Free She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth by Helen Castor Page B

forehead at her coronation, and hitherto one of Heinrich’s most loyal ecclesiastical supporters – finally abandoned the emperor in 1114, his theological conscience finding common cause with his territorial ambition. Pope Paschal had already sanctioned the emperor’s excommunication three years earlier, but now, in April 1115, the archbishop formally pronounced the dread sentence of anathema at Cologne, where imperial forces had been defeated by a rebel army only a few months before. A formidable faction within the German Church now held that their emperor had been excluded from the community of the faithful. All those who had sworn homage and fealty to him, they declared, were no longer bound by their oaths.
    If Heinrich had any doubt about the need to return to Italy to tackle the poisonous conflict between the Roman Empire and the Holy See at its source, it was dispelled three months later, when news came of the death of Matilde of Tuscany, countess of Canossa. La gran contessa , at almost seventy, had become a legend, ‘the daughter of Peter and the faithful handmaid of Christ’, according to the great reforming pope Gregory VII. Heir to vast estates in northern Italy stretching across the Lombard plain from the Apennines to the Alps, the countess had been the pope’s most devoted ally through forty years of violent struggle between the papacy and the Empire. From her impregnable fortress at Canossa, perched high on a spur of the north face of the Apennines looking over the plain to her nearby cities of Reggio and Modena, she rode with her troops against the Emperor Heinrich IV, standing in her stirrups with her father’s sword in her hand, the war-cry ‘For St Peter and Matilde!’ ringing around her.
    Heinrich V had learned the lesson of his father’s inability to defeat Matilde, opting for conciliation instead of confrontation.He visited her respectfully at Bianello, the castle in the foothills to the north-east of Canossa that stood sentinel for the fortress, and appointed her his lieutenant in Liguria, swearing that ‘in the whole earth there could not be found a princess her equal’. His strategy paid off in 1115 when the dying countess – who, though twice married, had no children – named him her heir. This was an unprecedented opportunity to impose imperial rule in Italy, but it would have to be taken swiftly, before the pope, to whom Matilde had previously promised her lands, could act to stop him.
    By the end of February 1116 the emperor’s forces were ready. When he left Augsburg at the head of his army, his fourteen-year-old wife was with him. Soldiers, horses, carts loaded with arms and provisions, and carriages for Matilda and her ladies travelled more than three hundred miles across the Alps, over the Brenner Pass, a prehistoric pathway that had become a regularised road when the Roman Empire expanded inexorably northward through the mountains. It was the lowest and easiest of the eight major Alpine passes, and an expedition that included the might of an imperial army had no need to fear the bandits who lay in wait by the roadside to relieve merchants and pilgrims of their possessions. But low and easy were relative terms in an Alpine crossing, and strength in numbers offered no cushion against the implacable landscape. Even swaddled in furs, Matilda could not escape the rawness of the thin air as she gazed up at the massive snow-drifted peaks that overshadowed their labouring convoy.
    There could have been no greater contrast between the wildness of the mountains and the comfort of their reception in Italy: a forty-eight-hour stay amid the sumptuous luxury of the doge’s palazzo in Venice, behind crenellated walls and colossal towers that proclaimed La Serenissima’s mastery of the sea. From there, the emperor and his queen travelled south-west to Padua and Mantua before arriving outside the forbidding ramparts of Countess Matilde’s Apennine fortress at Canossa. Heinrich was shrewd