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And the superstitious conquerors wept, and bowed their faces to the dust, in reverence and in awe, and Rome again arose from her desolation the seat of a new despotism more terrible than the centralized power of the emperors, controlling the wills of kings, priests, and people, and growing more majestic with the progress of ages; a vital and mysterious power which even the Reformation could not break, and which even now gives no signs of decay, and boldly defies, in the plenitude of spiritual power, a greater prince than he who stood in the winter time three days and nights before the gates of the castle of Canossa, bareheaded and barefooted, in abject submission to Gregory VII.
Pius IX. made one last effort to help his fellow-countrymen which people hardly noticed, so futile did it appear, but which was probably made in profound seriousness. He wrote a letter to the Emperor of Austria begging him to make all things right and pleasant by voluntarily withdrawing from his Italian dominions. Popes had dictated to sovereigns before now; was there not Canossa?
It was a year memorable for its severity. Heavy snow had fallen in October, which continued ice-bound and unyielding till the following April. No sooner had Henry reached Turin, than he set forward again in the direction of Canossa. The fame of his arrival had preceded him, and he found that his party was far stronger in Italy than he had ventured to expect.
He did not, however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him that Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army. Matilda hereupon persuaded the Holy Father to place himself in safety among her strongholds of Canossa.
Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man of feebler mould. Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents' unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character.
And yet he had so little of an eye for the line which separates the practicable from the ideal that at Canossa he humiliated Henry beyond all hope of reconciliation, and he died in exile because he would not listen to any compromise which might be an acknowledgment that he had exaggerated his own claims.
Scarcely had the beleaguered town been reduced, than the indomitable Guiscard found himself compelled to return to Italy, where the Emperor of the West, the unhappy Henry IV., vainly endeavouring to wipe out the humiliation of Canossa, had seized Rome and was actually besieging the great Hildebrand in the Castle of Sant’ Angelo.
In this year, 1080, a battle took place in which Rudolf was mortally wounded, and the party opposed to Henry left without a leader, though the war continued. And now Henry, seeing that he could trust his cause in Germany to the hands of his lieutenants, determined to march upon his pontifical foe in Italy, and take revenge for his bitter humiliation at Canossa.
For five days after leaving Canossa, Henry kept his oath; on the sixth he broke it, and, with an armed band, prevented the Pope from appearing among the princes at the Diet of Augsburg. Before another week had passed, the lordships of Hers and Stramen seemed almost deserted.
But in the meantime the Duke, as General to the Signori of Venice, had to visit Verona and the other fortified places of that dominion, and he took with him Taddeo, who copied for him the picture by the hand of Raffaello da Urbino which, as has been related in another place, is in the house of the noble Counts of Canossa.
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