The battle in which the Florentines fought the Ghibellines in the plain of Campaldino below Poppi on June 11, 1289, is memorable since Dante, at the time a youth of twenty-four, fought in the ranks of the victorious Guelfs. He referred to the fact himself in a letter, in which he said how he found himself “no mere child in the practice of arms, and was in great fear, and in the end rejoiced greatly through the varying fortunes of the battle.” For luck at first went against the Florentines; the Ghibellines gained an advantage, but they did not follow it up. Guido Novello, who was now an old man, backed upon Poppi, the Bishop of Arezzo fell fighting, and Buonconte, another Ghibelline leader, was wounded and fled. In the _Divine Comedy_ Buonconte is represented giving an account of his flight to Dante--how with pierced and bleeding throat he reached the point where the Archiano falls into the Arno, and how the waters carried him away and his final resting-place was never known. [Illustration: STATUE OF COUNT GUIDO, CASTLE OF POPPI] Guido Novello, who backed upon Poppi, cannot have stayed there, as the place was no longer his and no longer a stronghold of the Ghibellines. It had passed to his brother Simone and his son Guido of Battifolle, and Simone and his son, according to Villani, went over to the Guelfs because of Guido Novello’s cruelty. When therefore the Florentines made an assault on Poppi, they were damaging the property of a Guelf and an ally. Guido of Battifolle, sometimes also called Guido Novello, the son of Simone, pleaded in Florence for damage done to his property, and he received the sum of twelve hundred lire, which he spent in re-building his castle. It is owing to this sequence of events that the remote little town of Poppi came to boast of its remarkable castle. Vasari in his _Lives of the Painters and Architects_ tells us that Jacopo Lapo, called il Tedesco, “built many buildings in the Gothic style in Tuscany, among them the palace at Poppi in the Casentino.” And in the life of Arnolfo, whom Vasari wrongly called the son of Jacopo (he was his pupil), he adds that Arnolfo built the palace of the Signory at Florence on the plan of what his father had constructed at Poppi.