Frederico Canaccini

1289: La Battaglia di Campaldino

(Editori Laterza, 2021), 238 pp. €20.00

It is a rather sobering thought that the history of Italian, and indeed world, literature might have looked very different. On a sweltering June day in 1289, the youthful Dante Alighieri was among the three hundred or so elite cavalry in the first division of the Florentine/Guelf army as it faced the Aretine/Ghibelline forces on the plains near Campaldino. This section of the army bore the full brunt of the cavalry charge which opened the battle and was heavily involved pretty well throughout the engagement.  Casualties on both sides were heavy. Dante appears to have come through unscathed where others died or suffered severe wounds but the memory of Campaldino lived with him and appears at various places in the “Divine Comedy”. Intriguingly he places one of the Ghibelline commanders in Purgatory rather than the Inferno when he encounters his shade on his dream journey through the afterlife (some over-excited commentators have even hypothesized that he might have killed Buonconte da Montefeltro in single combat, though this is highly improbable), while some of the tortures of the damned appear to draw on memories of the aftermath of battle.

The presence of Dante on the field of Campaldino has given that battle a degree of profile in Italian memory, though not a notably prominent place. As Canaccini notes, it was hard to fit into Risorgiomento historiography as a glorious Italian fight against foreigners (the most conspicuous foreign presence was a group of French and Provencal knights who made a major contribution to the Guelf victory). There was a certain folkloric memory centred on tales of ghostly apparitions on the battlefield, which remained sparsely populated until into the twentieth century; in turn this memory fed stories picked up in literary form which Canaccini admits to having relished in his childhood.

Canaccini’s account of the battle starts a couple of generations before the armies faced off at Campaldino, with the appearance in Tuscany of “Guelf” and “Ghibelline” parties. As he notes, many commentators saw Satan in person as being at the origin of the Italian tendency to factionalism and division within cities. Indeed some chronicles claimed that the party descriptions were the personal names of two demons; others, more picturesquely, suggested that they were two dogs which had begun a fight in Florence and had drawn factions of supporters to cheer them on. More credibly, if still in highly romanticised form, the division in Florence at least was traced back to noble feuding over a broken engagement. While tracing the ups and downs of the parties in Tuscany over the thirteenth century, Canaccini is less forthcoming about what ideological content, if any, they had by the late 1280’s. Although the Imperial banner flew over the Ghibelline army at Campaldino, the reigning emperor Rudolf von Habsburg had little real interest in Italy (for which Dante reproached him bitterly). The Guelf coalition was pursuing the conflict with Arezzo in defiance of the clearly expressed will of Pope Nicholas IV- though in close alignment with the Angevin claimant to the kingdom of Naples whose banner flew over the army. Nominally the aim was to reinstate the Guelf faction who had been driven out of Arezzo; in practice the campaign was part of a three cornered fight over control of south eastern Tuscany between Arezzo, Florence and Siena (the latter two being in uneasy alliance at the time of Campaldino). Though Canaccini does not quite put it this harshly, it is hard to avoid a sense that the main motivation for Florentine Guelfism was a desire to ensure repayment of loans made to the Angevins while Tuscan Ghibellinism was driven by hostility to Florence. Certainly neither alliance was particularly solid; peace was nearly made in the winter of 1288/9 after a failed Guelf siege of Arezzo the previous summer.

Canaccini recounts the campaigns leading up to Campaldino with their ups and downs (one problem is that the Guelf side is much better covered by chronicle accounts, albeit ones of very questionable reliability- it is possible, for instance, that the failed 1288 siege was something of a rout rather than the withdrawal forced by extremely bad weather implied by Florentine writers). His retelling of the campaign which culminated in the battle is thorough and detailed. The Guelf side managed to gain tactical surprise by attacking along rough mountain paths via the Casentino rather than advancing up the Arno as in previous years (a map or two would have been helpful for the non-Tuscan reader). What is less clear is why the Ghibelline army committed itself to combat given that it was seriously outnumbered (on a previous occasion the previous year the armies had confronted each other but ultimately refrained from battle). Canaccini suggests that the Guelf army was also more modern in its composition, with effective infantry forces organised on the then cutting edge Italian model mixing crossbowmen and men with long spears, all protected by large shields or pavises whose carriers made up a significant part of the army. It is not clear from his account what sources suggest that the Ghibellines were less well equipped- there do not appear to be any accounting data from the Ghibelline side to match material in Florentine archives which give indications of the composition of the Guelf forces. Admittedly there is a slightly archaic feel to the Ghibelline side, due in part to the presence on the field in a combatant capacity of the aged bishop of Arezzo Guiglielmino Ubertini (who was to be killed there- surely one of the last bishops of the western church to die in battle at the head of his troops- and eventually reburied in Arezzo as late as 2008). Certainly the Ghibelline infantry do not appear to have been deployed as effectively as their Guelf counterparts but one would have liked a little more proof of their technological backwardness here.

It was clearly a bloody and close fought battle (and as so often in medieval battles, brutally hard on horses). Intriguingly, despite the loud Guelf claims of victory, a non-negligible number of men from that side appear to have been taken prisoner as various exchanges in the aftermath of the battle demonstrate. It was also in many ways a victory which went nowhere. A second siege of Arezzo proved no more successful than the first despite the absence of proper town walls to protect certain sectors of the city.   Looking further ahead, the battle seems to have resolved very little. Indeed by the end of the century Florence was bitterly internally divided again and heading towards another round of internal conflict one of whose victims was the man who had fought in the front ranks at Campaldino- Dante Alighieri. If the devil was indeed behind Italian factionalism, he was still hard at work.

Brian G H Ditcham
Independent Scholar