When Farinata degli Uberti Saved Florence From Destruction

The Ghibelline commander proved the most devoted of all to the city that had exiled him when, at the Council of Empoli (1260), he alone opposed the destruction of Florence. Historians tell that the Pisan and Sienese leaders, after their victory at Montaperti, were set on razing the enemy city. And yet Dante placed him among the damned all the same.

And he to me: “Turn around! What are you doing?
See there Farinata, who has risen up:
from the waist upward you will see him whole.” …

Rising at once, he cried: “What?
You said ‘he had’? Is he not still alive?
Does the sweet light not strike upon his eyes?” …

He said to me: “Here with more than a thousand I lie:
within is the second Frederick,
and the Cardinal; of the rest I say nothing.” …

— Dante, Inferno, Canto X

History is written by the victors — everyone knows that. And the history of literature? Not always; quite the opposite, in fact. Take Dante. First he was a White Guelph, and for that he was exiled from Florence; then he turned Ghibelline, but the emperor he backed, Henry VII, died before completing the longed-for unification of the peninsula. Dante’s hard fate mirrors that of another Florentine, known above all through the portrait the Supreme Poet made of him: Manente di Iacopo degli Uberti, who went down in history under the nickname Farinata (for his fair, “floury” coloring). He was born around 1212 and died in 1264, a year before Dante’s birth — yet Dante heard the legendary tales told of him, tales that raised him into an absolute symbol of the heroic political ardor of thirteenth-century Florence.

Farinata was the commander of the Ghibellines who, in the fateful battle of Montaperti (1260), defeated the Florentine Guelphs — the very enemies who had exiled him; his victory let him return to his native city. Yet after the battle of Benevento (1266), fought after his death, his family was banished from Florence forever. And still the commander proved the most attached of all to the city that had cast him out, when at the Council of Empoli (1260) he alone stood against the destruction of Florence. Florentine historians recount that, after the triumph of Montaperti, the Pisan and Sienese leaders were determined to raze the enemy city to the ground and stamp out, once and for all, the last remnants of Guelphism. The stubborn Farinata opposed the plan with his whole being, reciting an epigrammatic proverb of his own invention — «Com’asino sape, sì va capra zoppa, così minuzza rape, se’ lupo non la ‘ntoppa» (roughly: as even the fool knows, the man of the herd follows the crowd and gains little, unless a headstrong man stops him) — and convinced those present to abandon their design.

Farinata did indeed stain the Arbia — the stream that runs near Montaperti — red with Florentine blood; but if the city still exists today, it is also thanks to his tenacity, and above all to his unconditional love for it. A love that, sadly, was not returned: the Franciscan inquisitor Salomone da Lucca pronounced a posthumous condemnation for heresy against him and his wife Adaleta. His bones, which lay in the church of Santa Reparata, were exhumed, and the property of his heirs confiscated. Moreover, the law of the time decreed that the children of exiles, on reaching the age of fourteen, must share their fathers’ fate. So it was for Farinata’s children — and for Dante’s, too: duty to the homeland overcame the duty of a father. It is precisely this bitterness that forms the backdrop of the second half of Farinata’s canto (Inf. X), one of the very few where the sinner’s personality overwhelms the doctrinal questions. Once the caustic opening quarrel between the two partisans is past, what remains is a twofold suffering before a Florence that was excessively unjust to both. The misfortune that binds them in family tragedy lets us feel with how much bitterness the Ghibelline chief, by virtue of the damned’s power of foresight, prophesies the exile that will strike Dante the character — a condition that already afflicted Dante the writer.

The political antagonism between the two fades further still before the recognition of that senseless cycle of violence that calls forth more violence. Dante would let himself be inspired once more by his fellow citizen’s moral stature: when the emperor Henry VII laid siege to Florence in 1312, the poet chose not to take up arms against his loathed and beloved city. Even the losers shape the future we live in.

Cover illustration by Alessio Atrei.