Guelphs and Ghibellines

To find a political culture that was actually shared by rural lords and country dwellers, as well as by country and city, and aristocrats and prince, it would probably be necessary to look at that of the Guelph and Ghibelline metafactions, capable as they were of activating ties of solidarity and a strong sense of obedience. More than the ideological component—although the contents of this evolved constantly throughout the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and beyond—what generated membership of the parties was above all their role of mediation between environments at a distance from one another, such as the centre of the domain and its peripheries. The emergence of a new bureaucratically oriented state did not exhaust the spaces for political interaction and the Guelph and Ghibelline parties ended up monopolizing the exchange of particular resources: exemptions, pardons, ecclesiastical benefices for subjects, information and political support for the duke.