what he considered to be his property, that is the territories the church was trying to take from him, the empire, thanks to the gift of Constantine."
"And so he said he was the reincarnation of Charlemagne and Constantine to take the land back from the Holy Roman Empire?" exclaimed the pope.
"Those, Your Holiness."
"Those who?"
"Frederick Barbarossa and Frederick II also exhumed the body of Charlemagne and proclaimed something like this. And I would bet that this tradition has also been handed down to the astrologer Guido Bonatti and to Friar Geremia Gotto."18
"But these are all crazy."
"I told you, Excellency, that they were a little particular," concluded the historian.
4. Confrontations between the Guelphs and Ghibellines in Romagna
But why did the Church want Romagna?
What had happened between the papacy and emperors in those times?
Let's go back a few decades and take a look at a chronicle of the time.
Romagna in 1200
Although Pepin King of the Franks19 had given Romagna to the Church almost five centuries earlier, it was never perfectly under its possession. Often, therefore, many places in Romagna almost always joined the empire and towards the mid 1200s Gregory IX tried to take it back by force of arms. Because of the disagreements between Emperor Frederick II and the Church,20 the people of Romagna were also split between the Ghibellines and Guelphs as happened with many other peoples in Italy.
The residents of Forlì continued to obey the laws of the empire, while the residents of Faenza and Ravenna obeyed those of the Church.
Forlì, formerly named Forum Livii, in particular, was one of the most Ghibelline city in Italy and it was not a coincidence that Guido Bonatti, one of the best astrologers of his time, despite being born in Florence, requested and obtained citizenship of Forlì, believing that location to be the final place left in the world that maintained imperial traditions after the fall of the ancient empire of Rome, for reasons that you will soon discover for yourself.
In 1240, when Pietro Traversari died, who was the leader of the Guelphs of Romagna and lord of Ravenna,21 Ravenna and Faenza were conquered by Frederick II who went to Romagna and one after the other put siege to them.
In less than a week Ravenna fell and surrendered.
Now it was Faenza's turn to surrender, but the city, believing that Frederick II's forces were insufficient to cause it to capitulate, did not surrender and the emperor placed it under siege.
5. The siege of Faenza
Faenza resisted for seven months, infuriating Frederick himself, since years before he had already conquered the town and it had come to terms with him.
Furthermore, during the siege Frederick II ran out of gold and money and had to resort to the help of the Forlì people to conquer Faenza, he also requested the Forlì people to issue special augustarians22 in leather, equivalent to imperial gold coins, which he then repaid in gold to the inhabitants of Forlì once the town had been taken and sacked.
So, after having conquered Faenza, Frederick II wanted to raze it to the ground and erase it from the earth, saying all who were against the Faenza who, defeated, were unable to appease his fury in any way and had begun to have it dismantled by teams of scouts.
The people of Faenza, not knowing what else to do, even turned to their nearby enemies from Forlì, begging them to intervene and intercede with the emperor to stop the devastation he was causing to the detriment of their city.
The people of Forlì accepted the requests for help from Faenza and went as a delegation to intercede with the emperor to halt the destruction of the city.
Frederick, not without objections and protests against the people of Faenza, whom he considered traitors,23 finally agreed the city could be spared. However, he imposed that the city should become imperial definitively and should be governed under the banner of a mayor selected from among their Forlì neighbors, since they had helped him and proved to be Ghibellines in heart and soul. So he ordered that the people of Faenza stop doing "Guelph things" and merge with Forlì.
Thus the two cities became, until Frederick's death, two cities united in a small state governed by the same imperial laws and defended by the same arms.
Furthermore, because of their loyalty, Frederick granted the people of Forlì the right to use the black eagle on a gold field24 on their municipal coat of arms and gave them the right to mint imperial coins because of their assistance and loyalty and, for this reason, the people of Forlì proudly left.
Many things changed, however, in 1249, when Frederick II died in Puglia and especially in the following years, when Carlo d'Anjou defeated Frederick II's son, Manfredi, in Benevento in 1266.
Thus the Guelphs, who had been expelled from Florence a few years earlier after their defeat at the battle of Montaperti, began to regain strength in Florence and Bologna. A battle began in those cities for dominance over the Ghibellines, which briefly extended to all of Romagna, with the support of the Church that claimed that land to be hers.
And so, while Carlo I d'Angiò was named pope the imperial vicar of Tuscany, the Tuscan Guelphs returned to Florence and the region, while the Tuscan Ghibellines had to leave and take refuge in Romagna, which remained one of the last of the Ghibelline sites still loyal to the imperial laws in Italy.
6. The dragon, the Guelph cross and the Ghibelline cross
At that time, from 1186, various apocalyptic stories circulating around Italy were attributed to the prophet Gioacchino da Fiore, which spoke of the coming of a dragon with the seven heads of seven antichrists.
Six heads had already been assigned to various historical figures of the past but the last, and most important, was still vacant.
Thus the final missing head of the dragon was quickly attributed to Frederick II, by a certain type of clergy, who believed in the prophecies of Gioacchino da Fiore, because of the fact that, in addition to wanting to reform the church, it was said that he was born out of a union between a prelate and an old nun. Furthermore, Frederick II spoke Arabic, his bodyguards were Arabs and, during the Crusades, he was more concerned with making peace than war in the Holy Land, so much so that he was nicknamed "the Dragon", while other Franciscan and poorer circles of the Church, paradoxically, attributed to him the role of reformer, as the expected apocalyptic persecutor of the corrupt Church and especially of the cardinals.
For this reason many poor friars and priests, and later also white Guelphs, fought in the ranks of the Ghibellines.
The Guelphs used a papal cross as their symbol and flag; while the Ghibellines, while not denying the existence of God, had the reverse an imperial cross with contrasting colors that mirrored the Guelph one and summed up the different philosophy between the two factions.
But how were they made and what was the difference between the two symbols? Let's take a look.
Perhaps the Ghibelline and Guelph crosses arose as symbols, even before the Guelphs and Ghibellines,
