Under The Green Claws

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in the Forlì Apennines where all the Guelphs, who had been en route and had remained in the mountains of Forlì, retreated.

The Guelphs of Forlì, Riniero and Guido De' Calboli, locked themselves up with other nobles and eight hundred guards, in the castle of Calboli, having given them twelve thousand lire to defend that location for at least ten months while awaiting help.

But because the steps were so narrow no help came from Bologna. At this point, il Feltrano decided to put siege to the castle of Calboli and after two months he destroyed it with seven enormous war machines that cast huge stones, razed its walls and its houses, which were reduced to nothing.

After this series of victories, there were no rivals to the fame of the Ghibellines in Romagna.

Ravenna and Rimini had to surrender and become a confederation with the Ghibellines. They feared invasion and forged a peace pact with the Forlì people, evading alliances with the Bolognese, who were considered too weak to defend them.

It was a period that seemed to be totally successful for il Feltrano and the Forlì people, but nothing for the Bolognese.

This greatly worried the Bolognese and the Geremei, who feared the Lambertazzi would be forced to return to Bologna. So they began to increasingly protest to the pope requesting further military reinforcements.

This was also the period during which the legendary reputation was born of the cunning and the militarily undefeatable Feltrano, but the bulk of his work and fame, which would make the rounds of Europe, had yet to occur.

After all these repeated defeats, the Bolognese again asked Pope Nicholas III for help,

who, as moderate as he was, sent them Bertoldo Orsini, his nephew, with the title of Count of Romagna, with the objective of mediating and placating the situation between the Bolognese and Romagna.

Orsini recognized that he would need to stop trying to resolve the matter with arms and to reconcile the Lambertazzi and Geremei in Bologna more than to try to defeat the Ghibellines of Forlì, and that there could be no other remedy than to bring the Lambertazzi back to Bologna, return their properties to them and to make peace between the Ghibellines and Guelphs of that land.

And so, very wisely, he did.

But the Geremei accepted this decision badly and believed that the pontiff, because of the belligerence of the Ghibellines, would fight them and not let them into the city.

But Bertoldo Orsini said that the church embraced both and organized the return and a banquet of peace for both factions where Feltrano

also took part.

So, after the exile, the Lambertazzi returned to Bologna as brothers and peace seemed to have been made.

But that peace lasted only as long as Nicholas III was alive, when he died shortly thereafter, the new French pope, Martin IV, was not as meek as the former had been with the Ghibellines.

So, immediately after the death of Nicolas III, the Geremei and Lambertazzi again came to blows, and were driven out of Bologna and again took refuge in Faenza, which was still under the command of Guido da Montefeltro.

At the same time the Geremei turned to the newly elected French pope and asked him to organize a fearsome army to do away with the Ghibellines of Romagna once and for all.

Thus, with the support of the new pontiff, and the help of the King of France, Charles II d'Anjou, a real final crusade was organized, under the command of the French general Giovanni d'Appia, to be concluded once and for all against the last Ghibellines remaining in Italy.

At the time, after the victories over the heirs of Frederick II and the violent crusades against the Albigensian, the French army was considered unbeatable and terrible and what you will read from here on went down in history as the Dantean massacre of the "bloody heap" and I will tell you what happened and how everything turned out.

And I will also tell you, for the first time in centuries, why that land had remained irreducibly pro-imperial, and who had really founded it many centuries earlier at the time of ancient Rome.

-- Part two -- The crusade against the Ghibellines in Romagna