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Be this as it may, mankind throughout the Middle Ages appears to have been in a chronic condition of packing up and unpacking, and packing up again; one after another a nation, a race, a philosophy, a political system came to the front and was pushed back again into limbo: Germans and Kelts and Latins, French civilization of the day of Abélard, Provençal civilization of the days of the Raymonds, brilliant and evanescent Hohenstauffen supremacy, papacy at Canossa and at Avignon, Templars triumphant and Templars persecuted; scholasticism, mysticism, feudalism, democracy, communism: influences all these perpetually rising up and being trodden down, till they all rotted away in the great stagnation of the fifteenth century; and only in one part of the world, where the conflict was more speedily ended, where one set of tendencies early triumphed, where stability was temporarily obtained, in Italy alone did civilization continue to be nurtured and developed for the benefit of all mankind.
The moment of this supreme elevation in the Church was reached at Canossa, 1072, when Henry, the excommunicated Emperor of Germany, came barefooted, in winter, and prostrated himself before Gregory VII. If Charlemagne had worn the Church as a precious jewel in his crown in the ninth century, now in the eleventh the Church wore all the European states as a tiara of jewels in her mitre.
It was by one of the mountain passes that lead from Lucca northward that the first founder of Canossa is said to have travelled early in the tenth century. Sigifredo, if the tradition may be trusted, was very wealthy; and with his money he bought lands and signorial rights at Reggio, bequeathing to his children, when he died about 945, a patrimony which they developed into a petty kingdom.
To the Counts of Canossa in Verona he sent a large picture of equal excellence, in which is a very beautiful Nativity of Our Lord, with a daybreak that is much extolled, as is also the S. Anne, and, indeed, the whole work, which cannot be more highly praised than by saying that it is by the hand of Raffaello da Urbino.
It was in vain that Henry afterwards endeavoured, by making war upon his oppressor, to undo the evil effects of his public recantation at Canossa; the act of humiliation was too marked ever to be wiped out either by himself or by his descendants.
They have not even so much of wildness or grandeur as forms, the saving merit of nearly all wasteful things in the world, and can only be classed with the desolate ghiare of Italian river-beds. Such as they are, these balze form an appropriate preface to the gloomy and repellent isolation of Canossa. The rock towers from a narrow platform to the height of rather more than 160 feet from its base.
The famous civil constitution of the clergy , which was the expression of Rousseau's principle as formulated by his disciples in the Constituent Assembly, was the revolutionary conclusion to the world-wide dispute, whose most melodramatic episode had been the scene in the courtyard of Canossa.
After Henry's death, his son, the Emperor Henry V., paid Matilda a visit in her castle of Bianello, addressed her by the name of mother, and conferred upon her the vice-regency of Liguria. At the age of sixty-nine she died, in 1115, at Bondeno de' Roncori, and was buried, not among her kinsmen at Canossa, but in an abbey of S. Benedict near Mantua.
"Now tell us all about the war, And what they fought each other for?" What about Canossa? "What they fought each other for, I could not well make out. But everybody said" quoth he, "That 'twas a famous victory." What about Mentana or Castel-Fidardo? "What good came of it at last?" Quoth little Peterkin. "Why that I cannot tell," said he, "But 'twas a famous victory."
In awe-struck silence the Council of the Lateran listened to the Pope’s final excommunication of the King, and of all those who dared to associate themselves with him. “I absolve,” said Gregory, “all Christians from the oaths which they have taken or may take to him; and I decree that no one shall obey him as king; for it is fitting that he, who has endeavoured to diminish the honour of the Church, should himself lose that honour which he seems to have.” We all know the final act of that terrible unequal struggle, the duel of brute force against spiritual terrors in a rude age of violence and superstition, which took place in the courtyard of the Castle of Canossa, the Countess Matilda’s fortress in the Apennines.
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