Matilda of Canossa

Italian noblewoman

• Born: 1046
• Birthplace: Probably in Lucca, Tuscany (now in Italy)
• Died: July 24, 1115
• Place of death: Bondeno, near Mantua (now in Italy)

One of the most powerful women in medieval history in her own right, Matilda played key roles in supporting papal authority and claims both before and during the Investiture Controversy.

Early Life

Matilda (muh-TIHL-duh) of Canossa was born into a family that had served the Holy Roman Empire in Italy for several generations. Canossa was a hilltop castle in southern Lombardy. Her great-grandfather Azzo of Canossa pleased Emperor Otto the Great so much that he gave Azzo the title of count and marquis over Modena, Reggio, and parts of southern Lombardy. Azzo’s son, Tedaldo, remained in imperial good graces, as did Boniface, Tedaldo’s son. When the marquis of Tuscany, Rainieri, defied the authority of the emperor, and Boniface aided his lord, Boniface received control of Tuscany and the titles duke and marquis of Tuscany, first recorded in 1031. In the Tuscan cities, such as Florence, Arezzo, and Lucca, the duke personally held the position of count, exerting a very direct feudal control.

Holy Roman Emperor Henry III grew wary of having such a powerful vassal in distant Italy. Boniface’s lands stretched across Italy from the Ligurian coast to the Adriatic Sea, and from Bergamo in the north to Siena in the south. Tensions were clearly visible to contemporaries, and Henry may have had a hand in Boniface’s death while hunting in 1052. Boniface had married a daughter of the imperial duke of Lorraine, Beatrice, who brought important German lands with her as dowry. She was steeped in the high culture of the day and developed at Canossa a court renowned for its splendor and learning.

Matilda was born into this court and inheritance. She became heiress after her only brother’s death in 1055. Beatrice, certainly to protect her children, married Godfrey of Lorraine shortly after Boniface’s death. At the same ceremony in Mantua, the couple affianced Matilda and Godfrey’s rather older son, Godfrey the Hunchback. Henry was enraged at this double-coupling of two of his more powerful vassals, and Matilda, still a child, found herself at the center of a major controversy.

Matilda was well educated for a woman of her day and is noted for her unusual martial training under Arduino della Palude. She could handle the weapons of the day and even had two sets of armor made for her. It is recorded that she rode at the head of her troops at times. She could handle four languages the medieval forms of Latin, French, Italian, and German and collected manuscripts. During her long reign, she also showed considerable skill as an administrator, which she doubtless acquired as a young woman and on the job.

Life’s Work

The Godfreys’ revolt against Henry was sharp but short-lived, and Beatrice and her husband attended the royal coronation of the very young Henry IV in 1056. Four years later the family became entangled in papal politics. Pope Stephen IX, a leading reformer at the papal court and brother of the elder Godfrey, died suddenly in March, 1059. One portion of the cardinals elected the bishop of Velletri, who was acceptable to reformers but not their first choice. Other reformers held off until December, when they elected the bishop of Florence, himself from Lorraine. The reformers played their cards well and got both the imperial party in Germany and the people of Rome well bribed to support their Nicholas II and the deposing of the very short-reigned antipope, Benedict X. No less than Godfrey of Lorraine and Tuscany escorted Nicholas into Rome. This pope spent much of his time in Florence, and Matilda may well have gained her intense affection for the reform papacy directly from him. When Nicholas died, the reformer-bishop Anselm of Lucca replaced him, taking the name Alexander II in September, 1061. However, this election, too, was contested, and Godfrey again played a vital role in physically protecting the reform-party pope against, in this case, the empress-regent’s party. Young Henry IV, born in 1050, grew to manhood under Alexander, and he quickly came to realize that “reform” meant lessening imperial control over the church in imperial lands. Pope and young German king clashed with increasing frequency.

The elder Godfrey died in 1069, and Matilda took the reins of her vast territories. She married her fiancé, Godfrey, sometime between 1069 and 1071. Their only child died shortly after birth. In 1073, Alexander died, and the Tuscan-born powerhouse behind Church reform, Hildebrand, was acclaimed pope in Rome in April, 1073. He took the name Gregory VII. Disaffection among the German lords against the young king was a constant theme in the German part of the empire, but Godfrey decided to serve his lord, estranging himself physically and politically from Matilda, who steadfastly supported the pope in any controversy with the emperor. Beatrice, on whom Matilda had relied for much, died in 1076.

At the beginning of the same year, Henry IV made his move against Pope Gregory. The reformers had been especially troubled by nonclerical appointments to important church offices such as bishoprics. The king and emperor-elect insisted on retaining that power, especially on the grounds that many German bishops were also, by their offices, his feudal vassals. This disagreement, known as the Investiture Controversy , swept up the era’s best legal minds and fueled the revival and study of Roman law. Matilda’s patronage of the Law School at Bologna and of the great jurist Irnerius were based in her interest in these matters.

In March, 1075, Gregory published Dictatus papae , a far-reaching set of papal claims that went so far as to recognize a pope’s right to depose an emperor. The following January, at an imperial council held at Worms, Henry’s supporters laid out a series of legal charges and declared the pope deposed. Gregory was confronted with these charges and the decree and promptly excommunicated Henry and anathemized his clerical followers. Gregory then explained his position and actions to the German feudal lords; these lords, not well-disposed to Henry to begin with, decided that Henry had one year from the excommunication to have the sentence lifted or they would no longer recognize his authority as a Christian ruler.

Late in the year, Henry, with few material or financial resources, headed south to plead his case in Rome. Gregory for his part was heading north to rally the German lords. Because Henry had supporters in Lombardy many Lombard bishops had met at Piacenza and supported the deposing of Gregory Matilda arranged an escort for the sixty-year-old pope. On news of Henry’s descent south, the party decided to spend the winter at Canossa. Matilda hosted not only Gregory and his entourage but also the steady stream of Henry’s bishops and abbots who had changed their minds and were seeking reconciliation with the Church. Those who found the pope at Canossa were locked in dank, cold cells and fed only some bread and water, until Gregory was convinced of their repentance. As Henry and his party approached, they stopped short: He feared that the pope would not lift the sanction. He sent envoys who failed to move Gregory, so he enlisted Matilda’s aid; according to tradition, she agreed only after the abject ruler begged for her help from his knees. Henry consented to don penitential clothing and fast from sunrise to sunset not long in the dead of winter placing himself outside the castle gate at Canossa. On the fourth day, Gregory relented and released Henry from the excommunication. Henry quickly returned to Germany. The pope planned to follow, but Matilda convinced him otherwise, and she continued to host him.

Soon Henry was in a stronger position than ever, and Matilda began to feel the pressure of a new force in Italian politics: the emergence of urban communes in Lombardy and Tuscany. By the early 1080’, the former “capital” of Lucca was in constant revolt, led by antireform clergy and liberty-seeking town councillors and supported by the emperor. Florence had already replaced Lucca as the center of Tuscan administration. Henry returned to Italy in 1080. Sweeping through Matilda’s territories, he bought the support of many towns with special privileges and harassed her supporters. By 1084, with her army defeated and towns in revolt, she had no resources to aid Gregory, whom Henry had imprisoned in the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo. As Gregory watched, Henry installed his new antipope, Clement III, whom he would recognize until Clement’s death in 1100. The Norman ruler of much of southern Italy, Robert Guiscard, rescued the pope, who died in exile.

In 1087, Robert of Normandy, estranged son of William the Conqueror, sought the hand of Matilda in marriage. He failed, but in 1089, Welf (Guelph) of Bavaria married Matilda, who, at forty-three, was about twice his age. The Bavarian family was one of Henry’s biggest problems, and newly elected pope Urban II urged this marriage on her. Henry rapidly seized all of Matilda’s possessions in Germany and moved into Italy again. Mantua fell after a year, and Ferrara immediately. Henry supported a revolt in Liguria, the area surrounding Genoa. Holed up in her castle of Carpineta, Matilda held out as her advisers and vassals pleaded with her to drop her alliance to Urban and recognize Clement. For his part, Henry relished the revenge he was obtaining for the humiliation at Canossa, and he targeted that stronghold particularly. By a neat stratagem, however, she brought her forces up behind his and defeated them, humiliating him yet again.

During her last two decades, the movement toward urban autonomy gained speed and was co-opted by Henry IV’s successor, who was happy to sell privileges and rights. Her reactions to this movement seem to indicate that she did not understand these trends. Without an heir who would acquire either feudal or allodial possessions, she apparently lacked the concern she might otherwise have had. From their perspective, cities such as Florence loved Matilda for her lese faire attitude. In fact, the Papacy had been her heir, but after her death near Mantua in 1115, the emperor claimed everything as his. This exacerbated papal-imperial tensions in northern Italy and presented many opportunities for the thriving city-states of Lombardy and Tuscany to stake out their own power bases by playing each side off the other.

Significance

Matilda’s support of the papal side in the Investiture Controversy from the mid-eleventh century until nearly its denouement in 1122 with the Concordat of Worms helped ensure that imperial power did not merely swamp the reformers’ movement and subsume the Church into the state as happened in the Byzantine Empire. Though other powers such as the French and the southern Italian Normans did their part, Matilda literally stood between the emperor and pope.

Insofar as she did not stifle the beginnings of communal autonomy in Lombardy and Tuscany, she helped ensure that it would advance. Pisa emerged as a sea power and both Florence and Siena laid the foundations for their future power. Her struggles with the imperial party opened the door further for the negotiations that further weakened imperial power over these budding economic centers.

Bibliography

Blumenthal, Uta-Renate. The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. Standard work in English on the controversy.

Duff, Nora. Matilda of Tuscany: La gran donna d’Italia. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1910. Full biography of Matilda; draws on original sources and establishes the political context of her role in papal/imperial affairs.

Jones, Philip. The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. The ambiguity of Matilda’s will allowed the first flourishing of communal independence in Lombardy and Tuscany.

McCash, June Hall, ed. The Cultural Patronage of Medieval Women. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996. Matilda appears in this collection of articles as the major figure in church and cultural patronage of her day in northern Italy.

Tellenbach, Gerd. Church, State, and Christian Society at the Time of the Investiture Contest. Buffalo, N.Y.: University of Toronto Press, 1991. Treatment of the intellectual and theological issues that shaped Matilda’s positions, though she does not appear in this work at all.