Ancestor of the great and powerful family of the Buondelmonti was Sichelmo, who lived about 905, and whose son Azzo, Lord of Petrojo, was the grandfather of Giovanni, founder of the Vallombrosan Order. His other son, Rinieri Pagano, ruled the whole Val di Pesa and from him descended Uguccione and Rosso, whose feudal castle of Montebuoni was taken and razed to the ground by order of the Commune of Florence in 1135 at the instigation, it is said, of the Uberti who were jealous of their power. Half in derision, half in fear, they were called the Buoni del Monte (Good men of the Mountain) by travellers who dreaded being waylaid. Uguccione and Rosso were forced to come and live in Florence, and from Buondelmonte, son of Uguccione, the family took their name, while Rosso’s son Scolajo, founded the family of the Scolari.
Buondelmonte’s three sons, all hard fighters, were made knights of the Golden Spur, and it was the murder of his grandson and namesake by the Amidei, that plunged Florence into civil war in 1215.
Buondelmonte de’ Buondelmonti was among the young men invited by Messer Mazzingo Mazzinghi to a banquet at his castle near Campi, to celebrate his receiving the honour of knighthood. During dinner the buffoon of the house snatched a plate from before Uberto Infangati, a friend of Buondelmonte, who curtly reproved the jester’s insolence. Oddo Fifanti defended the man, and losing his temper, took the plate from him and hurled it at Infangati. Young Buondelmonte then rose from the table and attacked Fifanti with his dagger. Friends made peace between them and a marriage was arranged between Buondelmonte and a daughter of Lambertuccio Amidei and of Fifanti’s sister. A few days before the wedding the bridegroom rode under the windows of the Donati palace and Forese Donati’s wife, Madonna Gualdrada, called to him and bade him come up. She laughed him to scorn for a coward, who out of fear of the Uberti and the Fifanti was going to marry an ugly girl. “All the more do I grieve,” she added, “because I had intended your old playmate, my daughter, to be your bride.” Saying this she led him into the next room where her daughter “the most beautiful maiden in Florence,” writes Villani, sat singing. Buondelmonte, as the old saying is, “lost his intellect through his eyes,” and forgetting his plighted word asked for her hand. The wedding was fixed for the 10th February, the very day he was to have married the daughter of Lambertuccio Amidei. Furious at the insult offered to their house, the Amidei summoned their relations to meet in the church of S. Stefano, and Schiatta degl’Uberti proposed to slice the fair face of young Buondelmonte and spoil his beauty. But Mosca Lamberti replied in the well-known words: “Before thou beatest or woundest, dig thine own grave. Give him what he deserves. A thing finished is done with.” And so his death was determined.
On Easter morn 1315 the handsome young bridegroom, clothed in white with a garland of flowers on his head, was riding over the Ponte Vecchio on his favourite white palfrey. As he debouched into Por Sta. Maria the great doors of the Amidei palace flew open, and the murderers, led by Schiatta degl’Uberti who gave the first blow and knocked Buondelmonte off his horse, killed him near the old statue of Mars at the corner of the bridge. Well may Dante exclaim:
“O Buondelmonti! what ill counselling
Prevail’d on thee to break the plighted bond?
Many, who now are weeping, would rejoice,
Had God to Ema given thee, the first time
Thou near our city camest. But so was doom’d:
Florence! on that maimed stone which guards the bridge,