Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti

O Buondelmonte ..................
   Molti sarebber lieti che son tristi,
se Dio t’avesse conceduto ad Ema
la prima volta che a città venisti.

(Paradiso XVI.140-44)

O Buondelmonte ..................
   Many would be happy who now are sad,
had God given you over to Ema
the first time you came to town.

---

Once again, this plaque commemorates a passage from Dante’s conversation with Cacciaguida in Paradiso. Dante’s great-great-grandfather is complaining about the newcomers to Florence, just as he did on the plaque that went missing from farther down the street (Baldovinetti). In the early 1100s, this area of Florence, known as Borgo Santi Apostoli, contained about six city blocks of properties between the Roman walls (now via Porta Rossa) on one side and the Arno on the other.

The term borgo (a cognate with the English burg) came from fifth-century Germanic invaders and was used to describe the neighborhoods that sprang up alongside a town’s walls. As medieval cities grew, these areas were encircled by new walls, like growth rings on a stump. The feeling in the poetry quoted here is that the new people brought all sorts of trouble and Florence would’ve been better off had God drowned the Buondelmonti clan as they crossed the Ema river, which runs east-to-west about 4 km south of here.

According to legend, the Buondelmonti were originally rural bandits whose name came from people sarcastically calling them “buoni del monte” (“good guys of the mountain”). However, the most ancient name of the family was Montebuoni and they had a castle in Val di Greve. When it was destroyed by the Florentine army in 1135, the Buondelmonti family definitively moved to town.

But they are condemned here for another reason, and the event in question has for centuries been considered one of the most significant in all of Florentine history.

In 1215, a banquet was given in honor of a young man who had just been made a knight. Among the guests were Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti and Uberto degli Infangati who, as was common in those days, were sharing a plate together.

When one of the jesters hired for entertainment snatched up their plate, Uberto lost his temper. At that point, another guest, Oddo Arrighi de’ Fifanti, scolded Uberto and humiliated him by throwing food in his face. During the ensuing uproar, Buondelmonte stabbed Oddo badly in the arm and then all the guests ran home.

Oddo met with his friends and family (all raging Ghibellines), including members of the Gangalandi, Uberti, Lamberti and Amidei clans, and there it was decided that the stain on Oddo’s honor could only be washed away by the marriage of Buondelmonte to Oddo’s niece, the daughter of Lambertuccio degli Amidei, who lived near the statue of Mars.

Immediately after the formal betrothal, however, one of the ladies of the Donati clan offered a much better-looking wife to Buondelmonte and suggested that keeping his word to Oddo’s niece out of fear made him look like a coward. So, Buondelmonte dumped her.

Oddo and his allies met again, this time in the church of Santa Maria Sopra Porta, where Mosca dei Lamberti, an ally of Oddo, suggested that Buondelmonte be murdered and made his famous declaration, “Cosa fatta capo ha!” (“What’s done is done!”), a line from Inferno 28.107 that has become proverbial in Italian.

Not long afterwards, on Easter morning, Buondelmonte was ambushed at the statue of Mars at the end of Ponte Vecchio. Schiatta degli Uberti knocked him off his horse with a mace and Oddo Arrighi finished him off by slitting his throat. They say that Buondelmonte’s body was put on a wagon and, with his beautiful Donati wife weeping by his side, was led through throngs of mourners in the streets of Florence.

Above: the murder of Buondelmonte illustrated in the Chig. L VIII 296 ms. of Villani. Notice the legendary statue of Mars in the background.

Although incidents involving family honor and vendettas were not uncommon, this one spun out of control. Because the Uberti were longtime supporters of the Empire and had many Ghibelline allies, the Buondelmonti family readily aligned themselves with the Guelphs for protection.

As in other Tuscan towns, the choice in Florence of whether to support the Papacy (Guelphs) or the Empire (Ghibellines) often depended less upon political conviction than on the ever-shifting coalitions that provided political advantages to those who knew which way the wind was blowing.

As punishment for his involvement in the affair, Dante placed Mosca dei Lamberti in the eighth circle of Hell, among those who sow discord and strife. They are punished in Inferno, as Doré shows them above, by being endlessly stabbed and sliced by demons with swords.

Coat of arms of the Buondelmonti family