Dante by Alessandro Barbero

Author:Alessandro Barbero [Barbero, Alessandro]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: history, Europe, Medieval, Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Italy
ISBN: 9781782837619
Google: 0moHEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2021-08-26T23:30:06.974316+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

BANISHMENT

At the beginning of November 1301, Charles of Valois entered Florence with 1,200 knights. The Black Guelphs had never ceased sending ambassadors beseeching him not to trust the Ghibellines, who they said were governing the city. Presenting the government of the Cerchis as Ghibelline was something of an exaggeration, but the French did not understand the complications of Italian politics and you could get away with telling them this and much more. The White Guelphs fooled themselves that the brother of the king of France really was coming to bring peace and harmony, but the Black Guelphs knew very well that the pope had sent him to destroy their enemies. When they eventually understood the truth, the Cerchis’ supporters took fright and each one tried to save himself by distinguishing his own position from that of the condemned faction. ‘Bandino Falconieri, a cowardly man, was saying: “My lords, I am well pleased, because I was not sleeping safe in my bed,”’ Compagni wrote in disgust. The priors, one of whom in that particular two-month period was Dino Compagni himself, negotiated with the pope and desperately tried to placate him, but the Black Guelphs lost their patience and started to carry out acts of violence and aggression. On the advice of a holy man, the priors organised a procession to implore divine mercy, ‘and many mocked us and said that we would do better to sharpen our swords’.1

Ultimately Charles of Valois threw off his disguise and had the leaders of the White Guelphs arrested, while Corso Donati and the other exiles returned to the city with impunity. For five or six days the Black Guelphs killed, tortured, plundered and destroyed by fire just as they wished. Dante’s properties were also laid waste, as Bruni recalled: ‘they rushed to his house, and stole everything, and devastated his properties.’ When Villani wrote of those days of terror, he was very specific: ‘They started to steal from the warehouses and shops, and the houses of those who had supported the White Guelphs’, and then the Black Guelphs proceeded with systematic punitive expeditions against their rival faction’s properties in the countryside. The devastation ‘continued in the countryside, forays in search of plunder, and stealing and setting fire to houses for more than eight days, whereby a great number of beautiful and expensive possessions were ruined or burned’. One document recorded as late as 1343 that one farm once belonging to Dante turned out to have houses that had been ‘burned and not burned’, confirming the absolute truth of what Bruni had recorded.2

The new masters of the city illegally forced the supreme magistrate and the priors to resign, and they set up a new government of ‘appalling commoners’ – appalling in that they betrayed their own kind in the inevitable opinion of Dino Compagni. Once messer Cante de’ Gabrielli da Gubbio had been appointed to the position of supreme magistrate, the anarchic violence was replaced by legal violence: the victors started to make false accusations and prepare legal cases against their adversaries.

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