§ 16. Canossa. 1077.

The winter of 1076–1077 was one of the coldest and longest within the memory of men—the Rhine being frozen to a solid mass from November till April—and one of the most memorable in history—being marked by an event of typical significance. The humiliation of the head of the German Empire at the feet of the bishop of Rome at Canossa means the subjection of the State to the Church and the triumph of the Hildebrandian policy.

A few days before Christmas, Henry IV. left Spires on a journey across the Alps as a penitent, seeking absolution from the pope. He was accompanied by his wife with her infant son Conrad (born August, 1071) and one faithful servant. Bertha, daughter of the margrave Odo of Turin and Adelheid of Susa, was betrothed to Henry in 1055 at Zürich, and married to him, July 13, 1066. She was young, beautiful, virtuous, and amiable; but he preferred to live with mistresses; and three years after the marriage he sought a divorce, with the aid of the unprincipled archbishop Siegfried of Mainz. The pope very properly refused his consent. The king gave up his wicked intention, and became attached to Bertha. She was born to love and to suffer, and accompanied him as a comforting angel through the bitter calamities of his life.

The royal couple passed through Burgundy and Susa under the protection of Count William and the mother of Bertha, and crossed Mont Cenis. The queen and her child were carried up and lowered down the icy slopes in rough sledges of oxhide; some horses were killed, but no human lives lost. When Henry reached the plains of Lombardy, he was received with joy by the anti-Hildebrandian party; but he hurried on to meet the successor of Peter, who alone could give him absolution.

He left his wife and child at Reggio, and, accompanied by his mother-in-law and a few friends, he climbed up the steep hill to Canossa, where Gregory was then stopping on his journey to the Diet at Augsburg, waiting for a safe-conduct across the Alps.

Canossa, now in ruins, was an impregnable fortress of the Countess Matilda, south of Reggio, on the northern slope of the Apennines, surrounded by three, walls, and including a castle, a chapel, and a convent.⁷³⁷³    The castle was destroyed by the inhabitants of Reggio in 1255. The site affords a magnificent view of the Apennines towards the south, and of the plain of the Po towards the north, and the cities of Parma, Reggio, and Modena. An excursion from Reggio to Canossa and back can be made in eight hours. For Gregory’s own account of the meeting, see Reg., IV. 2, in Migne, 148, 465, and Mirbt, Quellen, 101. See also Hauck, III. 792 sqq.

The pope had already received a number of excommunicated bishops and noblemen, and given or promised them absolution after the case of the chief sinner against the majesty of St. Peter should be decided.

Henry arrived at the foot of the castle-steep, Jan. 21, 1077, when the cold was severe and the ground covered with snow. He had an interview with Matilda and Hugo, abbot of Cluny, his godfather, and declared his willingness to submit to the pope if he was released from the interdict. But Gregory would only absolve him on condition that he would surrender to him his crown and forever resign the royal dignity. The king made the last step to secure the mercy of the pope: he assumed the severest penances which the Church requires from a sinner, as a sure way to absolution. For three days, from the 25th to the 28th of January, he stood in the court between the inner walls, as a penitent suppliant, with bare head and feet, in a coarse woolen shirt, shivering in the cold, and knocked in vain for entrance at the gateway, which still perpetuates in its name. "Porta di penitenza," the memory of this event.⁷⁴⁷⁴    "Illic," says Berthold (Monum. Germ. SS., V. 289)."laneis indutus, nudis pedibus, frigorosus, usque in diem tertium foris extra castellum cum suis hospitabatur." During the night the king was under shelter. See Hefele, V. 94 sq.

The stern old pope, as hard as a rock and as cold as the snow, refused admittance, notwithstanding the earnest entreaties of Matilda and Hugo, till he was satisfied that the cup of humiliation was drained to the dregs, or that further resistance would be impolitic. He first exacted from Henry, as a condition of absolution, the promise to submit to his decision at the approaching meeting of the German nobles under the presidency of the pope as arbiter, and to grant him and his deputies protection on their journey to the north. In the meantime he was to abstain from exercising the functions of royalty.⁷⁵⁷⁵    The last point is omitted by Berthold, but expressly mentioned by Lambert of Hersfeld, and confirmed by Gregory, who says in his account of the Canossa event to the German prelates and princes, that he received Henry only into the communion of the Church, without reinstating him in his reign (losum ei communionem redidi, non tamen in regno ... instauravi), and without binding the faithful to their oath of allegiance, reserving this to future decision. Jaffé, p. 402; Hefele, V. 96. The same view he expresses in the sentence of the second excommunication. In view of these facts it is strange that Giesebrecht (III. 403) should discredit the report of Lambert, and hold that Henry regained with the absolution also the royal prerogatives.

The king made the promise, and two bishops and several nobles, in his behalf, swore upon sacred relics that he would keep it. Hugo, being a monk, could not swear, but pledged his word before the all-seeing God. Hugo, the bishops, nobles, and the Countess Matilda and Adelheid signed the written agreement, which still exists.

After these preliminaries, the inner gate was opened. The king, in the prime of life, the heir of many crowned monarchs, and a man of tall and noble presence, threw himself at the feet of the gray-haired pope, a man of low origin and of small and unimpressive stature, who by his word had disarmed an empire. He burst into tears, and cried "Spare me, holy father, spare me!" The company were moved to tears; even the iron pope showed signs of tender compassion. He heard the confession of Henry, raised him up, gave him absolution and his apostolic blessing, conducted him to the chapel, and sealed the reconciliation by the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass.

Some chroniclers add the following incident, which has often been repeated, but is very improbable. Gregory, before partaking of the sacrament, called upon God to strike him dead if he were guilty of the crimes charged on him, and, after eating one-half of the consecrated wafer unharmed, he offered the other half to Henry, requesting him to submit to the same awful ordeal; but the king declined it, and referred the whole question to the decision of a general council.⁷⁶⁷⁶    This story, first told by Lambert of Hersfeld, who in the main sided with Gregory against Henry, is discredited by Giesebrecht, III. 401; Ranke, VII. 284; Mirbt, 194-199; and the Catholic historians, Döllinger and Hefele(V. 98), reject it as a fable. The pope had no need to protest his innocence, and had referred the charges against the king to a German tribunal; the king had previously promised him to appear before this tribunal; his present purpose was simply to get rid of the interdict, so as to be free to act. By declining the ordeal he would have confessed his guilt and justified the pope, and superseded the action of the German tribunal. On the historical value of Lambert’s Annales, see Giesebrecht, III. 1030-1032, and Wattenbach, Deutschlands, Geschichtsquellen, II. 87 sqq. Gregorovius repeats the story as authentic.

After mass, the pope entertained the king courteously at dinner and dismissed him with some fatherly warnings and counsels, and with his renewed apostolic blessing.

Henry gained his object, but at the sacrifice of his royal dignity. He confessed by his act of humiliation that the pope had a right to depose a king and heir of the imperial crown, and to absolve subjects from the oath of allegiance. The head of the State acknowledged the temporal supremacy of the Church. Canossa marks the deepest humiliation of the State and the highest exaltation of the Church,—we mean the political papal Church of Rome, not the spiritual Church of Christ, who wore a crown of thorns in this world and who prayed on the cross for his murderers.

Gregory acted on the occasion in the sole interest of the hierarchy. His own friends, as we learn from his official account to the Germans, deemed his conduct to be "tyrannical cruelty, rather than apostolic severity." He saw in Henry the embodiment of the secular power in opposition to the ecclesiastical power, and he achieved a signal triumph, but only for a short time. He overshot his mark, and was at last expelled from Rome by the very man against whom he had closed the gate.

His relation to Matilda was political and ecclesiastical. The charge of his enemies that he entertained carnal intimacy with her is monstrous and incredible, considering his advanced age and unrelenting war against priestly concubinage.⁷⁷⁷⁷    Lambert refutes this slander (M. G., V. 257), and the best modern historians. Protestant as well as Catholic, reject it. See Neander, Ranke. (VII. 280), and Hefele (V. 67 sq.). Ranke says: "Solche Verhältnisse giebt es ja zwischen Individuen beiderlei Geschlechtes, die sich nur auf geistigem Boden entwickeln, in welchen ohne sinnliche Annäherung die tiefste innere Vereinigung der Gesinnungen und Ueberzeugungen besteht. Die Markgräfin glaubte an die Wahrhaftigkeit und den geistigen Beruf des Papstes, und der Papst andererseits bedurfte ihrer Hülfe."ern Italy, and afforded to the pope the best protection against a possible invasion of a Northern army. She was devoted to Hildebrand as the visible head of the Church, and felt proud and happy to aid him. In 1077 she made a reversionary grant of her dominions to the patrimony of Peter, and thus increased the fatal gift of Constantine, from which Dante derives the evils of the Church. She continued the war with Henry, and aided Conrad and Henry V. in the rebellion against their father. In the political interest of the papacy she contracted, in her fifty-fifth year, a second marriage with Guelph, a youth of eighteen, the son of the Duke of Bavaria, the most powerful enemy of Henry IV. (1089); but the marriage, it seems, was never consummated, and was dissolved a few years afterwards (1095). She died, 1115. It is supposed by many that Dante’s Matilda, who carried him over the river Lethe to Beatrice, is the famous countess;⁷⁸⁷⁸    Purg., XXVIII. 40, XXXII. 92; XXXII. 28, 82, XXXIII. 119, 121.eror.

Canossa has become a proverbial name for the triumph of priestcraft over kingcraft.⁷⁹⁷⁹    Mirbt,Publizistik, 181-200, seeks to make out that Henry’s act at Canossa was regarded by his age as an act of humility and not of humiliation. The contemporary writers speak of it as an act of unheard of and wonderful humility, "mira inaudita humilitas, officium humilitatis." In view of the profound reverence for the Church which prevailed it may be taken as certain that the people looked upon it as an act of humble piety. But for Henry it was a different thing. As Mirbt agrees, the king was not moved by deep religious concern but by a desire to hold on to his crown. For him Canossa was a humiliation and before the bar of historic judgment the act wherein the State prostrated itself at the feet of the pope must be regarded as a humiliation. For other instances of princely submission to the pope, see Mirbt, p. 198, note.he State of Prussia and the Vatican from 1870 to 1887. At the beginning of the conflict, Prince Bismarck declared in the Prussian Chambers that "he would never go to Canossa"; but ten years afterwards he, found it politic to move in that direction, and to make a compromise with Leo XIII., who proved his equal as a master of diplomacy. The anti-papal May-laws were repealed, one by one, till nothing is left of them except the technical Anzeigepflicht, a modern term for investiture. The Roman Church gained new strength in Prussia and Germany from legal persecution, and enjoys now more freedom and independence than ever, and much more than the Protestant Church, which has innocently suffered from the operation of the May-laws.