GUELFS AND GHIBELINES[8]
Mention was made, in the last chapter, of the "Guelf" party, and this,
with its opposite, the party of the "Ghibelines," fills the entire field
of Italian politics during Dante's life, and indeed for long afterwards.
It would be impossible in the space of these pages to follow up all the
tangled threads which have attached themselves to those famous names;
but since we may be, to use a picturesque phrase of Carlyle's, "thankful
for any hook whatever on which to hang half-an-acre of thrums in fixed
position," a few of the more prominent points in the early history of
the great conflict shall be noted here.
As every one knows, the names originally came from Germany, and to that
country we must turn for a short time to know their import.
About seven miles to the north-east of Stuttgart, in what is now the
kingdom of Wurtemberg, is a small town called Waiblingen, where was once
a stronghold, near the borders of Franconia and Suabia (or Alemannia),
belonging to the Franconian dukes. Conrad, often called "the Salic,"
head of that house, was raised to the throne of Germany and the Empire
in 1024. His line held the imperial crown for just a century, in the
persons of himself and three Henries, who are known as the second,
third, and fourth, or third, fourth, and fifth, according as we reckon
their places among Roman Emperors or German Kings; Henry III. (or IV.)
being famous as the great opponent of Pope Gregory VII.; Henry IV. (or
V.) interesting to us as the first husband of the daughter of Henry I.
of England, renowned in English history as the Empress Maud. The last
Henry died childless in 1125. But the Franconian line was not extinct.
Half a century or so before, Bishop Otto of Freising tells us "a certain
count, by name Frederick, sprung from one of the noblest families of
Suabia, had founded a colony in a stronghold called Staufen." Staufen,
better known as Hohenstaufen, is a lofty hill about twenty miles from
Waiblingen, and within the Suabian frontier. Frederick had been staunch
to Henry IV. in his time of greatest difficulty, and received as his
reward, together with the dukedom of Suabia, which the house of
Zahringen had forfeited through disloyalty, the hand of the Emperor's
daughter Agnes. By her he had two sons, Frederick, who succeeded to his
own duchy of Suabia, and Conrad, who received from his uncle Henry V.
that of Franconia, including no doubt the lordship of Waiblingen. At
Henry's death Frederick and Conrad, being then thirty-five and
thirty-three years old respectively, were the most powerful princes of
the Empire. Henry had designated Frederick as his successor; but the
electors thought otherwise. At the instance of the Archbishop of Mainz,
between whom and the Hohenstaufen there was no love lost, and, as it
would seem, not without pressure from Lewis VI. of France, whom Henry's
death had just saved from having to face an alliance between England
and Germany, they chose Lothar, Duke of Saxony.
We will now quote Otto of Freising once more. "Up to the present time,"
he says, writing of the year 1152, "two families have been famous in the
Roman Empire, about the parts where Gaul and Germany meet, the Henries
of Waiblingen, and the Welfs of Altdorf." The Welfs go back to by far
the greater antiquity. They probably did not originally belong to the
Bajovarian stock, for we read elsewhere that they had "large possessions
in the parts where Alemannia meets the Pyrenaean Mountains," as Otto
usually designates the Alps west of the Brenner. This Altdorf is a
village near Ravensburg in Wurtemberg, between Ulm and Friedrichshafen.
We first meet with the name in history about the year 820, when the
Emperor Lewis I., "the Pious," married as his second wife Judith,
"daughter of the most noble Count Welf." Somewhere about the middle of
the tenth century, a Rudolf of the race was Count of Bozen. His son Welf
took part in the insurrection of the Dukes of Worms and Suabia against
their step-father Conrad II., "the Salic," and lost some of his
territories in consequence, Bozen passing to Etiko, an illegitimate
member of the same house. The family must have soon been restored to the
imperial favour, for before 1050 Welf III. appears as Duke of Bavaria.
At his death, without issue, in 1055, he was succeeded by the son of his
sister, who had married Azzo II. of Este. This Welf IV. fought on the
side of Henry IV., against the revolted Saxons at the Unstrut, but soon
rebelled himself. He became for a time the husband of the "great
Countess" Matilda of Tuscany. Through him and his son Henry, "the
Black," the line was maintained; and though during the period at which
we have arrived the head of the family for several generations bore the
name of Henry, it is usually spoken of as "the house of the Welfs,"[9]
and the name is borne by some member of the family at most times. At the
accession of Lothar II. the head of the house was Henry, surnamed "the
Proud." With him the new emperor at once made close alliance, giving him
his daughter Gertrude in marriage. Henry's sister Judith was already
married to Frederick of Suabia, but he sided with his father-in-law, and
a struggle began which lasted for ten years, and in which the
Hohenstaufen brothers had not entirely the worst of it. Conrad was
actually anointed at Monza as King of Italy; but in the end, through the
intervention of St. Bernard, peace was made, and lasted during the few
remaining months of Lothar's life. At his death in 1137 Conrad was
elected. His first act was to take the duchy of Bavaria from Henry, and
bestow it on Leopold, the Marquis of Austria, his own half-brother, and
whole brother to Bishop Otto, the historian. Henry died very soon,
leaving a young son, afterwards known as Henry "the lion," and a
brother, Welf, who at once took up the quarrel on behalf of his nephew.
He beat Leopold; but when, emboldened by this success, he proceeded to
attack the Emperor, who was besieging the castle of Weinsberg, in
Franconia, he suffered a severe defeat. At this battle we are told the
cries of the contending sides were "Welf!" and "Waiblingen!" Why the
name of an obscure fortress should have been used as a battle-cry for
the mighty house of Hohenstaufen, we shall probably never know; it may
be that it was a chance selection as the password for the day. However
that may be, the battle-cries of Weinsberg were destined to resound far
into future ages. Modified to suit non-Teutonic lips, they became famous
throughout the civilised world as the designations of the two parties in
a struggle which divided Italy for centuries, and of which the last
vibrations only died down, if indeed they have died down, in our own
day.
Of all faction-wars which history records, this is the most complicated,
the most difficult to analyse into distinct issues. The Guelfs have been
considered the Church or Papal party; and no doubt there is some truth
in this view. Indeed, there seems to have been some hereditary tradition
of the kind dating from a much earlier generation; long, in fact, before
the Ghibeline name had been heard of. When, as we have seen, Countess
Matilda of Tuscany, the champion of Gregory VII., was looking out for a
second husband, she fixed upon Welf of Bavaria, presumably the "dux
Noricorum," who, as Bishop Otto tells us, "in the war with the Emperor,
destroyed the cities of Freising and Augsburg." Their union did not last
long, for Matilda seems to have been hard to please in the matter of
husbands; but the fact of his selection looks as if he had been a
_persona grata_ with the Papal See. It is somewhat significant, too,
that Machiavelli regards the contest between Henry IV. and the Papacy as
having been "the seed of the Guelf and Ghibeline races, whereby when the
inundation of foreigners ceased, Italy was torn with intestine wars."
Yet we may shrewdly suspect that it was not so much any special devotion
to the Church, as the thwarted ambition of a powerful house, which made
the Welfs to be a thorn in the side first of the Franconian, then of the
Suabian Emperors.[10] At any rate, when a representative of the family,
in the person of Otto IV., at last reached "the dread summit of Caesarean
power," the very Pope, whose support had placed him on the throne, found
himself within little more than a year under the familiar necessity of
excommunicating the temporal head of Christendom. Still, in Italy no
doubt the Guelfs, politically at any rate, held by the Church, while the
Ghibelines had the reputation of being, as a party, at least tainted
with what we should now call materialism. It will be remembered that
among the sinners in this kind, who occupy the burning tombs within the
walls of the city of Dis, Dante places both the Emperor Frederick II.,
the head of Ghibelinism, and Farinata degli Uberti, the vigorous leader
of the party in Tuscany, while the only Guelf who appears there is one
who probably was a very loose adherent to his own faction.
Less justified, it would seem, is the idea that the Guelfs were
specially the patriotic party in Italy. No doubt the Popes at one time
tried to pose as the defenders of Italian liberties against German
tyrants, and some modern historians, forgetting the mediaeval conception
of the Empire, have been inclined to accept this view. But when it
suited his purpose, the Pope was ready enough to support an "anti-Caesar"
who was no less a German, or even to call in a French invader. The truth
is that at that time (and for many centuries afterwards), no conception
of "Italy" as a nation had entered into men's minds. We do not always
realise that until the year 1870, the territory, well enough defined by
Nature, which forms the modern kingdom of Italy, had never, except
indeed as part of a far wider Empire, owned the rule of a single
sovereign. Patriotism hardly extended beyond the walls of a man's own
city. Even Dante feels that residence in Lucca, Bologna, or Verona is an
exile as complete as any, and that his only _patria_ is Florence, though
it may be safely said that to him, if to any living man, the idea of an
Italian nation had presented itself.
The one argument which we can find to support this view lies in the fact
that while the chief Guelf names are those of burgher families, many of
the leading Ghibeline houses were undoubtedly of German origin. At
Florence the Uberti, at Bologna the Lamberti, show their descent in
their names. Villani tells us that the Emperor Otto I. delighted in
Florence, "and when he returned to Germany certain of his barons
remained there and became citizens." The two families just mentioned
are specified. So far, then, the Guelfs may be regarded as representing
native civic liberties against an alien feudal nobility, and the
struggle between the two factions will fall into line with that which at
a somewhat later date went on in Germany between the traders of the
cities and the "robber-barons" of the country. In this aspect we may see
the full meaning of Dante's continual allusion to the sin of avarice,
under the image of the "wolf;" an allusion, again, which the original
name whence the Guelf party took its appellation would specially point.
How and when the names first appeared in Italy we do not know. The first
manifestation of resistance on the part of the cities to the Imperial
control was given when Milan withstood Frederick Barbarossa--in defence,
it may be noted, of its own right to oppress its weaker neighbours; but
during the war which followed, and which was terminated by Frederick's
defeat at Legnano, the head of the Welfs, Henry the Lion, was for most
of the time fighting on the Imperial side, and though he deserted
Frederick at the last, he does not seem to have given any active help to
the Lombard League. Yet it may well be that in his defection we have to
see a stage in the transition from Welf to Guelf. It is, however, not in
Lombardy, but in Tuscany, that the names of Guelf and Ghibeline, as
recognised party designations, first appear. Machiavelli says--perhaps
by a confusion with the Black and White factions, of whom we shall hear
later--that they were first heard in Pistoia; but however this may be,
they would seem to have been definitely accepted by 1215, to which year
Villani assigns their introduction into Florence.
We have now reached the first date, it may be said, which students of
Dante will have to remember; a date which to him, and equally to the
sober chronicler Villani, marked the beginning of troubles for the city
which both loved as a mother, though to the greater son she was "a
mother of small love." The occasion is so important that it ought to be
related in the historian's own words:--
"In the year of Christ 1215, one Messer Bondelmonte, of the
Bondelmonti, a noble citizen of Florence, having promised to
take to wife a damsel of the house of the Amidei, honourable and
noble citizens; as this Messer Bondelmonte, who was a gay and
handsome cavalier, was riding through the city, a lady of the
Donati family called to him, speaking evil of the lady who had
been promised to him, how that she was not fair nor fitting for
him, and saying: 'I have kept my daughter here for you,' showed
him the maiden; and she was very fair. And straightway falling
enamoured of her, he gave her his troth, and espoused her to
wife; for which cause the kinsfolk of the first promised lady
gathered together, and being grieved for the shame that Messer
Bondelmonte had wrought them, they took on them the accursed
quarrel whereby the city of Florence was laid waste and broken
up. For many houses of the nobles[11] bound themselves together
by an oath to do a shame to the aforesaid Bondelmonte in
vengeance for those injuries. And as they were in council among
themselves in what fashion they should bring him down, Mosca of
the Lamberti said the ill word: "A thing done hath an end,"
meaning that he should be slain.[12] And so it came to pass; for
on the morning of Easter Day they assembled in the house of the
Amidei by St. Stephen's, and the said Messer Bondelmonte, coming
from beyond Arno, nobly clad in new white clothes, and riding on
a white palfrey, when he reached the hither end of the Old
Bridge, just by the pillar where was the image of Mars, was
thrown from his horse by Schiatta of the Uberti,[13] and by
Mosca Lamberti and Lambertuccio of the Amidei assailed and
wounded, and his throat was cut and an end made of him by
Oderigo Fifanti; and one of the counts from Gangalandi was with
them. For the which thing's sake the city flew to arms and
uproar, and this death of Messer Bondelmonte was the cause and
beginning of the accursed Guelf and Ghibeline parties in
Florence, albeit that before this the factions among the nobles
of the city had been plenty, and there had been the parties I
have said, by reason of the conflicts and questions between the
Church and the Empire; but through the death of Messer
Bondelmonte all the families of the nobles and other citizens of
Florence took sides with them, and some held with the
Bondelmonti, who took the Guelf side and were its leaders, and
others with the Uberti, who were head of the Ghibelines. Whence
followed much havoc and ruin to our city, and one may think that
it will never have an end if God put not a term to it."[14]
The historian proceeds to enumerate the noble families who joined either
side. Curiously enough, they were at first evenly divided--thirty-eight
to thirty-eight. Not much is to be inferred from the names, though it is
somewhat significant that of those, some half a dozen families in all,
whom Villani, himself a Guelf, notes as having only recently attained to
nobility, all joined the Guelf party. There seems also to have been a
tendency for Ghibeline houses to become Guelf, which is not balanced by
any defections in the opposite sense, so that the balance of parties was
soon disturbed in favour of the Guelfs. At first, however, though
"there was a division among the nobles of the city in that one loved the
lordship of the Church, and the other that of the Empire, yet in regard
to the state and welfare of the commonwealth all were in concord."
This state of things did not last long. In 1220 Frederick II. was
crowned Emperor at Rome. Up till that time he had been more or less a
_protege_ of the Popes. First Innocent III., then Honorius III., had
kept a fatherly eye upon his youth and early manhood, and for a time
Church and Empire seemed to pull together. Honorius had, indeed,
occasion to write severely to him more than once, but there was no
breach of the peace. The accession of Gregory IX., in 1227, changed the
aspect of affairs. Before the year was out, Frederick, like most of his
predecessors for 200 years past, was under the ban of the Church: and
from this time forward there was an end of peace and quiet government in
Northern Italy. "Before Frederick met with opposition," Dante makes a
Lombard gentleman of the last generation say, "valour and courtesy were
wont to be found in the land which Adige and Po water; now may any man
safely go that way, who through shame has left off to converse with
good men or approach them."[15]
Florence seems to have remained longer than most of the chief cities
aloof from the main contest. She had her own wars with Pisa, beginning
with a private quarrel at the Emperor's coronation (in which we are
expressly told that both parties united), and afterwards with Siena; and
the great houses did a certain amount of private fighting; "but still
the people and commonwealth of Florence continued in unity, to the
welfare and honour and stability of the republic." In 1248, however,
Frederick turned his attention in that direction, moved, it may be, by
the growing strength of the Guelfs. His natural son, Frederick of
Antioch, was sent with a force of German men-at-arms, and after some
fierce street fighting, the Guelfs were driven out.
The Ghibeline supremacy was short-lived. Their nobles, especially the
great house of the Uberti, became unpopular by reason of the exactions
which they enforced; they got beaten in a fight with some of the
banished Guelfs at no great distance from the city; and before the end
of 1250 a meeting of "the good men," as Villani calls them, or, as we
should say, the middle class, limited the power of the Podesta,[16] and
appointed a Captain of the People to manage the internal affairs of the
city, with a council of twelve Elders. Other important changes were made
at the same time, and the new constitution--the third recorded in
Florentine history--was known as the "Primo Popolo." The death of
Frederick in the same year still further weakened the Ghibelines. Some
of them were banished, and the exiled Guelfs were recalled. Peace,
however, seems to have been kept between the parties for some time, and
when in 1255 Count Guido Guerra on his own account expelled the
Ghibelines from Arezzo, the Florentines restored them, and lent the
Aretines money to pay a fine which the Guelf chief had inflicted; "but I
know not if they ever got it back," says Villani.
Again the compromise proved unstable. Manfred, Frederick's natural son,
to whom, during the childhood of his young nephew, Conradin, the
championship of the Hohenstaufen cause had fallen, was daily increasing
in strength. His orders came to the Ghibelines of Florence to crush the
popular party; and the latter, being warned in time, drove out all the
great Ghibeline families. Two years later these had their revenge. On
September 4, 1260, a date much to be remembered in the history of these
times, the banished Ghibelines, aided by eight hundred of Manfred's
German horse, seized the opportunity of hostilities between the
Florentines and the Sienese to meet their opponents in a pitched battle.
This took place on the Arbia, near the fortress of Montaperti, to the
east of Siena.[17] The Guelfs were utterly routed, partly, it would
seem, through the incompetence of some of the Elders who accompanied the
army, and who, civilians though they were, overruled the judgement of
the military leaders, and accepted battle under unfavourable
conditions; and partly through the treachery of some Ghibelines who, not
having been exiled, were serving in the Florentine host. Readers of the
_Commedia_ will remember the name of Bocca degli Abati, placed by Dante
in the lowest pit of hell.[18]
Sixty-five of the leading Guelf families fled to Lucca, while the
Ghibelines entered Florence, and appointed Guido Novello, of the great
house of the Conti Guidi, Imperial Podesta. A meeting of the leaders of
the party from Pisa, Siena, and Arezzo was held at Empoli, and a
proposal was made on behalf of the rival cities, to raze Florence to the
ground as a fortified city, and so preclude her revival as a Guelf
stronghold. For once, however, a man was found to set patriotism above
party. The great Farinata degli Uberti, whose wise counsel and warlike
skill had mainly contributed to the victory, rose, with the same
magnificent scorn, we may suppose, that Dante afterwards saw him display
for the torments of Hell,[19] and let it be known that, so long as he
had life in him, he would resist any such measure at the sword's point.
Count Giordano, the commander of the Germans, who had convened the
meeting, gave in, and Florence was saved.
This was the last gleam of success which the Imperial cause was to
enjoy in Tuscany for nearly half a century. Soon after the battle of
Montaperti, Urban IV. was elected to the Papal See. He was a Frenchman
by birth, "son of a shoemaker, but a valiant man and wise," says
Villani. In view of the growing power of Manfred, vigorous steps had to
be taken. The exiled Florentine Guelfs had made a fruitless attempt to
effect a diversion in Germany, by inciting the young Conradin to oppose
the acting head of his house. This old expedient having failed, Urban
turned his eyes towards his own country. Charles of Anjou, brother of
Saint Lewis, was at that time, next to the reigning sovereigns, the most
powerful prince in Christendom, and to his aid the Pope appealed.
Himself a man of Puritanical strictness in his life, and devoted to the
Church, Charles was ready enough to accept the call, which appealed
alike to his principles and to his ambition, and to act as the champion
of the Holy See against the dissolute and freethinking Manfred; and the
influence of his wife, the only one of Raymond Berenger's four daughters
who was not actually or in prospect a queen,[20] was thrown on the same
side. After keeping Easter 1265 at Paris, Charles set out, and landed at
the mouth of the Tiber in May. In December he was crowned at Rome King
of Naples, Sicily, and Apulia. Two months later, at the end of February
1266, Charles and Manfred met near Benevento. After some hard fighting,
of which the German troops seem to have borne the brunt, the battle was
decided against Manfred by the desertion of his Apulian barons, and he
himself was slain. His defeat gave the final blow to the Ghibeline cause
in Tuscany. Only Pisa and Siena remained faithful. In Florence an
attempt was made to avoid civil strife by the device of doubling the
office of Podesta. Two gentlemen from Bologna, Catalano de' Malavolti
and Loderingo de' Landolo, a Guelf and a Ghibeline,[21] were appointed,
and they nominated a council of thirty-six, chosen from both sides. But
this plan did not work well. Party spirit had grown too violent to allow
of half measures, and before the year was out the people rose again, and
the Ghibelines were banished for good and all.
FOOTNOTES:
[8] It seems proper to say that this chapter was written, and at
least some of it printed, before Mr. Oscar Browning's
interesting volume, _Guelphs and Ghibellines_ (Methuen),
appeared.
[9] It may not be out of place here to correct the vulgar error
that "Guelf" is in any sense the surname of our Royal family.
The house of Brunswick is no doubt lineally descended from these
Welfs of Bavaria; but it has been a reigning house since a
period long antecedent to the existence (among Teutonic peoples)
of family or surnames, and there is no reason for assigning to
the Queen the Christian name of one of her ancestors more than
another--"Guelf" more than "George."
[10] Hallam considers that hostility to the Empire was the
motive principle of the Guelf party in Lombardy; attachment to
the Church in Tuscany.
[11] Observe that the Bondelmonti were comparatively newcomers.
They had originally belonged to Valdigreve, and had only lived
in Florence for some eighty years at the date of this event.
Hence they were looked upon as upstarts, and not properly
speaking, nobles at all. See _Paradise_, xvi. 133-147.
[12] _Hell_, xxviii. 106.
[13] Possibly "by the Uberti lot."
[14] Villani, _Croniche_, v. 37.
[15] _Purgatory_, xvi. 115.
[16] The name _Podesta_ originally denoted the chief authority
of a city or county, whether vested in one person or several.
Frederick I. established Imperial officers under this title
throughout Tuscany near the end of his reign, and for some time
the Podesta was regarded as the Emperor's delegate. Before the
end of the century, however, they had become municipal officers,
gradually displacing the former consuls from the chief position.
About 1200 the custom of choosing them from the citizens of some
other town than that in which they officiated, seems to have
become established; the native consuls being their councillors.
[17] _Hell_, x. 96.
[18] _Hell_, xxxii. 81, 106.
[19] _Ibid._, x. 36.
[20] _Paradise_, vi. 133.
[21] They seem to have acted on the principle of filling their
own pockets, rather than of maintaining order; and are placed by
Dante among the hypocrites, in the sixth pit of Malebolge
(_Hell_, xxiii. 103). They belonged to the order of Knights of
St. Mary, popularly called Jovial Friars.