The daughter of Peter and the faithful hand-maid of Christ
Pope Gregory VII to Matilda Countess of Tuscany
‘To you, my most beloved and loving daughter, I do not hesitate to disclose any of these thoughts, for even you yourself can hardly imagine how greatly I may count upon your zeal and discretion.’ The writer of this letter in late 1074 was Pope Gregory VII. The ‘most beloved and loving’ daughter in question was Matilda Countess of Tuscany, a woman now in her late thirties, who had inherited vast dominions in northern Italy from her father some twenty years back. As she moved towards independence from the various tutelages of mother and stepfather, increasingly she was acting as the ‘faithful hand-maid’ of St Peter – a hand-maid with a sharp sword in her hand and an army at her back.1
The combination of Countess Matilda’s prolonged military endeavours with her own sense of a holy mission is what made her egregious among her contemporaries: ‘For St Peter and Matilda!’ her men shouted as they stormed the fortresses of the Apennines while she termed herself ‘Matilda by the Grace of God’. It also inspired their admiration – if they were on the same side.
The approval which Matilda received from her allies and subordinates, based on her gender, not despite it, clearly related to the apparently ‘holy’ nature of her chosen role. The pious Christian Matilda would not have relished a comparison to pagan Boadicea, with her invocation to Andraste on the eve of battle a thousand years earlier. As a matter of interest, she would not even have recognized the allusion. Penthesilea was not forgotten and Matilda would receive the usual ration of such comparisons to the Amazonian Queen. However, not only had Boadicea vanished into her unknown grave but her very name had been forgotten, awaiting the rediscovery of Tacitus’ manuscripts in a monastery library in the fourteenth century.2 Yet Matilda’s role represents an important aspect of the subject of the Warrior Queen, that of Holy (Armed) Figurehead. Just as Boadicea must have gained strength from the image of the Celtic goddess in her people’s minds, so Matilda received practical support from the notion of the halo round her head – and the sword in her hand.
Not surprisingly, it was just this shining white garment of virtue which Matilda’s (political) enemies sought to defile. Calumnies included the suggestion of a carnal relationship with the Pope, and the suggestion that the ‘chaste’ Matilda actually had one of her husbands killed, and possibly her children as well. This was a deliberate attempt to counteract the undoubted propaganda value – to the papal side – of the image of Countess Matilda, both pure and powerful, encouraging her troops to the rescue of the Holy Father. The scandals as well as the paeans of praise bear witness to the successful possibilities inherent in the idea of the Armed (Female) Saint.
The Pope, assisted by his loving daughter, was involved for most of the years of his reign in an incessant power struggle with the German Emperor Henry IV. From the point of view of Countess Matilda, it was an armed struggle which over thirty years would have enabled her to have claimed, with Schiller’s Wallenstein, ‘our life was but a battle and a march’. So in a sense the Countess Matilda did lay down her life for the papal cause – the cause of Christ, as she firmly believed.
The life she dedicated to the cause was that of a wealthy, high-minded and extremely religious aristocratic woman, who might otherwise have ruled her dominions and endowed her pious foundations with the suitable expectation of peace in this life and further peace to come ‘in the heavenly country’. This was the life she finally led as a very old lady, when these papal-imperial troubles were in any case subsiding, helmet and mail finally, as it were, put away. Yet as the devout and filial language of the ‘hand-maid’ Matilda towards the Pope indicates, fully reciprocating his own intimacy, the sacrifice, if sacrifice it was, was one that she herself felt called by God to make. At one point she borrowed the words of the Apostle to say that neither tribulations nor anguish, nor hunger, nor peril, nor persecution, nor swords, nor death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor virtues, nor the present could ever separate her from the love of Peter.3
Matilda of Tuscany – Matilda of Canossa as she is sometimes known – was born in about 1046 somewhere in northern Italy.4 Her father was the Margrave Boniface II, head of a family based on the mighty Apennine fortress of Canossa, and invested with the office of Margrave by the Roman Emperor-cum-German King, Conrad II, in 1027. Boniface’s lands stretched roughly speaking from the Apennines to the Alps, sweeping across the wide plain of Lombardy; but he held many of them in feudal tenure to Conrad II since in a revival of the idea of the ‘Roman Empire’ of Charlemagne, the elected German King was in his capacity of ‘Roman Emperor’ currently exercising lordship over northern Italy.
Charlemagne’s ‘Roman Empire’ had been conferred on him in 800 by the Pope and brought back for the German kings in the middle of the tenth century. Officially, therefore, Conrad, like other German kings of this period, owed his position in Germany to election by the German princes; while he had to be crowned by the Pope as Roman Emperor. That at any rate was the theory of the thing.
Matilda’s mother was Boniface’s second wife Beatrice, daughter of the Duke of Upper Lorraine. Hereditarily speaking, Matilda must have owed at least as much to her clever, capable mother as to her rough warlord of a father; while in terms of environment Beatrice’s influence must certainly have been paramount since the Margrave Boniface was killed when Matilda was six.
It was to be a turbulent childhood, a presage of Matilda’s adult life. The death of her father and the deaths of her brothers – their precise number is in question but the relevant point to Matilda’s story is that they did not survive – left Matilda theoretical heiress of Boniface’s extensive lands. But the rules of inheritance, given the vital imperial exercise of Italian overlordship, were not at this date quite so simple. The Emperor Henry III, for example, who had succeeded Conrad II in 1039, claimed the right to invest a male child with those of Boniface’s Tuscan territories which he had held in feudal tenure, although this still left Matilda as heiress to the Canossa family heartlands. Moreover Henry III was in an increasingly strong position to enforce his wishes since the fortunes of the German-ruled ‘Roman Empire’ were waxing. Burgundy had fallen to Conrad II by inheritance; Henry III himself had extended his sway over Bohemia, Bavaria and Hungary, as well as over the Normans in the south of Italy.
In any case the question of female inheritance in this age dominated by force turned more on practicalities than on theories. Where an heiress was concerned, her husband would tend to exercise her military obligations because he was judged physically capable of doing so, although she herself might literally inherit (and later transmit possession of her lands to her children). Similarly, where kingdoms, duchies and counties were at stake, a female’s ability to inherit in fact rather than theory often depended on what masculine support she could muster. This is illustrated by the story of the fight for the English crown between Stephen and his cousin Matilda (or the Empress Maud) to be considered in the next chapter: by modern rules of descent, Maud, the King’s daughter, had a better claim than her first cousin, Stephen, son of the King’s sister. But, as will be seen, such a claim was not necessarily upheld if it could not be enforced. The need for strength or at least protection, and marriage for the sake of protection – these were the elements which dominated the lives of women (and little girls) in high positions, as the need for strength and powerful allies dominated the lives of their menfolk.
Under these circumstances, the swift remarriage of Matilda’s mother Beatrice to her cousin Duke Godfrey of Upper Lorraine a year after Boniface’s death is easily understood; although by choosing a husband who was at the time in open revolt against the German Emperor, she was hardly likely to achieve a reconciliation in that direction. At one point Beatrice and Matilda were taken hostage. It was not until after the death of Henry III in 1056 that some kind of political calm was temporarily established. The new Emperor Henry IV was another child (at six years old, he was four years younger than Matilda) and the regency was left in the hands of his mother, the Empress Agnes. The conditions of Matilda’s own life became less perilous: Duke Godfrey, no longer considered a rebel vassal, was allowed together with her mother Beatrice to govern Matilda’s estates during her minority.
Where the chroniclers of her education are concerned, naturally the Tomboy Syndrome is found to be at work.5 Matilda, like Zenobia, was said to have been eager to learn martial accomplishments to the detriment of traditionally female arts like embroidery: ‘Disdaining with a virile spirit the art of Arachne she seized the spear of Pallas’, wrote Vedriani in 1666; Arduino della Paluda, later a general, was said to have taught her to ride like a lancer, spear in hand, to bear a pike like a footsoldier and to wield both battleaxe and sword. Fortunately for these activities, Matilda grew up under this treatment tall and strong, if slender. According to later tradition, she was certainly accustomed to the weight of armour: in his lifetime Vedriani declared that he knew of a suit of her armour sold for a song in the Reggio market in 1622.
Whether or not Matilda actually wore armour, which is doubtful, she did, as a matter of fact, embroider: she embroidered well and she sent presents of her work (an embroidered standard) to male contemporaries such as William the Conqueror.6 The stereotype of the tomboy has to disdain ‘the art of Arachne’ (spinning) if she dares to pick up the spear, but the real woman had no intention of sacrificing a possible advantage by disdaining those pursuits common to her sex and rank which signalled femininity and gentleness.
Furthermore, Matilda’s education left her accomplished in four languages – the four languages concerned, German, French, Italian and Latin, expressing the polyglot nature of her future responsibilities – and, in an age when most Northern rulers usually signed documents with a mere cross, this female would in adulthood be able to write letters herself unaided by a clerk. One should not ignore the effect of this excellent education in giving her confidence to rule her estates. (Queen Elizabeth I had the same kind of education and exhibited the same kind of intellectual confidence towards her male contemporaries.)
At some point during her youth Matilda was married. Like her mother’s second marriage, this was another inevitable and practical step, although myth, wishful thinking and the fact that it had taken place beyond the Alps combined to allow a lot of nonsense to be written on the subject later on. The chosen bridegroom was the son of Duke Godfrey by an earlier marriage, a boy known – all too accurately, alas, since he was severely deformed – as Godfrey the Hunchback. Three facts can be extracted for certain out of the various fantasies surrounding this, the first of Matilda’s two marriages: that she did marry, that the marriage was consummated because at least one child, who died in infancy, was born of the union, and that the marriage itself was a failure.
The various elaborate legends on the subject divide into those intended to bolster up Matilda’s ‘holy’ image (that the marriage if indeed it took place was never consummated, or, if consummated, only reluctantly in the line of duty) and those intended to denigrate her by making of her some kind of insatiable witch-like creature. It is significant that exactly the same kind of legends – the Chaste Syndrome versus the Voracity Syndrome – attached themselves to Matilda’s second marriage at the age of forty-three to Welf of Bavaria. According to the scurrilous accounts, both Godfrey and Welf were supposed to have been impotent in face of Matilda’s treatment – in the case of Welf, Matilda was alleged to have boxed his ears with disappointment and sent him home; Godfrey was supposed to have been killed, as were Matilda’s two children by Godfrey, both hunchbacks.7
On the other hand, a pious story has Matilda cropping her hair deliberately short on her wedding night, adopting a hair shirt and then starkly inviting her husband to a joyless but dutiful coupling for the sake of the dynasty: ‘Come, let us to our union.’8 It is possible of course that the two versions, lubricious and pious, actually bear some relation to each other: one cannot help observing that Matilda’s wedding-night tactics required a delicate balance to be struck between performance (desirable) and pleasure (undesirable) in which there may have been an unfortunate degree of miscalculation on her part.
On the subject of Matilda’s chastity, two important sources for her life unite in following a more moderate course. The Vita Mathildis is a long biographical poem in Latin by the Countess’s chaplain Donizo which he intended to present to her personally; her death intervened and the poem was published later. For all its flourishes, it preserves details which would otherwise be lost, and the fact that it was designed for Matilda’s own perusal suggests that wild inaccuracies would not have been permitted. Donizo stresses Matilda’s personal holiness, while not actually claiming her celibacy. Rangerius, biographer of Anselm of Lucca, Matilda’s spiritual adviser, takes the same line: Matilda, he wrote, was not keen on the carnal aspects of matrimony, nevertheless ‘her mother’s exhortations prevented her from committing herself to the deep religious desire for a chastity which was, in her case, no longer permissible in view of the obligations she had assumed’.9
Donizo and Rangerius between them put forward a plausible picture; it is certainly more plausible if less exciting than that of an eighteenth-century Italian work, for example, with the full wind of myth in its sails: ‘Matilda, embellished with all the virtues, had the rare destiny of causing lilies to bloom among her martial laurels, and these she bore ever unharmed to her tomb; wife and widow to be sure, but always a virgin too.’10 Matilda’s marriage, for which she had not felt much enthusiasm in the first place given the unprepossessing nature of her husband, petered out with her return to Tuscany from beyond the Alps and her enthusiastic adoption of the papal cause. It ended technically with Godfrey the Hunchback’s death in 1076 but before that politics, far more than physical disinclination, had driven the couple apart.
The politics which transformed Matilda from a dissatisfied but dutiful wife into the right-hand woman warrior of Pope Gregory VII were painted in theory on a broad canvas of noble aspect. The eleventh century witnessed that great battle between Pope and Emperor to exercise jurisdiction over each other – and each other’s subjects – which had at its heart the relative importance of Church and state in directing men’s lives.
Two and a half centuries later, Dante would suggest in De Monarchia that the divine plan for the government of the world consisted of a universal emperor acting in harmony with a universal pope; man had ‘a twofold end’, both spiritual and temporal, and thus needed ‘a twofold directive power’ to achieve it: ‘to wit, the supreme pontiff to lead the human race, in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the Emperor to direct the human race to temporal felicity, in accordance with the teachings of philosophy …’.11 Nothing like this ideal was however established in the lifetime of Matilda. And there were some murky details in the corners of the broad canvas of Church and state. As emperors deposed popes to set up rival popes in holy Rome and popes interfered with German affairs by declaring emperors excommunicated (which might result in their own deposition) their motives might be construed as spiritual (the preservation and purification of the Church of Christ) or they might be seen as the less sympathetic ones of power-seeking and power-broking.
It is probable that Matilda’s first appearance on the public scene was at just such an ambivalent occasion. In 1059, when she would have been about thirteen, she was present with her mother and stepfather Godfrey of Lorraine at the Council held at Sutri, in the mountains between Rome and Viterbo. The death of Pope Stephen IX, Godfrey’s brother, in March 1058 had been a blow to the family interests when the Roman nobles took the opportunity to elect their own candidate. He was however deposed at Sutri in favour of the Bishop of Florence, backed by Godfrey’s faction, who took the title of Nicholas II. The death of Nicholas II in 1061 produced yet another crisis. While Anselm of Lucca – a worthy incumbent of the office – was duly elected as Pope Alexander II, a sense of the imperial interests in Italy, somewhat dormant during the childhood of Henry IV, began reviving in Germany. Thus an anti-pope was put forward in the shape of Caladus of Parma, a prelate of notoriously evil character (according to his enemies) who took the title of Honorius II; what was more the lax bishops of Lombardy preferred his cause to that of Alexander II, fearing the upheavals in the name of Church discipline which the latter had promised.
The circumstances surrounding the Council of Sutri of 1059, the election of Alexander II and the years of fighting which followed it give an indication of the background, turbulent, complicated, ever-changing and contentious, against which Matilda grew up. If it were true to say that ‘mere anarchy’ was ‘loosed upon the world’ in which she lived, her devotion to the papal cause in the shape of the Pope she principally served, Gregory VII, was the natural reaction of a singularly unanarchic character to such a situation. It was however to be over a decade before the Papacy was so vigorously incarnated. In the meantime Matilda was learning the arts of battle.
So far as one can piece together her story, she made her first foray on the battlefield at the side of her mother, defending the interests of Alexander II against those of the schismatics in 1061 shortly after his election. The seventeenth-century account is eloquent: ‘Now there appeared in Lombardy at the head of her numerous squadrons the young maid Matilda, armed like a warrior, and with such bravery, that she made known to the world that courage and valour in mankind is not indeed a matter of sex, but of heart and spirit.’12 Matilda was also probably present in 1066 when her stepfather finally put an end to the Roman and Norman support for the anti-Pope Honorius II: at the battle of Aquino, at which Godfrey of Lorraine defeated the Normans, she is even said to have shared the command of four hundred archers with the General Arduino, although this is surely an exaggeration.
According to Vedriani, Matilda was by now generally seen as ‘the new Bellona among the armed companies’.13 But although there are later reports to establish Matilda’s presence at various military engagements in the 1060s in the cause of Alexander II, it seems unlikely that she had carried out any kind of real military command before the death of Duke Godfrey in 1069.* This was the effective moment in Matilda’s life when, aided by her mother, she began to exercise proper authority in Italy – in the absence of any male figure able to stop her. Her husband, Godfrey the Hunchback, battled on in Lorraine (physical disability did not prevent him being a doughty fighter) but increasingly failed to support Matilda in Italy with reinforcements.14 The fact was that Lorraine was beginning to turn away from the Papacy back towards the imperial cause, just as Matilda’s own commitment became yet further strengthened by the election of a new pope.
In the summer of 1073 the great reformer and former monk Hildebrand was consecrated as Pope Gregory VII. A strong character, believing in the centralization of the Church as a means to this reform, Hildebrand had already acted as the power behind the throne during the pontificate of Alexander II. In particular he was dedicated to rooting out that practice of lay investiture, by which the symbols of their office were granted to ecclesiastics by laymen. The new Pope Gregory was convinced that the Church would never be purified so long as laymen had in effect an opportunity to buy and sell Church offices, although he would initially have preferred to work through rather than against the Emperor. (In the previous reign, Henry III had been a noted supporter of Church reform.)
In 1075 Pope Gregory prohibited lay investiture under pain of excommunication, and later that year carried out that sentence against various offenders: these included favourites of Henry IV who had been appointed to the vacant sees of Milan, Fermo and Spoleto. At Mass in Rome on Christmas Eve 1075, however, as part of the rough internal politics of the city, the Pope was first violently assaulted and then abducted. The intention was to take him as prisoner to Germany. Only the furious uprising of the Roman people (to whom he had endeared himself) rescued him.
The incident, shocking in its brutality, may well have put the finishing touches to the unofficial break-up of Matilda’s marriage. Although there is some evidence that Godfrey the Hunchback suggested a reconciliation about this point, Matilda did not take up the offer: the fact that Godfrey’s sympathies were increasingly towards the imperial cause was hardly likely to endear him to her, in view of the Holy Father’s beleaguered state. For was not Matilda, wife of Godfrey, by now happily transformed into Pope Gregory’s hand-maid, and one ‘distinguished by her excellence’ (egregia indolis puella) in his own words?15
The Pope’s excellent hand-maid was recommended to throw herself at the feet of the Blessed Virgin whom she would find more attentive than any human mother; frequent Holy Communion was suggested in order that Christ himself might nourish her. Matilda for her part declared herself as devoted to Gregory as Paul had been to Christ. While nothing in Gregory and Matilda’s language – or indeed their respective characters – gives any credence whatsoever to the calumnies of their opponents concerning their carnal relationship, the intensity of the mission which they shared cannot be doubted. Matilda, a deeply religious woman, victim of an unhappy marriage, had found a far more satisfying role as the Pope’s ‘daughter Matilda’. Unlike anything more sinister, the paternal role which Pope Gregory played in Matilda’s life – he was twenty-six years older than the Countess – does emerge very strongly through their correspondence.16
It was Matilda’s good fortune that the love which she undoubtedly bore for Gregory, a love compounded of veneration and affection, was an emotion actually sanctified by the Church since it was the prescribed attitude of any pious Christian ‘daughter’ towards the ‘Holy Father’. Writing of a period many many centuries before the emergence of psychoanalysis, it is fruitless and anachronistic to probe further into the sexual elements which may have lurked into this ‘daughter’s’ passionate devotion to her ‘father’, since if they existed Matilda herself would have been quite unconscious of them. To make a more pagan allusion, however, Matilda’s reporting of her military victories to Pope Gregory sometimes reminds one of Wagner’s Brünnhilde reporting her triumphs to her godly father Wotan.
It was Anselm of Lucca, her spiritual adviser, who commented that Matilda combined the will and energy of a soldier with the mystic and solitary spirit of a hermit.17 Fighting for the head of the Church gave an opportunity to fulfil both sides to her nature; marriage to Godfrey the Hunchback, on the contrary, not even solid in his support of the Papacy, gave her an opportunity to fulfil neither.
At all events 1076 was to be a dramatic year in Matilda’s life, as well as in the fortunes of the Papacy. Matilda found a new independence: Godfrey was killed in Antwerp in February and her mother Beatrice died in April. Ironically enough the fact that Matilda’s child (or children) by Godfrey had died in infancy added to this independence since Matilda had no male heir to challenge her position. At the same time the Emperor Henry moved against the Pontiff: at the Council of Worms in January 1076 he had renounced obedience to ‘Hildebrand, now not Pope but false monk’ and declared him deposed. Lastly, and most dramatically of all, Gregory employed the most powerful weapon at his own command in retaliation, a mighty one indeed, that of excommunication.
The terms worked out at Canossa were as follows: an excommunicated monarch – even an emperor – had twelve months in which to make penance; otherwise his subjects were absolved from all obedience to him and he himself forfeited all civil rights and stood to be deposed from every civil and political office (which meant that the Pope was in effect interfering with the political affairs of Germany, much as the Emperor’s practice of lay investiture was now seen as interfering in Church affairs). Of course the practical consequences of such a ban depended very much upon the behaviour of those in a position to benefit from the possibilities of independence it offered: that is to say, the Emperor’s vassals. When Henry’s Saxon subjects used the excuse to rise up in revolt again – for they had rebelled earlier – they made it unpleasantly clear what the consequences were likely to be, including the most hideous possibility of all, the election of another king of Germany. So, as Henry’s other vassals began to fall away from him, the stage was set for that celebrated scene of political (and politic) repentance: at Canossa, Matilda’s Apennine fortress, in January 1077.
The Pope was already on his way to Germany, for a consultation with the German princes, including bishops, at Augsburg, when the dramatic news of the Emperor’s dash towards Italy across the Alps reached him. Such a journey from Rome to Germany – as the brutal events at Christmas 1075 will have made clear – could not have been made by the Pontiff without suitable armed escort, since Piedmont and Lombardy supported the Emperor. This escort was already provided by the troops of Matilda. The Emperor’s action demanded a new schedule. The Countess probably came to join the Pope at Florence on about 28 December in order to ride with him personally to Canossa. The choice of this virtually impregnable fortress, lying in the heartland of Matilda’s territory, was doubly significant. It symbolized not only security, essential in view of the still unknown intention of the Emperor, but also the powerful protection which Matilda herself was exerting, had exerted and would continue to exert towards the Holy Father.
Canossa stood – and its ruins still stand* – on a spur of the Apennines about twenty-five kilometres south-west of Reggio. On a clear day there you could see if not forever at least the rising cities of the Italian plain: Modena, Parma and even Mantua, as well as Reggio. Only one side of the fortress was remotely accessible and that was guarded by three walls; the rest was guarded by the terrain itself. The chaplain Donizo romantically referred to Canossa as a ‘new Rome’; if an excess of praise, the description did at least convey that a proper little town existed within the fortress itself: domestics, animals, shopkeepers and men-at-arms jostling with the influx of mighty visitors.
‘Lo, I possess at once the Pope, the King [Henry], Matilda, princes of Italy, of France and of those beyond the mountains. Those also of Rome, prelates, sages, venerables …’. In his biographical poem, Donizo had the fortress of Canossa itself chant this proud refrain.18 Among the prelates present, to be listed also among the notables, was Hugh, the celebrated Abbot of Cluny, that Benedictine monastery in Burgundy which was one of the sources of the movement for the spiritual reform of the Church; he was accompanied by his secretary Odo, later as Pope Urban II to be Matilda’s second guiding ‘Holy Father’. Then there were the unhappy German clergy who by participating in the Council of Worms had risked anathema themselves; the Emperor’s relations came also to ask for mercy.
Henry IV probably made his first stop at Matilda’s outlying sentinel fortress of Bianello; there the Countess visited him, accompanied by Abbot Hugh. From his point of view, a quick absolution was essential if he was to shore up his political situation in Germany. The Emperor besought the intervention of both (Abbot Hugh had been made his godfather by Henry III) in order that he might be relieved at once of his excommunication. According to Donizo, the Emperor believed, and Abbot Hugh confirmed his belief, that Matilda’s intercession was the best hope of melting the hard papal heart: ‘Plead for me, cousin,* plead for my forgiveness with the Holy Father … Go therefore to him, Oh! most valiant cousin and make him bless me again. Go! I beseech you!’ (One notes that Matilda was not thought to have sacrificed the traditional intercessionary powers of a woman.)
There is some evidence that Matilda did intercede and also a suggestion that the Pope became irritated at her persistent efforts. No doubt, he preferred her practical exertions as the Pope’s armed hand-maid to her enactment of the more traditional female role of mediator. An illustration to Donizo’s Vita Mathildis shows an enormous Abbot Hugh (in a monk’s robe and carrying a crozier) with a tiny Henry kneeling beneath him. The Emperor’s supplication is clearly addressed to Matilda, shown medium-sized, and extending her own hand pleadingly on his behalf. Gregory did not in any case grant the Emperor the speedy relief he desired, sending messages instead regarding the forthcoming Council of Augsburg. So the Emperor’s situation was not shored up, or not for the time being.
Instead, in the freezing weather – the winter of 1076/7 was exceptionally severe – the Emperor was obliged to stand barefoot in a coarse woollen penitential garb outside the gates of Canossa itself. Fasting for three days, from 25 to 27 January, there he stood during the hours of daylight, a visible symbol of imperial penitence. From time to time he knocked on the doors of the fortress and still he was not admitted. Inside Canossa the Pope, silent and as it seemed remorseless, remained in the imagination of the world as the invincible symbol of papal determination. To some he stood for more than that. The whole matter of the excommunication with its concomitant of interference in German affairs was to many minds dubious in canon law. ‘This was not apostolic severity but rather the cruelty of a tyrant!’ Gregory himself admitted in his subsequent account of the episode to the princes and bishops of Germany: ‘he did not cease to implore with many tears the apostolic clemency’ so that all present were found ‘marvelling at our unusual hardness of heart’.19 But outside Canossa, while still under ban, Henry for the time being had no choice but to persevere.
Finally on the fourth day, the shivering Emperor was allowed to throw himself at the Pope’s feet and receive mercy. Even so, his absolution was in theory granted to him only as a man, not as a king: that would still have to wait for a conference at Augsburg. (Although the conference never took place, and Gregory did refer to Henry as king after Canossa.) It was undoubtedly at first sight a sensational victory for Gregory. For all that Henry did not keep his word regarding the notorious investitures – strife between Pope and Emperor persisted well into the next century – he had at least been obliged to bow his neck to the Pope’s authority on this single most celebrated occasion. The Emperor had in short ‘come to Canossa’ and so that famous phrase signifying the recantation of a previous proudly held position, for humbling oneself on a grand scale, was born.
Furthermore, Canossa, where it all happened, was the stronghold not of a prince or bishop, but of a woman. (No wonder that Canossa with its infinite possibilities of defence was the favourite residence of Matilda.) This extra bit of symbolism concerning Canossa’s female ownership is however generally missing from the catchphrase which has come down to us.
The practical triumph of Pope Gregory was short-lived. The last years of his life were spent in an unenviable series of confrontations with the Emperor, ending with Gregory’s death in exile at Salerno while an anti-pope, Clement III, Henry’s nominee, occupied St Peter’s. Civil war in Germany – where the princes persisted in electing a new king in Rudolf of Swabia despite the lifting of the ban on Henry – occupied the Emperor until 1080. After that Rudolf’s death in battle freed him to return across the Alps to Italy and, after ravaging the north, besiege Rome itself. Here, with William I of England and Philip of France carefully neutral, Matilda was, as Donizo put it, the only soldier of St Peter left.20
Nor had her own affairs prospered since Canossa. The rising Tuscan cities, in particular Lucca, were beginning to desert her cause – since the townsmen, wanting independence, regarded the hereditary ruler of Tuscany as their natural foe. On his return Henry marched on Lucca, had Matilda judged guilty of high treason for refusing feudal allegiance to him, and placed her under the ban of empire which meant that all her goods were confiscated. On the papal side there was nothing but praise for the sturdiness with which Matilda met the fate which her loyalties to the Holy Father had brought about. Anselm of Lucca, the Pope’s Vicar in Lombardy, praised the heroic Countess for amassing ‘eternal treasure in heaven’ by her efforts, confident that she would ‘fight with her blood’ until God delivered over his enemy (Henry) ‘into the hands of a woman’. But the fact was that Matilda’s earthly treasure was fast diminishing as a result of her ceaseless campaigns, a fact recognized by Pope Gregory when he pleaded for assistance for ‘our daughter Matilda … otherwise she will be forced to make peace with Henry or lose all her possessions’. By the spring of 1082, Matilda’s finances were in ruins, and much of the gold and silver in the treasury at Canossa had to be melted down to remedy them. Yet still, according to Rangerius, Matilda feared neither dark nor cold and nothing separated her from her soldiers. Nor did she retreat into neutrality.21
Matilda’s military triumph at Sorbara in July 1084 was a bright spark in the increasing gloom of the papal fortunes. At Easter the anti-Pope Clement III had crowned Henry at Rome, with Pope Gregory held in the Holy City. Subsequently the Norman leader Robert Guiscard liberated Gregory and took him back with him to Salerno where he died the next year; Robert Guiscard also sacked the Holy City, causing the Emperor to flee. North of Rome however Henry’s allies continued to harry Matilda’s possessions: her castle of Sorbara, on the plain about fifteen kilometres north-east of Modena, seemed an ideal target to invest because of its accessibility compared to, for example, Canossa. Matilda retaliated with a surprise attack late at night when the enemy soldiers were asleep; the celebrated war-cry ‘For St Peter and Matilda!’ rang out as Matilda personally led her small force to victory. According to tradition, she carried the ‘terrible sword of Boniface’ (i.e. her father’s sword) as she massacred the enemy, standing in her stirrups before her troops.22 Militarily, one Sorbara did not make a summer, however satisfying to Matilda. The Emperor Henry continued to ravage her possessions.
It is indeed the stoical resistance of Matilda to the idea of making peace with Henry, because it necessitated recognizing the anti-Pope Clement III, which compels admiration over the next fifteen years of her life. As the champion of St Peter, she tried in vain to persuade Gregory’s short-lived successor Pope Victor to take up residence in Rome; then the succession of Odo, the former prior of Cluny, as Urban II in 1088 brought about the second great partnership of Holy Father and armed daughter.
It was Pope Urban who, in the need for allies, recognized that Matilda’s theoretical marriageability must be employed once more in the cause of Christ. In 1089 the forty-three-year-old Matilda was married to the seventeen-year-old Welf V of Bavaria, thus introducing Bavaria into the papal alliance. The fury with which Henry IV greeted the match demonstrates the success of the move on the political level. In the case of the participants, Matilda’s personal reluctance was probably equalled by that of the youthful Welf: some six years later he separated from his masterful bride, his senior by a whole generation, tired of her dominance in the cause of papal politics. As for Matilda, various suitors had been mentioned for her hand over the years since Godfrey the Hunchback’s death, without conclusion; it was significant that her second marriage was not only arranged by the Pope, but arranged for the benefit of his cause. To that kind of marriage, Matilda could agree.
There was a moment after Henry had taken Mantua in 1091, followed by Ferrara and other important Italian cities, when peace was once more proposed with Tuscany’s gran Contessa: if only she would acknowledge Guibert of Ravenna as Pope Clement III. There were by now many who begged her to accede. ‘You have struggled long enough, oh! most valiant lady, you and your serene consort, to uphold the dignity of the Pontificate.’ Matilda’s reaction can however be most closely gauged by an outburst at the same council of war, held in the Apennines, by one Hermit John: ‘Are you not that Matilda who glories in the title of daughter of Peter?… What sort of peace can be made with the impious?’23 No peace was made.
It took a series of deaths, marking the passing of a whole generation who had lived most of their lives entrenched in conflict, to pave the way for Matilda’s comparatively serene old age. Pope Urban II died in 1099 and the anti-Pope Clement III in 1100. Lastly the death of Matilda’s old enemy Henry IV in 1106 ushered in a new era. The Concordat of Worms of 1122 – a compromise by which a clear distinction was made between a prelate’s position as a landed vassal of the crown and his spiritual office – was hammered out towards the end of the reign of his son and successor Henry v.
A new age was dawning in more senses than one. Matilda continued to regard the struggles of the Italian cities for independence as part of her own struggle to establish a free Papacy. She had been born too soon or had spent too much of her life in conflict to understand that as the commercial importance of Pisa and Lucca developed, this was a phenomenon in its own right.24 And yet as a governor she was far from being naturally despotic: she patronized jurists such as Ubaldo da Carpineti and Irnerius. One has the sad impression that Matilda’s long fights with the Empire, while granting her her reputation in the pantheon of Warrior Queens, actually robbed Tuscany of the possibility of strong, intelligent and benevolent female rule over thirty years.
The new Emperor Henry treated Matilda, towards the end of her life, courteously. He called upon her at Bianello, the sentinel fortress of Canossa, where once his father had set off to shiver in the snow, ‘swearing in the whole earth there could not be found a Princess her equal’. But Matilda, as her health failed, spent more and more time at Polirone, a Benedictine monastery near Mantua founded by her grandfather. (Although when there was an uprising in the city of Mantua in 1114, this gallant old lady still threatened to command an army against the unruly townsfolk.) Polirone had been the first northern Italian monastery to accept the reformed Cluniac rule: both Anselm of Lucca and Matilda’s second spiritual adviser Bernard of Vallombrosa had been monks at Polirone. The illuminated so-called Matildine Gospels presented by the Countess to Polirone (now in New York, in the Pierpont Morgan Library) commemorate not only her generosity towards the monastery, but also, in the nature of their illustrations, those spiritual sympathies which Pope Gregory and Pope Urban had inculcated.25
It was at Polirone that Matilda died on 15 July 1115, in her seventieth year, leaving Donizo (his biographical poem unpresented) to repine, ‘Now that thou art dead, oh great Matilda, the honour and dignity of Italy will decline.’ It is however a curious postscript to the life of Matilda that her testamentary dispositions brought about considerable trouble – for the Emperor Henry V and also for the Pope. The Countess, childless if not virgin, left no direct heir since with her own death her family died out. Thus in two separate wills of 1077 and 1102 Matilda had transferred all her allodial property – that is, the Canossa inheritance, not within the feudal structure of the Empire – to the chair of St Peter. After peace was made with Henry v, Matilda willed her feudally held possessions back to him, although Henry seized the opportunity to claim the whole of her territories. This left the Pope, at the next moment of strength, to claim Matilda’s allodial property in his turn. Ironically enough, even in death Matilda, the Warrior Queen in the course of peace, had not brought about that tranquillity between Emperor and Pope which she so ardently desired for the sake of the Holy Father.
Countess Matilda was originally buried at the monastery but in the seventeenth century her body was transported to St Peter’s, surely the appropriate resting-place for her who had been the Pope’s ‘hand-maid’. Certainly the ‘daughter of Peter’ would have been a more comforting title in death to the Countess herself than that allusion to Penthesilea inscribed on her original tomb. The first of the three Latin inscriptions contained this passage: ‘This warrior-woman disposed her troops as the Amazonian Penthesilea is accustomed to do. Thanks to her – through so many contests of horrid war – man was never able to conquer the rights of God.’26 And yet, whatever the pious Matilda’s reactions, there remained the need to compare one Warrior Queen to another, for verification as it were, however far-fetched the comparison.
Anselm of Lucca himself, in her lifetime, compared Matilda to the Amazonian Queen; he also compared her to the Queen of Sheba.27 Where Matilda was concerned, however, Anselm was careful to add that ‘the garb of a Penthesilea’ hid ‘the messenger of mercy’. That is, on the judgement seat, God would see in Matilda not the stern avenger of crime but rather the compassionate mother of the feeble and oppressed. For another perceived need was to prevent Matilda losing her proper femininity due to her military command. Matilda’s latter-day reputation includes a possible tribute from Dante in the Purgatorio: the ‘Lady Beautiful’ encountered beside the waters of Lethe, who draws him through its drenching waves to the blessed shore, is named Matilda (although there are other more likely claimants for the poet’s inspiration). A more valiant and thus more verisimilitudinous picture emerges from Tasso in Jerusalem Delivered:
With manlike vigour shone her noble look,
And more than manlike wrath her face o’erspread …
Henry the Fourth she beat, and from him took
His standard, and in Church it offered
Which done, the Pope back to the Vatican
She brought, and placed in Peter’s chair again.28
In general, however, the many tributes to Matilda both in her lifetime and afterwards, down to the twentieth-century biographies of the Countess, are careful to stress the compassionate side of her nature. Like Boadicea, she is excused the final responsibilities for her actions and their consequences by her sex. At Sorbara, for example, the warrior maid with the ‘terrible sword of Boniface’ raised above her head was also depicted as begging a halt to the slaughter once the fortress was surprised: slaughter, it could be plausibly argued, that she herself had initiated. ‘Her heart did not grow hard – she cared for the sick, nursed the wounded, made bandages and dressings, prepared and distributed food, and nourished and clothed the destitute, dispossessed by the German scourge.’ So runs a hagiographical modern life of Matilda, published in Italy in 1937.29
The judgement delivered by Leone Tondelli in his classic modern biography of Matilda, which has run through many revised editions since its first publication in 1915, is on firmer ground; for throughout it stresses the religious inspiration which not only supported Matilda in her ‘so many contests of horrid war’, but also justified her participation in them to her contemporaries.30 The Countess Matilda, wrote Tondelli, was ‘a heroine of Christian Italy’. Her whole life constituted ‘luminous proof’ that if a Christian upbringing tends, with ‘modest self-effacement, self-reflection and a mystical union with God, to elevate and refine the spirit’, it nevertheless does not take away vigour in action. Most significantly of all, it is to Matilda’s ‘Christian upbringing’ that Tondelli ascribes that martial ability so uncharacteristic of her sex. In moments of need, Tondelli continues, such an upbringing can suggest ‘even to a woman’s heart the heroism of chivalry and it can mould the female soul – usually rich in generosity but little resistant to long-lasting tests’ – shades here of Gibbon and Mommsen on the subject of Zenobia – ‘into an indomitable constancy’. One feels that that is a judgement with which the gran Contessa herself – ‘Matilda by the Grace of God or she is nothing’ – would have agreed.
* The metaphors of strife and battle used by commentators on both sides at the time make it difficult (except in the case of Sorbara) to be certain when Matilda actually led her men, as opposed to commanded them.
* But only the foundations of Countess Matilda’s fortress remain; the ruins above ground date at earliest from the thirteenth century.
* Matilda was second cousin to Henry IV through her mother Beatrice of Lorraine.