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He fought in 1289 at the battle of Campaldino against the city of Arezzo and the Ghibellines who had taken possession of that city. Florence had been strangely peaceful in his childhood because the Guelfs were her unquestioned masters at the time. It must have been a relief to Florentines to go forth to external warfare!
When the strife of Guelfs and Ghibellines, Neri, and Bianchi, had exhausted her in the fourteenth century, she submitted for a while to the indirect ascendency of the kings of Naples, who were recognized as Chiefs of the Guelf Party. During the fifteenth century she was kept continually disturbed by the rivalry of her great merchant families.
After the Guelfs had conquered the Ghibellines, and the people had absorbed the Grandi in their guilds, the next chapter in the troubled history of Florence was the division of the Popolo against itself. Civil strife now declared itself as a conflict between labour and capital.
It is very doubtful if English civilization has not, upon the whole, lost more than it has gained by substituting parliamentary for royal supremacy, and exchanging the Stuarts for the Guelfs.
It was in the first commencement of the long contest known as the strife between the Guelfs and Ghibellines before even these had become the party words for the Pope's and the Emperor's friends, and when they only applied to the troops of Bavaria and of Swabia that, in 1141, Wolf, Duke of Bavaria, was besieged in his castle of Weinberg by Friedrich, Duke of Swabia, brother to the reigning emperor, Konrad III.
If it be remembered that, at the same time, France had become a prey to the horrors which followed the imprisonment of King John; that England witnessed the commencement of the troubled reign of Richard II.; that Italy was delivered up to the contentions of the rival factions of the Guelfs and Ghibelines, and beheld two occupants at the same time upon the papal throne; that two emperors disputed the right to the imperial crown of Germany; and that Timurlane ravaged Asia from the territories of the Usheks to the borders of India, it will not be disputed that the history of the world records the annals of no more unhappy epoch in its affairs.
During the stress and storm of the fierce warfare carried on by Guelfs and Ghibellines, the Podest
Every town in the north of Italy was at that period torn by the factions of the Guelfs and Ghibellines; private feuds crossed and intermingled with political discords; and the savage tyranny of Ezzelino had shaken the fabric of society to its foundations. It seemed utterly impossible to bring this people for a moment to agreement.
It is not needful to describe the varying fortunes of the Guelfs and Ghibellines, the burghers and the nobles, during the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries. Suffice it to say that through all the vicissitudes of that stormy period the name Guelf became more and more associated with republican freedom in Florence.
Twenty replies to madame Grimaldi were written and torn, as not sufficiently expressive of a resentment that was rather vociferous than eloquent, and her confessor was at last forced to write one, in which he prevailed to have some holy cant inserted, though forced to compound for a heap of irony that related to the antiquity of her family, and for many unintelligible allusions to vulgar stories which the Ghibelline party had treasured up against the Guelfs.
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