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One of Oberto's ancestors, Alberto Azzo II, who is originally mentioned as Marchio de Longobardia, governed the territory from Mantua to the Adriatic and the region about the Po, where he owned Este and Rovigo. He married Kunigunde, sister of Count Guelf III of Swabia, and in this way the famous German family of Guelf became connected with the Oberti and drawn into Italian politics.
While the people was guarding itself thus stringently against the Grandi, a separate body was created for the special purpose of extirpating the Ghibellines. A permanent committee of vigilance, called the College or the Captains of the Guelf Party, was established.
The Archbishop of Cologne, however, summoned an assembly and brought about the election of a rival king, Otto of Brunswick, the youthful son of Henry the Lion. So the old struggle between Guelf and Hohenstaufen was renewed. Both of the kings bid for the support of Innocent III, who openly proclaimed that the decision of the matter lay with him.
That standard," he continued, laying his hand familiarly on Tito's shoulder, "that carried on the horse with white trappings that with the red eagle holding the green dragon between his talons, and the red lily over the eagle is the Gonfalon of the Guelf party, and those cavaliers close round it are the chief officers of the Guelf party.
But, despite the threats of the Church, Otto conquered most of Apulia and was equally successful in reviving the Imperial authority in Northern Italy. Innocent saw the power that he had built up so carefully in Italy crumbling rapidly away. In his despair he turned to France and Germany for help against the audacious Guelf.
By the time this generation gets upon the stage, if the controversy will not have ceased, it will run such a tide that we shall hardly he able to speak to one another, and there will be a Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel, which cannot tell where the differences lie." "You can form no conception how much one grovelling in the city needs the excitement and impulse of literary example.
"Ancients," and "priors," the heads of the "arts," supersede the consuls. The "podesta" is more and more limited to a judicial function. In some of the Guelf cities, there is "a gonfalonier of justice," to curb the nobility. In Florence, there were also twenty subordinate gonfaloniers. The final triumph of Guelfs and of republicanism in Florence was in 1253.
'Well then as usual facts began to play the mischief with one's ideas. In the first place, as one lives on in Italy you discover the antiquity of this quarrel; that it is only the Guelf and Ghibelline quarrel over again, under new names. And in the next presently one begins to divine an Italy behind the Italy we know, or history knows!
This ill-success revived the Guelf opposition in Germany, whose most powerful supporter was Henry the Lion's brother-in-law, Richard of England. Richard on his way to Palestine had made an alliance with Tancred against the common Hohenstaufen enemy. But returning from crusade Richard fell into the hands of Leopold of Austria.
After suffering for centuries from the vicissitudes common to all Italian free cities discords between the Guelf and Ghibelline factions, between the nobles and the people, between the enfranchised citizens and the proletariat after submitting to the rule of foreign masters, especially of France and Milan, and after being torn in pieces by the rival houses of Adorni and Fregosi, the Genoese at last received liberty from the hands of Andrea Doria in 1528.
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