whitebeard

Thursday, March 30, 2006

The Casentino and its story

CHAPTER II

THE SWORD IN THE VALLEY

“Cities of men with lofty gates and towers,

concourse in arms, fierce faces threatening war,

giants of mighty bone, and bold emprise."

The traces of the rule of the strong arm, under which the Casentino lay far many centuries, are still visible to-day. As you look down the plain from castled hill to castled hill, and along the many folds of the mountain ramparts, where every village, girt with ruined walls, bristles upon a crag of defence, you think that some Cadmus must once have sown the valley with dragons' teeth. No field better fitted far that deadly seed. The barons, lay or ecclesiastic, who in the chaos of the ninth and tenth centuries in Italy bad possessed themselves of practical authority, could satisfy, in the impregnable fastnesses of these mountains, the ideal of individuality inherited from long-bearded or Teutonic ancestors, by warring upon one another, or stooping upon the defenceless peasants in the valleys, or the feeble communities in their neighbourhood. During this period in Italy the Eagle of the Empire, however omnipotent in simulacrum upon the banners of Frankish or German sovereigns, was in effect superseded in the Casentino, and everywhere within range of the Apennines, by the petty screaming lords of the mountain eyries. .

Within the Valley Enclosed the strong places were early united under a single rule. From the latter part of the tenth century, if not earlier, all the upper and most important part of the Casentino was held by the great house of the Guidi. These barons, who owned vast territories in Tuscany and the Romagna on either side of the Apennines and held the grand title of Counts Palatine, were some of the most potent elements in the early history of Florence. In the pages of Dante and of Giovanni Villani and other FIorentine writers of that time they are called i Conti without further distinction.

Their origin, like that of so many great Italian houses of the Middle Ages, is wrapped in obscurity. Nothing seems to be certainly known of them till the latter part of the tenth century, when they were already powerful. And at this periodo they appear still in a borderland of legend and history. Early chroniclers relate a tale of love as the foundation of the fortunes of the family. The young Lord Tegrimo, or Guido, was hunting one day in the forest of Modigliana, and killed a fair white doe. Finding himself beneath the castle of the Countess Engelrada, he sent his page with the. doe to lay it as an offering at her feet. Engdrada was the daughter of the Duke of Ravenna, and was very beautiful and very rich; she ruled Modigliana in the Romagna, notfar from Faenza, with all the country round. Many were the wooers that knelt at her feet, only to be dismissed with scorn. But the offering of the doe, and perhaps some glimpse which she had aiready had of the handsome young huntsman, touched her hard heart and she commanded the presence of Tegrimo in her bower, and before long she yielded him her heart and her hand, together with all her vast possessions in the Romagna and Tuscany.

This couple are mentioned in contemporary documents, and the succession of their posterity may be gathered from ancient deeds, in which grants made by them to religious foundations are recorded. The early chroniclers supplement this dry memorial by more romantic details of the sinful lives for which these pious gifts were usually a tardy death-bed expiation. They tell us that Guido, son of Tegrimo, was very powerful in Ravenna, where he made himself so hateful by violence and lust that the people massacred him and all his house. One baby son alone escaped, being hidden by his foster-mother, and grew up to take terrible revenge upon the slayers of his kindred. So fìerce was his exultation over his slaughtered enemies that he is said to have licked their blood from his sword, whence his name of Tegrimo, or Guido Bevisangue. This bloodthirsty individual founded the once famous Abbey of Strumi, near Poppi, for the white-robed followers of St. Bernard. His son Guido appears as the founder of churches and patron of monasteries, and might have come down to history in an amiable light had it not been for that scourge of sinners, Peter Damian, who in one of his epistles gives a different view of the baron's character. He narrates how a certain priest in a vision was conducted by St. Benedict into Hell, where he saw many who had been great nobles on earth suffering terrible torments because of their sins. And among. other things he saw a number of hideous devils busily making great preparations, running backwards and forwards, hurrying and panting, like servants getting a house ready far the reception of some great and honoured guest, and was told that they expected Count Guido on the fourth day from then; whereupon the priest woke up and related what he had seen, and on the fourth day, as predicted, the Count died.

. And so Guido succeeded Guido, each one adding to the power and influence of the house. The grandson of him whose doom Peter Damian relates is the first of the Counts who joined the warlike name of Guerra to the original Guido. This first Guidoguerra was a man of great authority, and shared the government of Tuscany with those great princesses, the Countess Beatrice and her daughter, the famous Matilda. His sons joined in the Crusades, and were taken captive by the Saracens ; the Count is recorded to have pawned a great silver crucifix for their ransom. Re was succeeded by one of these crusading heroes, Guidoguerra II, known as the Marquis, a title bestowed upon him by the Grancontessa Matilda, who seems to have adopted him as her son, and to have given him equal jurisdiction with herself in Tuscany. Both he and his father were generous in their gifts to churches and convents. The Marquis was followed by his son, Guidoguerra III. In this Count, who was the companion of crusading kings, and foremost in the councils of the young Emperor Barbarossa, the house reached the highest summit of its power and prosperity. A chronicler of the time tells us that at his death, in 1157, every Italian wept; that he was the greatest of the princes of the Empire, and the mirror of nobility for all Italy. During his absence in the Holy Land, and after his early death, while his san was yet a child, the dominions of the Guidi were ruled by his sister Sofia, the Abbess of Pratovecchio. Sofia was a woman of very notable character-a typical nun princess of the twelfth century, the female counterpart of the fighting bishop of the day, who wore a coat of mail and carried a sword far a pastoral staff. When making her profession at the age of fifteen, with great pomp and ceremony, in the presence of bishops and high ecclesiastical dignitaries, she took the veil from the altar and placed it aver her own head, saying, "I will not that you bishops should put it on me; but with my own act I give myself to my Lord Jesus Christ." Her widowed mother, the Countess Imilia, founded for her the Convent of S. Giovanni, which still exists at Pratovecchio. It quickly became a great and powerful community, through the generous endowments bestowed upon it by the Guidi, and the Abbess ruled it, and its dependent religious houses, and vassal castles and territories, with a strong hand. She was seen constantly on horseback, riding from place to place, surrounded by her men-at-arms, to administer justice to her subjects. When she approached one of her convents, the nuns, headed by their abbess, would come forth in procession to a great distance to meet her, and would receive her kneeling humbly upon the ground. The forests and green valleys where the, ruined monasteries of the Apennines once stood are empty of such pictures now. But these veiled votaries of re1igion were not so meek as they appeared, and their conduct often called forth the harsh reproof of their superior. On one occasion she replied to their greetings thus: "I do not salute you, for you are the most wicked of women and of evil report, and bring shame upon my house." The nunneries indeed were full of the party spirit of the time, and were often nests of political intrigue, and there are records of secret murders and evil deeds committed within those subject to the Abbess Sofia at the instigation of the Counts.

The gallant Abbess did not allow the influence of her House to decline. during the minority of her nephew. She was in constant attendance upon Frederick Barbarossa's Empress when that lady accompanied her lord into Italy. The young Count grew up in the sunshine of the Imperial favour, and followed the Emperor in all his wars later; espousing his cause zealously in the great quarrel with the Church. With this Guidoguerra, fourth of the name, the history of the House emerges into clearer light. As the ancestor of the several branches of the Guidi, which played a prominent and conflicting part in the faction warfare of later days, and himself a mighty prince and a man of robust and striking personality, he has obscured the more shadowy memories of his fathers, and stands in history as the most famous of all the Conti. His fame is coupled with that of his wife, the good Gualdrada, daughter of a rich Florentine citizen, Messer Bellincione Berti dei Ravegnani, the "alto Bellincione" named to Dante among the noble Florentines of old by Cacciaguida in the Paradiso (C. xvi., v. 99) . In another passage (C. xv., vv. 112-114) Cacciaguida cites Bellincione and his wife as examples in their attire of the simplicity and modesty used in the good old days.

Giovanni Villani and other fourteenth century writers tell a charming tale about the marriage of Guidoguerra and Gualdrada. The following is Boccaccio's version of it: -" The Emperor Otho IV., chancing to be in Florence, and to make the city more joyous by his presence, having betaken himself to the festival in the Church of St. John, it happened that together with the other gentle women of the city, according to our custom, the wife of Messer Berto carne to the church and brought with her her daughter, named Gualdrada, who was still a maiden; and when they had seated themselves on one side with the other women, all the bystanders, because the damsel was passing beautiful in form and in stature, turned to look at her, and among others the Emperor, who, having greatly praised both her fairness and the modesty of her mien, asked Messer Berto who she was. To which Messer Berto, smiling, answered: “She is the daughter of one who is willing that you should kiss her if it so pleases you.' These words were heard by the damsel, who was close by; and rising to her feet and looking awhile at her father, her countenance changing somewhat with shame, she said: 'My father, do not so courteously promise away my honour, for of a surety none shall ever kiss me, save he whom you give me for husband.' " The story continues, that the Emperor was still more pleased with her because of her words, and calling to him the noble youth Count Guido, who was in his train, urged him to marry her; and Guido being nothing loth, having already fallen in love with the maiden, the marriage was performed, and Otho bestowed upon them the Casentino as Gualdrada's dowry. But, alas for romance, the Guidi, as we know, had possessed the Casentino long before: The chroniclers must have confused Gualdrada with the far – off Engelrada. And, what is worse, it is quite clear from documentary evidence that Gualdrada was a married woman of many years standing in 1208 when Otho first came to Italy, being already in 1180 the wife of Guidoguerra. But that she was as virtuous and beautiful as the story says we need not doubt. It is Dante who speaks of her as “the good Gualdrada."

.The Count, her husband, has left a different impress on history. The Faentine chronicler, who lauds Guidoguerra III in such high terms, bewails the dissimilarity of the son, whom he likens to Rehoboam, in that he little followed in his father's footsteps, but, despising the wise and discreet, was led by the counsel of the young and foolish. There is a letter extant addressed to the Count by Pope Innocent III. in 1213, exhorting him to repent the many crimes of his ear1y life, instead of adding a multitude of fresh ones to them in his old age, and in especial to mend his conduct towards the religious houses. For it seems that he had not only oppressed and afflicted his neighbours the monks of Camaldoli with many wrongs, but by making a road near the Eremo he had intruded into their solitude armed men, and, worse still, play actors and light women, there where from of old no woman was ever allowed to enter. Moreover, he had carried off all the oxen of the monks. But though a reprobate in the eyes of Pope and bishops, the merry baron captured the popular fancy, and many tales became current about him. Magister Boncompagno, a famous grammarian of the thirteenth century, relates the pranks which Guidoguerra played upon the minstrels and buffoons who came to his palace, and at whose expense his whimsical and brutal humour diverted itself in a manner little to their taste. He punned in practical fashion upon their names, compelling one, called Malanotte to spend all night upon the roof in the snow, and another, Maldecorpo, to lie and fizzle between two fires, while a third suffered for his name of Abbas by having his hair pulled out so as to simulate a tonsure. And other like tricks are told of him.
by having his hair pulled out so as to simulate a tonsure. And other like tricks are told of him. Guidoguerra shared in the general depression of the Ghibellines after the great defeat of Barbarossa at Legnano. From this time begins a gradual decline in the power of the Guidi. The day of the independent baron in Italy was passing by. The growing cities opposed a new and mighty force to the feudal system, which had never thoroughly conquered the country. As a city waxed in power and consequence the independent magnates in its neighbourhood grew weaker, and were compelled one by one to seek the alliance and support of the city itself by condescending to share citizenship with the burghers. Faenza and Pistoia, and other communes that had obeyed Guidoguerra's father, now openly defied him, and, when the trial of arms came, showed themselves strong enough to exact terms from him. His vassals revolted against the subjection in which they had hitherto been held, and he was forced to grant them rights in the lands which they tilled. Meanwhile Florence was quietly extending herself outside her walls. During the thirteenth century she destroyed one by one the independent strongholds upon the hills around, compelling their lords to acknowledge her supremacy and receiving them into her own community, to which they brought, together with a strong and rich vitality, the elements of discord. Each day this natural process extended farther, and the great Counts Palatine, the Guidi themselves, began to be affected by it. The Republic succeeded in dealing Guidoguerra many severe blows. By armed attack, and more often by insidiously encouraging discontent among his vassals and serfs, she usurped the sovereignty of many of his castles, abbeys and fiefs in her neighbourhood. United with the other Guelf cities of Tuscany, she fought in him the ally and supporter of the hated Frederick Barbarossa and his son Henry VI. In 1196 the Count, having lost all faith in the Empire, which was now divided by the rival claims of two candidates and had for the time lost its hold upon Italy, began to reconcile himself to the new order of things, and made common cause with the Guelf League of the Tuscan cities. With the other Guelf chiefs he paid homage to Otho IV when that Emperor came to Italy in 1309. Four years later he died, leaving his sons estab1ished as citizens and subjects of Florence, and in possession of the houses of the Ravignani over the gate, which they had inherited through their mother, the Countess Gualdrada. These houses beside the ancient gate of San Pietro were afterwards sold by the Guidi to the Black Cerchi, a branch of the Cerchi which adhered to the party of the in opposition to its kinsmen, the leaders of the Bianchi. These Black Cerchi are the newfelony of such great weight with which Dante declares out of the mouth of Cacciaguida that the gate was laden in his time.

It follows