The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars | Hacker News Reader

The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars

exurbe.com

117 pointswallflower33 comments

> Bologna is famous for still having two intact towers

Famous fact but actually incorrect: there are many more, they're just a bit more difficult to spot than the two central ones.

In total there are 22 towers still standing in some form, and (iirc) about 7 of them are still their original height.

https://www.bolognawelcome.com/en/blog/not-just-the-two-towe...

Blog is by historian Ada Palmer, who also wrote some quite successful sci-fi that was a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Novel: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Too_Like_the_Lightning . How she finds the time while also teaching as a professor at Chicago I do not know.

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

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

Also very good is “The Scariest Library” https://www.exurbe.com/the-scariest-library/

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 batshit insane and truly without equal. One of the best things I've ever read.

reminds Yemen tower houses

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20211004-yemens-ancient-s...

Also Georgian tower houses https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svan_towers

:) I was just to add these.

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

Oh I could spend ages on this blog.

Interesting that the main reason they went away was coordinated effort to halt a race towards the bottom (or top, as the case may be). Medieval society was also able to work towards a common good.

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.

>Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families

They needed some mini-fortresses, but why build them in the form of a tower? They could have built a secure, easy to defend structure less tall.

Maybe they've built them for showing off, the taller the building, the higher the prestige? At least, that is the reason we have skyscrapers.

"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.

in a dense city you also have to take into account the height of the neighboring towers too - you don't want to be showered with arrows and later musket balls from a higher tower near by - thus race to the top :)

yep. From reading Bret Devereaux's Acoup.blog, I've learned that especially with arrows, height is an advantage - if you're firing down on someone from a position above them, you can aim easier, and your arrow is accelerated by gravity. Conversely, if you're firing up at someone from a position below them, gravity is working against you, and it's harder to aim.

This is why they build seige towers back in the day - to give the attackers a position higher than the beseiged city's walls from which to fire down on the defenders.

Is there any historical data to support the height of the towers in the first image? It looks like at least some of that is leaning on an artistic license.

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.

What are you referring to? Who looked into it? Are you citing something?

I think they might be referring to this video? https://youtu.be/ikg3-GQLg3g They traveled to the city and spoke to an actual historian on the matter. The "more accurate" model appears in the last 20s of the video if you are just curious about what our best guess of the actual appearance of the city is.

Want to mention the excellent care given to the alt text of the images.

Been to these places and never knew this history.

I'll also add that the medieval city of Lucca has several great towers that you can climb.

I wonder if there's a D&D setting like this.

When your eyes buzz like flies it's a moiré.

This is a commercial for the book at the top (and bottom) of the webpage. There’s nothing wrong with marketing, however this article is proposing and propagandizing -facts- about towers in renaissance Italy. The book markets itself to be an irreverent and witty take on historians’ tales about the Renaissance and its historical influence and how it has been propagandized. The top image in the article of towers is a modern fallacy（render）of what an Italian renaissance city might have looked like. In the third to last paragraph the author describes Bologna as the city of a hundred towers then describes Florence as having fewer but showing the same render. There are no actual references to infighting and burning described in the article. The author even alludes to a fictional Shakespearean story to enforce the point. So in which city when did this happen? The article also talks about the towers as being fireproof and for rich family’s ‚to then set your enemies homes on fire‘ later to say about Florence’s dozenish towers ‚Much to the despair of the city fire brigade‘ This reeks of creative history and perhaps much of history has been created, but others have far more references supporting their creativity. To quote Abe Lincoln ‚Don’t Believe everything you read on the internet‘

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