here - Nobility Associations

eing the Italian forms of "Welf" and "Waiblingen". The princes of the house of
Hohenstaufen being the constant opponents of the papacy, "Guelph" and
"Ghibelline" were taken to denote adherents of Church and Empire, respectively.
The popes having favored and fostered the growth of the communes, the Guelphs
were in the main the republican, commercial, burgher party; the Ghibellines
represented the old feudal aristocracy of Italy. For the most part the latter were
descended from Teutonic families planted in the peninsula by the Germanic
invasions of the past, and they naturally looked to the emperors as their protectors
against the growing power and pretensions of the cities. It is, however, clear that
these names were merely adopted to designate parties that, in one form or another,
had existed from the end of the 11 C.
In the endeavor to realize the precise significance of these terms, one must consider
the local politics and the special conditions of each individual state and town. Thus,
in Florence, a family quarrel between the Buondelmonti and the Amidei, in 1215,
led traditionally to the introduction of "Guelph" and "Ghibelline" to mark off the
two parties that henceforth kept the city divided, but the factions themselves had
existed virtually since the death of the great Countess Mathilda of Tuscany (1115), a
hundred years before, had left the republic at liberty to work out its own destinies.
The rivalry of city against city was also, in many cases, a more potent inducement
for one to declare itself Guelph and another Ghibelline, than any specially papal or
imperial proclivities on the part of its citizens. Pavia was Ghibelline, because Milan
was Guelph. Florence being the head of the Guelph league in Tuscany, Lucca was
Guelph because it needed Florentine protection; Siena was Ghibelline, because it
sought the support of the emperor against the Florentines and against the
rebellious nobles of its own territory; Pisa was Ghibelline, partly from hostility to
Florence, partly from the hope of rivaling with imperial aid the maritime glories of
Genoa. In many cities a Guelph faction and a Ghibelline faction alternately got the
upper hand, drove out its adversaries, destroyed their houses and confiscated their
possessions. Venice, which had aided Alexander III against Frederick I, owed no
allegiance to the Western empire, and naturally stood apart.
One of the last acts of Frederick I had been to secure the marriage of his son Henry
with Constance, aunt and heiress of William the Good, the last of the Norman kings
of Naples and Sicily. The son of this marriage, Frederick II (b. 1194), thus inherited
this South Italian kingdom, hitherto a bulwark against the imperial Germanic
power in Italy, and was defended in his possession of it against the Emperor Otto
by Pope Innocent III, to whose charge he had been left as a ward by his mother. On
the death of Otto (1218), Frederick became emperor, and was crowned in Rome by
Honorius III (1220). The danger, to the papacy and to Italy alike, of the union of
Naples and Sicily (a vassal kingdom of the Holy See) with the empire, was obvious;
The Hohenstaufen Dynasty - Page 25 of 200