Guido da Landriano

Guido da Landriano commanded the army of the Lombard League at Legnano in 1176, the battle in which north Italian city militias beat a Holy Roman Emperor in the field. He was a Milanese noble of the Landriani, one of the families that had led the city's resistance since Frederick Barbarossa razed Milan in 1162 and dispersed its population into four villages. The league that rebuilt it was an alliance of communes that had spent decades fighting each other and combined against the emperor's attempt to reassert imperial rights over them. In May 1176 Barbarossa moved from Como towards Pavia with a force of German knights, and the league's army intercepted him near Legnano. The fighting turned on the Company of Death, a body of picked infantry sworn to defend the carroccio - the ox-drawn wagon carrying the city's standard and altar, which functioned as a rallying point that could not be abandoned without disgrace. The imperial cavalry broke the league's horse and then could not break the infantry around the wagon, and when the Brescian cavalry returned to the field the German line gave way. Barbarossa was unhorsed and missing for days; his wife had begun mourning when he reached Pavia. The peace of Constance in 1183 conceded the communes their self-government, and Legnano became a founding story of Italian civic independence, invoked again in the nineteenth century and in the twentieth. Italy's national anthem names the battle. Almost nothing is known about Landriano himself beyond the command, which is the ordinary condition of communal officers: the cities recorded what their institutions did and were markedly less interested in who held office that year.

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