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Updated: June 26, 2025
Protestant and Catholic Scotsmen faithfully believed each other to be servants of the devil; but the Guelph and Ghibelline of Florence each respected, in the other, the fidelity to the Emperor, or piety towards the Pope, which he found it convenient, for the time, to dispense with in his own person.
We have now to ask ourselves why, when the struggle with the Empire was over, when Frederick Barbarossa had been defeated at Legnano, when the Lombard and the Tuscan Leagues were in full vigor before the Guelf and Ghibelline factions had confused the mainsprings of political activity, and while the national militia was still energetic, the Communes did not advance from the conception of local and municipal independence to that of national freedom in a confederacy similar to the Swiss Bund.
Above, on the surface of polished walnut-wood, between the tapestry and the ceiling, are hung suits of mail, helmets, shields, swords, lances, and tattered banners. Every separate piece has its history. Each lance, in the hand of some mediaeval hero of the name, has transfixed a foe, every sword has been dyed in the life-blood of a Ghibelline.
The great Florentine poet had the right to dream that his country was invested with a providential mission, that his people was a chosen people, which, by its own fault and by the fault of others, had lost its way, but would find it again. Such was Dante's so-called Ghibelline programme less Ghibelline than intensely and magnificently Italian.
In the Netherlands, where the attachment to Rome had never been intense, where in the old times, the Bishops of Utrecht had been rather Ghibelline than Guelph, where all the earlier sects of dissenters Waldenses, Lollards, Hussites had found numerous converts and thousands of martyrs, it was inevitable that there should be a response from the popular heart to the deeper agitation which now reached to the very core of Christendom.
You think, maybe, it were a sufficient excuse to say, "I did it for that he is a Ghibelline." Is this of the justice of kings, that they who resort on such wise to their arms should be entreated after such a fashion, be they who they may?
His house in the Ghibelline Street now belongs to the city of Florence, and contains many treasured mementoes of his life and works; it is open to all who wish to visit it. In 1875 a grand festival was held in Florence to celebrate the four hundredth anniversary of his birth.
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.
The battlements of the palace, cut square, show that it was built to that height by the Guelph faction; the trifurcated battlements of the belfry indicate a sudden change on the accession to power of the Ghibelline faction.
A silent bunch of ignorant human beings, full of thought for the morrow, and of care for the master's sheep that were herded together in the stone pen all round the hut; fighting the wolves in winter, and in summer time listening for the sound of war from the valley, when Guelph and Ghibelline harried all the country, and killed every stray living thing for food.
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