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Updated: June 16, 2025
The Waiblingen faction elected as emperor of Germany Conrad the Crusader, in whom began the Hohenstaufen dynasty, so named from the Swabian family seat on the lofty Staufen hill rising from the Rems River. From this event dates the strife of the Welfs and Waiblingens, who in Italy became known as Guelfs and Ghibellines.
In order to explain the continual prosperity of the princes amid the clash of forces brought to bear against them from so many sides, we must remember that they were the partisans of social order in distracted burghs, the heroes of the middle classes and the multitude, the quellers of faction, the administrators of impartial laws, and the aggrandizers of the city at the expense of its neighbors. Ser Gorello, singing the praises of the Bishop Guido dei Tarlati di Pietra Mala, who ruled Arezzo in the first half of the fourteenth century, makes the Commune say: 'He was the lord so valiant and magnificent, so full of grace and daring, so agreeable to both Guelfs and Ghibellines. He, for his virtue, was chosen by common consent to be the master of my people. Peace and justice were the beginning, middle, and end of his lordship, which removed all discord from the State. By the greatness of his valor I grew in territory round about. Every neighbor reverenced me, some through love and some through dread; for it was dear to them to rest beneath his mantle. These verses set forth the qualities which united the mass of the populations to their new lords. The Despot delivered the industrial classes from the tyranny and anarchy of faction, substituting a reign of personal terrorism that weighed more heavily upon the nobles than upon the artisans or peasants. Ruling more by perfidy, corruption, and fraud than by the sword, he turned the leaders of parties into courtiers, brought proscribed exiles back into the city as officials, flattered local vanity by continuing the municipal machinery in its functions of parade, and stopped the mouths of unruly demagogues by making it their pecuniary interest to preach his benefits abroad. So long as the burghers remained peaceable beneath his sway and refrained from attacking him in person, he was mild. But at the same moment the gallows, the torture-chamber, the iron cage suspended from the giddy height of palace-roof or church tower, and the dreadful dungeons, where a prisoner could neither stand nor lie at ease, were ever ready for the man who dared dispute his authority. That authority depended solely on his personal qualities of will, courage, physical endurance. He held it by intelligence, being as it were an artificial product of political necessities, an equilibrium of forces, substituted without legal title for the Church and Empire, and accumulating in his despotic individuality the privileges previously acquired by centuries of consuls, Podest
But the accounts of both, though they are very different writers, agree in their scorn of the leaders of the White Guelfs. They were upstarts, purse-proud, vain, and coarse-minded; and they dared to aspire to an ambition which they were too dull and too cowardly to pursue, when the game was in their hands. They wished to rule; but when they might, they were afraid.
She handled her subjects agreeably, and they were, perhaps, more worthy of attention than the high discourse upon Guelfs and Ghibellines which was proceeding tempestuously at the other end of the room. It was a real catastrophe, not a mere episode, that evening of hers at Venice, when she had found in her bedroom something that is one worse than a flea, though one better than something else.
In the Via dei Bardi stood, probably still stands, the house inhabited by the chief of the great and noble family from whom it takes its name we write of the period of the fiercest struggles between the Guelfs and Ghibelines; and the Bardi were powerful partisans of the latter party. In that house dwelt a young girl of uncommon beauty, and yet more uncommon character.
Thus, if the Hohenstaufen family were the heirs of the Franconian Emperors, the Guelfs became the representatives of the opposition to that line which had centred in Saxony; and for the old contest between Papacy and Empire, Saxon and Franconian, there was now substituted a dynastic struggle between Weiblingen or Ghibelline and Guelf.
On the extinction of their house in 1024, it was succeeded by a Franconian dynasty which came into collision with the Papacy under Pope Gregory VII. On the extinction of this line in 1025 Germany became divided between the partisans of the Houses of Swabia and Saxony, the Wibelungs and Welfs, the origin of the Hibelines and Guelfs.
During the period of the civil wars, while there was nominally a conflict between the party of the pope and the party of the emperor, the Guelfs were devoted to the destruction of feudalism, and to the building-up of commerce and republican institutions; while the Ghibellines, dreading anarchy, resisted the incoming of the new order of things. Dante was himself a Ghibelline and an imperialist.
For the next twenty years the papal policy centres round the doings of Charles as much as it had centred for thirty years round the aims of Frederick II. The Guelf party in Rome had already elected Charles as senator, or head of the civic commune, in opposition to the Ghibelline Manfred. Thus the Pope and the Italian Guelfs once more combined to betray Italy to the foreign conqueror.
Such was the state of affairs in Dante's time, and it is important to remember this, because the quarrels of these different factions had a great effect upon his life. Particularly long and bloody in Florence and other cities had been the strife between two families and factions who called themselves respectively the Guelfs and the Ghibellines.
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