Pistoia is a city and contado (county) of Tuscany in the Florenzen chronicle, one of Florence’s old wounds: in 1227 the Florentines destroyed it for being an ally of the emperor. The Whites depart for Pistoia, Arezzo and Pisa. It remains a piece of the Guelph game: as the Blacks weakened there were attempts in the contado of Pistoia, “where men were enslaved for mining.”
The fifty men who embark with Luca come from there: woodcutters of the contado, in black hoods, trained by the Spini. They know nothing of the sea (“the war will be fought on land”).
It also supplies the grievance behind the commission: Dante proposed exiling the heads of the Bianchi and Neri parties of Pistoia, and for that a cursed emissary sickened his eldest son.