23-09-2021, 09:53 PM
(This post was last modified: 24-09-2021, 04:50 PM by Mark Knowles.)
One often see them referred to as the Guelph party and the Ghibiline Party. Now I don't know to what extent this means a "Party" in the political sense. When I think of different merchant guilds being allied to different parties this makes me think of unions. But to be political parties they have to have common ideals such that Guelphs in Genoa have a common ideology with Guelphs in Naples that is more than just some degree of allegiance to the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. But I am not sure that they had that common ideology. I agree that there does seem to be a degree of arbitrary alignment.