Guelfs and Ghibellines
The papal-imperial conflict
between the
(written by
Lancelot Finn, November 21, 2004)
Country and city
have different mindsets, which sometimes translate into different political
philosophies. Most people in areas with
high population density voted Democrat in 2004.
Most people in areas with low population density voted Republican. Patrick Cox at TCS superimposed a red-blue electoral map (by county) on a map of
population density and showed how eerily
tight this correlation is. There was
a similar polarization in 12th- and 13th-century
In each case, the
distinction was sharpened by a geopolitical question. Today that question is the war in
Heirs of Dante Alighieri
Guelfs were mostly merchants and burghers, strongest in the
city-states of
The Ghibellines supported the German emperor, who was called
the "Holy Roman Emperor." Many
were noblemen. The most famous Ghibelline, though not the most typical, was Dante
Alighieri. Dante's book On Monarchy is the most famous defense
of the imperial cause.
Dante argued that
the Roman people were chosen by God to rule the earth and bring it peace and
justice. That is about what the neocons are accused of believing about the American
people. Dante argued that the solution
to human strife was to give all power to one person, the Emperor, who, having
nothing more to gain, would not be corrupted by ambition. In a similar vein, the National Security
Strategy in 2002 argues that
Like contemporary
bloggers, Dante made his name writing in a new
medium—in Dante's case, the vernacular (though On Monarchy was in Latin).
Today's star bloggers are, like Dante, mainly
of the Ghibelline persuasion. Andrew
Sullivan, Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair, Wretchard
of Belmont Club, Greg Djerejian of Belgravia Dispatch, Roger
Simon, and Iraqi bloggers like the Fadhil brothers of "Iraq the Model," Zeyad of "Healing
Iraq" and Alaa of "The Mesopotamian,"
plus other internet greats like Mark Steyn and Tech Central Station, and
fellow-travelers like Niall Ferguson and Max Boot, all supported the liberation
of Iraq. Today's Ghibellines
share Dante's classical bent. As Dante
looked to ancient
Many bloggers—like Dante—are Ghibellines
against their demographic: they are
journalists, or professors, or—in Roger Simon's case—a screenwriter, or—in Mark
Steyn's case—Canadian, when most of academia, the
media, the film industry and Canada pays homage to the Guelf
cause. Andrew Sullivan is gay and a journalist and a Brit and a
big-city dweller: a sure Guelf, one would think, but
no. Dante spent much of his life in
exile for his political views, from his native
City and country, Guelf
and Ghibelline
But what accounts
for the prevailing political slant of certain demographics? Patrick Cox asks the same question:
What, we are led to ask, could explain this
relationship [between demography and politics]? How does the number of live
humans per square mile either influence or reflect political philosophy?
The standard, rather unexamined, assumption is that
rural
While this may be an accurate description, no one, to
my knowledge, has provided a convincing explanation for the differences between
lower and higher density regions. Why would, after all, city life cause one to
embrace liberal political views? Why would life in the country yield a
conservative perspective? What, specifically, are the causative factors?
I'll try to
answer a few of Patrick's questions in light of the Guelf-Ghibelline
analogy. Country and city engender
different mindsets: chivalry versus commerce; personalities versus systems;
self-reliance versus interdependence. The
first set of values breeds Ghibellines and Bush-supporters;
the second creates Guelfs and supporters of the UN.
In the country,
one relies for physical safety on one's own strength and skill in arms, and on
a culture of honor wherein friends avenge friends. This engenders a cultural esteem for
strength, prowess, valor and loyalty, the elements of a chivalric culture which
celebrates the exploits of Frederick Barbarossa, or
the fall of
For the
countryside, war is a source of pride and even of pleasure. Parents take pride that their boys have
become heroes, and veterans tell war stories for years afterwards, to entertain
as well as to brag. Cities have more
sophisticated means of acquiring and displaying status. They have movies, plays, bars and clubs, mass
entertainment a-plenty, and are too busy to listen to war stories. And war is not exciting to city folk because
city life is a bit like war anyway.
Armies march constantly up and down urban streets. Danger and risk are everywhere: for example,
one wrong move can get you thrown under a car and killed. In the factory, in the office, even on the
metro, you must listen and follow orders.
People compete with each other.
Country life is
anchored by personalities. You have few neighbors, who rarely come and
go. They know you and you know
them. The city is a sea of
anonymity. With thousands to choose
from, you can change your friends like you change your shirt. And you
can change your own personality—simply find a new crowd and act
differently. You may find you have to
change your personality to get ahead, or even to survive. In the city, personalities are transient, and
systems are the anchors of life—the
metro that carries you to work, the corporation that hires and fires people its
bosses have never met, the police that ticket you or tow your car, the agencies
that regulate the height of buildings in order to drive up rents, the gangs
that kill you. So country-dwellers—Ghibellines—want to vest authority in personalities: in a
brave emperor like Frederick Barbarossa, or a
charismatic president like George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan, or—back when the
Democrats were the party of the rural South and West—John F. Kennedy and
Franklin D. Roosevelt. That three of
these four were members of political dynasties is also a comment on the
preferences of rural Ghibellines. Guelphs prefer to
vest authority in systems like the Catholic Church, federal government agencies
or the UN, and staff them with highly trained operators, like Bill Clinton,
with limited discretion.
There is a
medieval expression, Stadtluft macht frei, "city air makes men free." Up to a point. The city is rich in opportunity, but people
there are interdependent which makes you dependent on many people, in ways you
may not understand. Urban anonymity
creates opportunity for frauds and confidence tricksters; but there is a fine
line between the confidence trickster and the legitimate businessman who sells
inferior goods, or persuades you to buy what you do not need. City-dwellers learn to mistrust, and they turn
this mistrust towards their political leaders: any powerful leader is suspected
of mischief, tarred with corruption allegations and conspiracy theories. While this may make city-dwellers vigilant
for their liberty, they often walk into more insidious forms of collectivist
tyranny, harder to resist because they do not have a recognizable face. The Guelf cities
thwarted the emperor, only to come under the more oppressive power of the
Catholic Church, with its Inquisition, and of their own petty despots. Dante, a lover of liberty, understood these
forces, and it motivated his embrace of the emperor as a counter-force.
But the reason I
would place before all these is religion.
Religion emanates
from cities. The word "pagan"
comes from the Latin paganus,
meaning a country-dweller, because Christianity spread to the cities first,
until country-dwellers and believers in the old gods seemed synonymous. Islam, too, began in the cities, and Muhammad
worried that Arabs would return to the desert and to their Bedouin gods. In the 12th- and 13th-centuries,
increasing religiosity in the cities strengthened papal influence and Guelfism there. The
most potent religion to emerge in the modern era, unfortunately, is socialism
(including its social-democratic and American "liberal"
variations). Socialist, too, spread
first to the cities, and remains strongest there. In the election of 2004, the cities voted
loyally for the liberal faith, and reacted in pious horror to the persistence
of ancestral superstitions among today's pagani (that is, country-dwellers).
The latent power of the UN
Whereas Dante was
the last defender of a lost cause, today's Ghibellines
are momentarily confident. The Taliban
and Saddam are down, John Howard and George Bush are re-elected, and the
The Holy Roman
Emperors, likewise, had difficulty understanding the threat posed by the
papacy. When the Emperor Henry IV
was ordered by Pope Gregory VII to stop appointing bishops (the pope was claiming that right for the Church),
he replied, incredulous
and defiant: "I, Henry, king by
the grace of God, with all of my Bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and
be damned throughout the ages." Yet
two centuries later, the papacy had achieved most of Gregory's objectives, and
imperial power was shattered—and this despite two brilliant emperors from the Hohenstaufen dynasty, the dauntless Frederick I
Barbarossa, and Frederick
II, fluent in nine languages and called a "wonder of the
world." How did the papacy do it?
Henry IV was
swiftly taught a lesson about the popes' latent power. Gregory excommunicated Henry and absolved his
subjects from all oaths of obedience to him.
Wikipedia describes what happened next:
In
Germany there was a rapid and general revulsion of feeling in favour of Gregory,
and the princes took the opportunity to carry out their anti-regal policy under
the cloak of respect for the papal decision. When at Whitsun the king
proposed to discuss the measures to be taken against Gregory in a council of
his nobles, only a few made their appearance; the Saxons snatched at the golden
opportunity for renewing their rebellion, and the anti-royalist party grew in
strength from month to month.
The
situation now became extremely critical for Henry. As a result of the
agitation, which was zealously fostered by the papal legate Bishop Altmann of
Passau, the princes met in October at Tribur to elect a new German king, and
Henry, who was stationed at Oppenheim on the left bank of the Rhine, was only
saved from the loss of his throne by the failure of the assembled princes to
agree on the question of his successor. Their dissension, however, merely
induced them to postpone the verdict. Henry, they declared, must make reparation
to the pope and pledge himself to obedience; and they decided that, if, on the
anniversary of his excommunication, he still lay under the ban, the throne
should be considered vacant.
In 1077, at the
Those who, like Senator
Jon Kyl and Ben
Shapiro of Townhall, are angered by Kofi Annan's letter to the
coalition exhorting them that "the problem of insecurity can only be
addressed through dialogue and an inclusive political process" (with
terrorists!) have a point, but do they appreciate how much worse it could
get? As Shapiro points out "the
beauty of international law [is] that it means whatever Kofi
Annan wants it to mean." Imagine if Annan,
or Annan and the UN General Assembly, condemned the
Like the emperor
and the pope, the
None of this
shared ground does much to mitigate the intensity of "mental war" (as
Paul Berman described it in the last chapter of his book Terror
and Liberalism) that afflicts our times. If you live in politically informed circles,
it's hell. It seems that for every
person you meet, in every conversation you make, the question lurks beneath the
surface, "Which side are you on?"
Republican or Democrat? Guelf or Ghibelline? Montague or Capulet? Even if Republicans hold their own in the
Yet for all that,
I welcome the papal-imperial struggle of our times, and this despite my belief
that we Ghibellines are likely to lose and infamy
shall be our fate. The High Middle Ages
were a brilliant time in history. While
the papal-imperial conflict played itself out as high tragedy in the
foreground, in the background it was the age of Gothic cathedrals, of St.
Francis and St. Bernard and St. Dominic, who lived their saintly lives and left
new monastic orders in their wake; it was the age when Aristotle was translated
from the Arabic, when Abelard initiated medieval philosophy and Thomas Aquinas
brought it to its climax; it was the age when France and England took shape as
nations, when universities were founded in Bologna and Paris and Cambridge; it
was the age of chivalry, of growing
literacy and religiosity, of the beginnings of the Renaissance; it was an age
which has fired the imagination of the world ever since. What are the alternatives to "mental
war," after all? There are the
somnolent, decadent ages when all seems to be at peace—the Pax Romana, the Ch'ing Dynasty in China, the Pax Americana of the 1990s—which are, or
imagine themselves, prosperous and peaceful.
But too often these are times of a gradual atrophy of the human spirit,
of shallow culture and creeping tyranny.
There are times of great, destructive wars, which debase the spirit in
their own, different way. Times of
mental war, when, despite a broad and enlightened consensus, Guelf and Ghibelline struggle
over the question of how man should relate to man, against a backdrop of steady
and broad-based improvement—these are the golden ages. When Guelf and Ghibelline alike have been defeated, history will look back
in wonder on what has been wrought by them and around them.