The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

One of my all-time favorite essays is by the same author: "The Shape of Rome" —

https://www.exurbe.com/the-shape-of-rome/

Oh shit, I didn’t catch the name - strongly recommend that whole series. It’s one of the most wildly inventive sci-fi series I’ve read in a long time.

It's a bit more complicated than that.

Firenze went through several waves of

1. being ruled by a certain noble family, usually with French or Papal connections

2. a rebellion happens; a new "communal" government sees other nobles and the merchant class rule together for a short period

3. one noble family rises to the top again, or the city gets reconquered by the old family

4. rinse and repeat

The development of new towers was blocked during one of those briefs interreigns, more specifically a situations where both main factions from the nobility were absent from the city, busy fighting a war among themselves in the nearby regions.

Later, when one of the factions had come back into the city and emerged as winner, they destroyed their enemies' towers. Such enemies inevitably came back stronger, retook the city, and destroyed the left-over towers. By that point, towers were clearly not enough to ensure safety (because conflicts now involved pretty large armies), so nobody tried to rebuild them.

Meanwhile, nearby San Gimignano was remote enough to not be periodically invaded, so their towers survived largely unscathed.

> Medieval society was also able to work towards a common good.

I'm not sure that they'd have thought of it quite in those terms, but yeah, restrictions on private ownership of castles, and destruction of said castles, is basically as old as castles, and these towers are, functionally, really just a special case of castles.

Makes you wonder what modern urban planning could learn from a bunch of 13th-century Italians with too many towers

"Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities."

I'd want to stay as far away as possible from the fire I guess.

Also, it seems to be quite a busy city - presumably they weren't necessarily able to acquire more land to make an actual fortification and are stuck with a fixed perimeter, the only place to go is up.

Although an element of prestige was obviously there, they went high also for the usual reason: cost. Italian cities like Firenze and Bologna, at the time, were among the richest in the world, and real-estate costs were sky-high. Buying land to erect some wall or other fortification, in the middle of the city, would have been a huge waste of money.

Even roman popes, when they decided they wanted a fortified structure, just reused the roman-era mausoleum of Hadrian - building from scratch would have been prohibitively costly.

Gotta be taller than the tallest ladder would be my guess. Tower forts are common. You can find them in places like Ireland also.

Looking at this picture [1] of Bologna’s skyline from the sixties it seems it could be pretty realistic. The skyline has changed drastically and now you have many more tall buildings that make the remaining tower seems shorter. Also, I think the strangeness of the picture is due to the number of towers, but afaik there were around 100 towers in the city in the 13th century.

[1] https://it.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torri_di_Bologna#/media/File...

There are documents from the time and even paintings from later times, supporting these projections. You can see a partial list of the towers that have since disappeared here : https://www.torridibologna.it/torri-scomparse/ . There were probably more that we just don't have documents for.

Dante famously described Bologna as selva turrita, a forest of towers. It really was as crowded as that.

I don't know how tall are those in the first image, but consider that several towers reach beyond 300 feet (90 meters today), and documents point out that few reached beyond 330 in middle ages.

[edit]

This, existing, tower appear to approximate the height of those in that image:

https://static.bolognawelcome.com/immagini/bb/ec/bd/1b/20220...

Someone did look into exactly that. There is no supporting document regarding the actual height. And it does look like it is exaggerated for impact purposes. So they did have towers, they were clearly higher than the rest of the other buildings... Might have been this tall? Maybe. Or maybe not.

I'm from Rome area (now I live in Colonna, 40km from Rome center) and the number of places I lived or people I know live which is directly connected/built along/into over ancient roman stuff is quite huge.

When I lived in Ostiense area, the basement of the building where we held bikes and stuff was an ancient roman storage facility from first century BC, the building was built over it. Same stones and everything!

When I lived in Colli Albani area (out of the ancient city perimeter and 5 mile-ish from downtown) the building was built around an ancient, still functioning acqueduct.

Where I live now, which is in the country side, my neighbor while building a new house found a Christian church from the 2nd century.

:) I was just to add these.

I visited the Georgian ones - they really look otherwordly - some towns are packed with them.