United States or Comoros ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


It is hard to imagine how any man in his position could have done less than he did, and now that it had come to a final settlement he was really anxious to cause his vanquished relations as little humiliation as possible. To go to their house was like playing the part of a bailiff. To allow them to come to his dwelling suggested the journey to Canossa.

Gregory lay like a magician in the fortress of Canossa: but he had no need of carnal weapons, for when the emperor reached the Alps he was almost alone. Then his imagination also took fire, the panic seized him, and he sued for mercy.

"Who is that lady in the gilded gondola close by?" said he. "Which one, your highness?" "The one in red velvet," "That is the Countess Lucretia Canossa, sister of the Marquis de Strozzi." "Is she married?" "Yes, your highness, to a man who has squandered her fortune; so that but for her brother she would be penniless." The elector thanked Antonio, and leaped back into his own gondola.

The long-sighted and experienced Thiers remarked that here Bismarck was on the wrong track, and would be compelled to retreat, with all his power. Bismarck was too wise a man to persist in attempting impossibilities, and after a bitter fight he became conciliatory. He did not "go to Canossa," but he yielded to the dictates of patriotism and enlightened policy, and the quarrel was patched up.

According to a vague tradition, the Simoni drew their blood from the high and puissant Counts of Canossa. Michelangelo himself believed in this pedigree, for which there is, however, no foundation in fact, and no heraldic corroboration. According to his friend and biographer Condivi, the sculptor's first Florentine ancestor was a Messer Simone dei Conti di Canossa, who came in 1250 as Podest

On the surrender of Henry to Hildebrand at Canossa his approving comment is, "the clay that is about man is always sufficiently ready to assert its rights; the danger is always the other way, that the spiritual part of man will become overlaid with the bodily part." In the later struggle between the Popes and the Hohenstaufens his sympathy is with Gregory and Innocent.

Like his father, Tedaldo adhered consistently to the Imperial party; and when he died and was buried at Canossa, he in his turn bequeathed to his son Bonifazio a power and jurisdiction increased by his own abilities.

To the great House of Canossa, the rulers of one-third of Italy, there now remained only two women, Bonifazio's widow Beatrice, and his daughter Matilda. Beatrice married Godfrey, Duke of Lorraine, who was recognised by Henry IV. as her husband and as feudatory of the Empire in the full place of Boniface.

We are not far from an analogous solution of the situation, always translated into the customs of our time." He assured the House that now, as always, he would defend the Empire against internal and external enemies. "Rest assured we will not go to Canossa," he said.

High-handed Henry the Fifth, claiming power over the Church, being refused full coronation by Pope Paschal till he yields, seizes Pope and College of Cardinals then and there, and imprisons them till he has starved them to submission, and half requites the Church for Gregory's humiliation of the father whom he himself thrust from the throne of that Henry whom the strong Hildebrand made to do penance barefoot on the snow in the courtyard of Matilda's Castle at Canossa.