For Italians the Battle of Crécy was a major event, not least because England, until then considered a second rate power — fifteen years later, the Battle of Poitiers (1356) having happened in the meantime, the Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani still thought fit to dub Edward III “il piccolo re d'Inghilterra” [“the puny king of England”] in comparison to his French counterpart —, shattered eighty years of French military dominance in Europe. Although from a continental point of view it could be argued that the ascendancy of France dated to Philip Augustus’ victory at Bouvines in 1214, for Italy it had started with Charles of Anjou's vanquishing of Manfred, king of Sicily, at Benevento in 1266, an event that established an Angevin dynasty in the kingdom of Naples. This action had resulted in a French-backed Guelph, or pro-Papal, hegemony over most of Italy. The Ghibelline, or pro- Imperial, polities of substance were reduced to a mere handful by the beginning of the fourteenth century. The bond between France and the Papacy was further cemented with the election in 1305 of the Frenchman Bertrand de Got as Pope Clement V and the transfer of the Papal See to Avignon four years later — beginning a period that English commentators would regard as the Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy.

In 1310, the descent into Italy of Holy Roman Emperor Henry VII gave new strength to the Ghibelline cause, besides unleashing a chain of events destined to turn the peninsula into a huge battleground for the next thirty or so years. Before his untimely death in 1313, Henry VII managed to bring under Imperial control a number of city-states, thereby boosting the position of major feudal lords in north-central Italy and creating an inevitable backlash from the Guelph-ruled polities — the latter aided by the king of Naples and the Papacy, both enjoying French backing and encouragement. So it was that by the 1340s the once consistent tenets of Guelphism and Ghibellinism, though still factional rallying banners, had begun to blend into the needs of local politics, which in turn evolved according to international twists and turns.

How confusing this situation could be is well exemplified by the accounts of Crécy given by the Italian chroniclers included in this volume.