature, but they can be oddly poignant, or funny, or in some other way revelatory.  And they're brief.  If it takes only a nanosecond to find out whether a dedication is something you want to read or not, why not take a look?  You're committing to an entire book, after all.  An extra line or two won't hurt you.

Acknowledgements.  Sure, some authors will thank their entire family, each individual member of their critique group, their publisher, their editor, their agent, their first-grade teacher, their Facebook friends, and their dog, but this, too, can be surprisingly interesting.  You can learn the strangest things about people, things which may affect the way you view their work.  Again, why not take a look?   Aren't you just a little curious?

If there's a quote, it will be there for a reason.  Similarly, historical notes, glossaries, and punctuation guides are not placed there to try your patience, but rather to offer you useful tools for approaching a book that may take place in a setting you're less familiar with than the author is.  (At least, one may hope that's the case!  Who wants to read a book written by somebody who knows less about the subject than we do?)

And this front matter can radically affect how your book is received.  In the case of the author who had written a skillful retelling of a classic novel (but classic in another country and another language, so not well known to many of her readers), she was perfectly honest and up-front about what she had done.  But a quick scan of her reader reviews on Amazon made it obvious that most people had no idea that the book was not completely original in all of its aspects.  Her retelling was well done, but it made me uncomfortable - and probably made her a bit uncomfortable, too - to see so many people praising the depth of her characters (actually the original author's characters), the intricacies of her plot (the original author's plot), and the sparkle of her dialogue (much of it, at least, from the original book).  As it happens, I had read the classic novel, so I was aware of these things.

These readers gave her credit for what was not her own, and failed to recognize what she had actually accomplished, in her well-crafted retelling, because they simply didn't know what she was trying to do.  

So my advice would be to take those few seconds to page-back and see what's there before you start reading that next book on your Kindle.  You may not find anything that matters, but then again, you just might.

Illustrations in this post are in the public domain.

The Real Lions of Florence

Mom rescuing little Orlanduccio from a lion, mid thirteenth century

Florence has a thing about lions.  Stone lions, heraldic lions, and painted lions abound.  But for hundreds of years, until not so very long ago, they also had the real thing.

The street behind the Palazzo Vecchio (Florence's town hall, formerly the Palazzo della Signoria) is called via dei Leoni, not so much in honor of these noble beasts as because they were once housed here, living symbols of a proud city.

Palazzo Vecchio

But via dei Leoni was neither their first home nor their last.  Florence may have kept lions as early as the 12th century, and certainly had them by the middle of the 13th, which was well before the construction of the Palazzo della Signoria.  At that time, they may have been housed in and around an earlier public building, the Palazzo del Popolo, begun in the year 1255 in the middle of the brief ten-year period when the city was ruled not by the nobles and magnates, but by the Primo Popolo (merchants and guildsmen, for the most part).  That building has been through many changes of name and function; today it is the Bargello, containing Florence's sculpture museum.  A different account suggests that they were caged in an area where today we find the Loggia del Bigallo.  Wherever they were, it was possible to purchase a ticket to see the lions.

Bargello

In the middle ages and Renaissance it was not unusual for nobles and rulers of cities to present gifts of exotic animals to one another.  Eric Ringmar, writing in the Journal of World History, says that "the vast majority of foreign animals kept in Italy had come from Muslim rulers--initially from the sultan of Egypt and, after the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453, from the sultan of Istanbul."  He adds that in the 15th century Florence maintained no fewer than 25 lions.

And certainly lions are not the only exotic animals Florentines kept in their menageries; there's the sad history of Lorenzo de' Medici's giraffe, who broke his neck caught in the ceiling beams of the structure built to house him; and there are tales of leopards used for hunting, as well as many other animals of non-Tuscan origins.

But the lions were always special.  

The historical record of these creatures is spotty, but contains some fascinating glimpses of what it must have been like to keep such fierce and demanding animals in a crowded city.  The earliest incident I've read about, illustrated above in a manuscript of Giovanni Villani's history of Florence, is the tale of Orlanduccio of the Lion.

Somewhere during the ten-year reign of the Primo Popolo, one of the city's lions escaped from its enclosure and ran through the streets of the city, spreading panic.  It seized a small child, a little boy named Orlanduccio.  Orlanduccio's distraught mother, who was widowed, saw her only child in the clutches of the beast and promptly snatched him back.  Both child and mother remained unhurt, and - presumably - somebody eventually enticed the big kitty back to its home.  Ever after, the boy was known as Orlanduccio of the lion, and it was said that he was spared because it was his fate to grow up and avenge his father's death, which he eventually did.

As a mom, I've always thought that it should have been the brave mother's name that came down to us, not Orlanduccio's, but maybe that's just me.  Here's a later, more melodramatic depiction of the incident:

Naturally, given the symbolic significance of the lions to Florence, births or deaths among them were important events, and often considered to be omens, good or evil.  A popular belief during the middle ages, one that is often seen in poetry, is the idea that lion cubs were born dead and then came to life as the mother licked them.  A chronicler thought it important to note that a litter of lion cubs in the early 14th century had been born alive, and not dead, and the birth of six cubs in June of 1337 was cause for rejoicing. 

Another anonymous chronicler, writing at the very beginning of the 15th century, reports an incident in November 1391, in which a fight among the city's lions resulted in the death of a pregnant lioness, killed by seven of her fellows - an evil omen indeed, particularly since she had already produced many cubs for the honor of the city.

 In 1302, another lion met its demise, to the consternation of the Florentines.  This one had been a gift from Pope Bonifacio VIII, which may have made the incident doubly significant.  A young lion, probably a cub, was chained in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Signoria when an ass, laden with a load of wood, approached.  "Either through fear or through a miracle," says Villani, the ass kicked the cub to death, even as panicked Florentines tried to save it.  When the pope died in the following year, the cub's death was said to have been an omen.  Villani cites "the prophecy of the Sibyl":  "When the tame beast shall slay the king of beasts, then will begin the destruction of the Church."   I suspect the ass didn't survive, either, and I wonder what happened to the poor guy who was just trying to deliver his wood.

Bonifacio VIII

In another instance of lion-as-portent, two lions escaped into the city's streets just before the violent demise of Corso Donati, leader of the Black Guelf party, in 1308.

And in yet another, it is said that among the many portents presaging the death of Lorenzo de' Medici in 1492, one of the most alarming was that the city's pair of lions locked in lethal combat and killed one another, either at the moment of his death, on the day of his death, two days before, three days before, or a few months before, depending on which record you read.   (Among the other signs, according to Florentine coppersmith Bartolomeo Masi:  lightning struck the pinnacle of the cathedral; a woman ran from Santa Maria Novella screaming something about a bull with flaming horns; torches were seen to move from Medici graves at Fiesole to their villa at Careggi for three nights in a row; flames burned on the fortress at Arezzo and beneath the walls a she-wolf howled; and an unusually bright star loomed over Careggi and disappeared at the moment of Lorenzo's death.)

Lorenzo's death mask

The lions were also used for spectacles, to impress visitors.  Sometimes this worked; other times, not so much.  In 1459, when Pope Pius II visited, Florence decided to stage a series of combats, Roman-style, between different types of animals.  They blocked off the streets leading up to the Piazza della Signoria.  First lions were let in, then wolves, wild boars and horses, bulls, and Corsican dogs.  Twenty young men were hidden inside a large manniquin of a giraffe; their job was to agitate the lions to cause them to attack the other creatures.  While they gave it their best, the lions simply weren't interested, and much to the organizers' embarrassment, the citizens jeered.  Perhaps the giraffe's inhabitants just weren't annoying enough.

In a letter written by Alessandra Strozzi in the 15th century, she complains, "The lion hunt vituperated us, for a bull chased them all into the stalls like sheep."  Oh, dear.  Not good for the city's prestige, not at all.  The Florentines must have been tempted, at least momentarily, to change the city's symbol to a bull.

We even have a surviving shopping list that includes the cost of lion chow.  The year was 1336, and the food for the city's lions (along with torches and candles) came to 2400 lire.  By means of comparison, the city's musicians and heralds, including trumpeters, drummers, shawm players, and ten herald trumpet players, cost the city only 1000 lire for that year.  The lions must have eaten well.

It wasn't until the year 1777 that Florence ceased keeping lions in the city.  Still, their symbolic value was not forgotten.  One has only to look at all the statues of lions all around the city.

 Among the stone beasts, the Marzocco is, famously, the symbol of the Republic of Florence.  You see versions of him everywhere.  By the 1300s, a medieval sculptured lion was the only statue in the Piazza della Signoria.  (The many other statues which now grace the piazza are later additions, from the late 15th century.)  The most famous Marzocco is the one sculpted by Donatello in 1418-20, now in the Bargello Museum, but a faithful copy still stands outside the Palazzo Vecchio:

Marzocco

Also famous, and spawning copies all over the world, are the two Medici lions which originally graced the Villa Medici when it was owned by Ferdinando I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1576.  Since 1789, these two stone beasts have flanked the Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria.  One is ancient, from the 2nd century BC, and may have originally been carved in relief and then carved free of its background for Ferdinando by sculptor Giovanni di Scherano Fancelli, about whom little is known.  The other, sculpted as a companion for the first, was carved by Flaminio Vacca between 1594-1598. 

Vacca's lion

The ancient lion

But real lions are not compatible with hordes of tourists, so if you are in Florence today and have an urge to gaze upon a real, living, breathing lion, you will need to make a short trek to nearby Pistoia and visit their zoo.

So let's tip our hats to the Real Lions of Florence, and, while we're at it, to Orlanduccio's courageous mom.

Images in this post are in the public domain with these exceptions:  Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license in each case, to Kandi (Bargello), JoJan (Palazzo Vecchio), and Sailko (both Medici lions and the Marzocco).

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.