Battle of Montaperti: Siena Crushes Florence
Siena destroyed the Florentine army at Montaperti in September 1260 and Dante put the man who betrayed it in the lowest circle of hell. The war was one episode in the long quarrel between Guelfs, who supported the papacy, and Ghibellines, who supported the emperor, which had by this point become the vocabulary in which Italian cities fought each other over anything. Florence was Guelf and had expelled its Ghibelline families, who had taken refuge in Siena. The Sienese, with German cavalry supplied by Manfred of Sicily and the Florentine exiles under Farinata degli Uberti, drew the Florentine militia out by a piece of deception — envoys who offered to betray a gate. The Florentine army of perhaps 30,000, with its carroccio and its city banner, met about 20,000 on the hills east of Siena. The battle turned when Bocca degli Abati, a Ghibelline sympathiser inside the Florentine ranks, cut off the hand of the standard-bearer; the standard fell, the line took it for a rout and became one. Some 10,000 were killed and 15,000 taken. Dante, born five years later, has Bocca frozen in the ice at the bottom of the Inferno and has Farinata in the circle of heretics, standing upright in a tomb, remembered for having refused at a council afterwards to allow Florence to be razed. Siena's own account is a chronicle of the Virgin's intervention. Ghibelline Siena's victory lasted six years. Charles of Anjou destroyed Manfred at Benevento in 1266, Florence recovered, and the two cities spent the following century in commercial rivalry that Florence won by inventing modern banking.
- Year: 1260 CE
- Category: Military
