[1] He moved to Fano, where he continued his studies under the guidance of Umile da Milano, a disciple of Haymo of Faversham.

The range of Salimbene's travels during these years, the extraordinary number of great men he met, is a census of places and personalities uniquely characteristic of the mid-thirteenth century: Pope Innocent IV, Frederick II, King Louis IX of France, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, Hugh of Digne, Gerardo da Borgo San Donnino, Bernard of Quintavalle, Filippo da Pistoia.

He inserts several autobiographical episodes in his Chronicle and gives a remarkably vivid picture of life in France and Italy during the 13th century.

A Guelph and a Franciscan, doubly vowed to enmity against him, Salimbene wrote of Frederick with a curious unwilling admiration, "Of faith in God he had none; he was crafty, wily, avaricious, lustful, malicious, wrathful; and yet a gallant man at times, when he would show his kindness or courtesy; full of solace, jocund, delightful, fertile in devices.

Yet in those instances where his facts can be checked against outside sources, the Chronicle has been shown to be generally trustworthy and reliable, even in the harsh account of Elias of Cortona, for example, where all of Salimbene's most violent prejudices have been engaged to blacken the character of a man he so evidently disliked.

One of the most significant was the political pamphlet The Twelve Calamities of Emperor Frederick II (“XII scelera Friderici imperatoris”), probably written in 1248.

"The Twelve Calamities" was set up as a kind of servant's narrative (Exempla, examples), made to demonstrate the faults of Frederick II - often with loosely fitted biblical quotations.

Emphasizing the Christian nature of his narrative and the non-Christian nature of Frederick, Salimbene turned a phrase used during the crusades claiming that “if he had been a good Catholic and had loved God, the Church, and his own soul, he would scarcely have had an equal as an emperor in the world.”[12] Salimbene's Chronicle is incompletely preserved in a single manuscript (Vatican Latin 7260).

[7] It was first edited in the "Monumenta historica ad provincias Parmensem et Placentinensem pertinentia", III (Parma, 1857), but the part issued only covered the years 1212-87.

[13] Besides an Italian translation by Carlo Cantarelli there is an incomplete one in English by G. G. Coulton with the title "From Francis to Dante" (London, 1906).