Matilda looked up at him, not quite possessed of her usual energetic and fearless nature but struggling to get through what she had to do now. She stood up to join him and held out her hand to him. “The Truth Against the World?”
He took it, and embraced her. “That’s my girl. The Truth Against the World. Come on then, little sister, we’re off to Tuscany to hunt for hunchbacks and German vipers.”
On December 8, 1075, Pope Gregory VII fired a salvo at King Henry IV. In honor of the feast day of the Immaculate Conception, he was calling Henry out on his lies and his crimes, and demanding that he come clean in his behavior through apology and repentance, or risk immediate excommunication. No pope had ever excommunicated a sitting monarch, and it was an unprecedented threat in European politics.
Henry responded in the way he knew best: with violence. He enlisted the help of the Cenci family in Rome, old rivals of the Pierleoni who were easily turned by German gold. They hired mercenaries to infiltrate the holy Christmas Eve services at Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. As they approached in the line to receive communion from the pontiff’s own hand, the mercenaries broke ranks and bludgeoned the pope. They dragged a bleeding and unconscious Gregory out of the cathedral and locked him in a tower that belonged to the Cenci.
No one would ever know why Gregory was not immediately murdered by his would-be assassins. It was believed that in the haste to put such a diabolical abduction plot into play, the exact orders—what to do once they had the pope as hostage—had not been properly delineated. And no one involved wanted to have the blood of the Holy Father on his hands if that was not what the king had requested or paid for. As a result, they held him overnight until a decision could be made.
The people were outraged. The bloodshed on the altar against a pope who was still favored by the Roman populace caused a near riot on Christmas morning. The Cenci palace was stormed by a mob, led by the Pierleoni family, and Gregory was liberated while the Cenci were driven out of their city.
Pope Gregory VII returned to his primary home in the Lateran Palace. After being treated for the wounds to his head, he called for pen and ink and wrote immediately to his beloved so that she would not worry unnecessarily.
Matilda rode with Conn at breakneck speed across Tuscany, toward Pisa. Her mother had taken seriously ill while handling administrative matters in Pisa, and Matilda was desperate to get to her. She prayed as she rode that her mother would be alive and conscious upon her arrival. She could not bear the thought of losing Beatrice at all, but losing her without having the opportunity to see her and speak to her again would be more than she could bear.
Matilda was relieved that Beatrice was alive, although unconscious, upon her arrival. She was told that her mother slipped in and out of consciousness based on the rise and fall of her fevers. At the moment, she was sleeping soundly, which gave Matilda time to consider the other matters that were weighing heavily on her heart.
She received the message from Gregory as she left for Pisa, the one that assured her of his safety but described in some detail his violent abduction. How desperately she wished she could go to him right now. She needed to see him and touch him, to be reassured that everything would be all right. But it wasn’t possible with her mother in such a condition. She wrote him a letter, in her necessarily careful public way, expressing her love to him in terms that would not convict her if they were read by papal legates or, worse, by enemy interceptors.
My Most Beloved Holy Father,
How distressed I am to hear of the pain caused to you, but how thankful I am to God for sparing his one true and chosen Apostle.
Know that I would do anything to attend your needs in Rome, as your beloved daughter and servant, but I must remain at the side of my ailing mother. I beg you to intercede with God through your sanctified prayers on her behalf.
Although I am separated from you by distance, know this: Neither tribulation nor anguish, hunger, peril, or persecution, nor swords nor death nor life, no principalities or virtues, nor anything of the present, will ever separate me from my love of Saint Peter.
I remain eternally yours.
Gregory would know exactly how to read between the lines, as the letter was couched in their personal code. She referred to herself as his beloved, and to him as hers, but in the careful phrasing that made such an open declaration safe. So while she was invoking the phrase in their Song of Songs, “My beloved is mine and I am his,” the phrasing would not appear to be inappropriate to an outsider, who would see only a loving daughter of the Church sending her devotion to the Holy Father. Her fervid, final declaration of never being separated from her love of “Saint Peter” under any circumstances referred to a key teaching of the Book of Love: that true beloveds are never separated by anything of this world or time, because their souls are bound together for eternity.
Upon receiving Matilda’s passionate letter, a morose and tormented Gregory sent another of his own. Perhaps his recent head injury had caused him to be careless or perhaps he had simply tired of the pretense, but as he wrote to his beloved, he allowed himself in this one instance to forget that he was the pope and that she was married to the duke of Lorraine. He wrote a beautiful and passionate letter, one in which he indicated that he wished they could both abandon their current responsibilities and run away together to a place where they would not be under constant scrutiny. He closed the letter with the lines from the Song that would haunt them both over the next year, words that could condemn them both in the wrong hands:
I will wait in pain until I see you in the flesh, my perfect one, my dove, until you open to me again, knowing that it is all too fleeting. Until we can be together in eternity, where you will be forever at my side in the eyes of our Lord, I await you.
Pope Gregory VII was careful to screen his messengers, particularly those who carried his correspondence to Tuscany. What he could not know was that his most trusted messenger would ride into a trap laid by the duke of Lorraine, his innocent throat sliced for the price of a single slip of paper.
The pope’s passionate letter to his eternal love would never reach her hands. It would, however, reach the hands of her husband.
Conn was certain, and Matilda agreed, that Godfrey had been instrumental in the attempt to assassinate the pope, if not the mastermind himself.
“Of course it was Godfrey. It was a failure, wasn’t it?” Matilda spat her anger and frustration. “But thanks to God that it was a failure, Conn. What would I have done? To lose Gregory and my mother at one time? I would not survive such sorrow.”
“But it did not happen that way, Matilda. Gregory is safe. God takes care of his own.”
She nodded, too overwhelmed by the current circumstances to realize that Conn had just quoted from the teachings of the Order. Because in spite of Gregory’s rescue and the obvious indicators that pointed to the king and his duke, Henry had not backed down. He did not have enough shame to beg forgiveness for attempted assassination. Instead, he declared that the royal court of Germany intended to put the pope on trial and prove to the rulers in Europe that Gregory must be deposed as a criminal. A trial date was set, for January 24, 1076, and nobles from all over Europe were invited to attend in the German city of Worms, where they were to have their revenge upon the upstart pope who would call himself the sole ruler of the world.
The Synod of Worms
Germany
January 24, 1076
THE BISHOPS of Germany had spoken.
Gregory VII was accused of multiple crimes against the people of Europe and their rightful king, and petitions had been hastily assembled and signed to give legal support to his guilt. They utilized Gregory’s own law as the key piece of evidence against him. He had stolen the throne of Saint Peter in an illegal election; he had not been chosen by the College of Cardinals and had violated his own election decree. He was condemned for his arrogance in attempting to strip the bishops of their rights and influence and to consecrate himself as the sole holder of all sacred pow
er.
In the middle of a heated presentation of evidence in the presence of the king, a red-faced, hunchbacked Godfrey, the duke of Lorraine, burst through the door, waving a document in his clenched fist.
“I wish to add another charge against this demon who would deceive all Europe and call himself the pope.”
Henry IV was perched on his throne and feeling very full of himself. He enjoyed this kind of chaos and high drama, and he knew what Godfrey was about to introduce was going to be the sweetest and most succulent piece of evidence that any of them had thus far.
“Come forward, my good duke. You have a personal complaint against the papal usurper, I am told.”
“I do, Your Grace.”
“By all means, state your accusation before this council.”
“I wish to accuse this man of adultery.” The hunchback’s tormented voice rose with his outrage, echoing off the stone walls of the council chamber. It reached a crescendo with his final, emphatic statement. “With my wife.”
The council chamber burst into immediate chaos. While the rumors of Gregory’s relationship with Matilda were known by all in attendance, no one had anticipated a formal charge of adultery brought against them by the woman’s own husband.
“And what proof do you have of this terrible injustice against you, my lord Godfrey?”
Godfrey thrust the document forward. “This letter, written in the false pope’s own hand, was sent to my wife on Saint Stephen’s Day. It is filled with the most debased language and confirms their wicked and lustful alliance.”
Henry licked his lips in anticipation as he gave the command. “Read it.”
Godfrey squirmed with discomfort. It was one thing to admit to being cuckolded before all his peers; it was yet another to compound the humiliation by reading the correspondence of his wife’s lover aloud to the court. “I would prefer to enter it into evidence and allow the council members to read it of their own accord.”
The king reached out his hand to snatch the letter from the hunchback. “Then I will read it.”
Henry took great pleasure in reading the private correspondence of Gregory and Matilda to the council. He stopped before one sentence, relishing it a bit before reading it with the most lecherous inflection, “‘I will wait in pain until I see you in the flesh, my perfect one, my dove, until you open to me again.’”
There was silence in the chamber until the king broke it. “Well, my lord Godfrey. I am sorry that you have been confronted with the unfortunate truth that your wife is a whore, but most grateful that you have come forward with this piece of evidence for the benefit of all Europe. Is it agreed by all here that this letter, in combination with the accounts that many of us have been given of the unholy sexual liaisons between the false pope and this man’s harlot of a wife, provide ample proof of criminal behavior? If there are no objections, I hereby put into the official decree that both Pope Gregory VII and Matilda, Countess of Canossa, are charged with adultery.”
The formal decree that was delivered to Gregory read:
Thou hast filled the whole Church with the odor of a most serious charge, that of too familiar living together with a woman, who is another man’s wife.
Henry did not stop there. He had several scores to settle, and he drove his misogynistic point home with a condemnation of Gregory’s esteem for women in general:
It is our understanding, and our shame for you and the Church, that all your decrees have been set into motion by women, so that the entire Church is now administered by women.
That Gregory had frequently held meetings with not only Matilda but also her wise and experienced mother had been a source of ire for a number of churchmen who believed with grave intensity that the apostle Paul had never been more divinely inspired than when he wrote his first letter to Timothy, the one that reads, “I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to hold authority over a man, but to suffer in silence.” Henry’s estranged mother, now his bitterest enemy, had also become an adviser and ally to Gregory. Henry referred to these women as “Gregory’s unholy trinity,” and it was ultimately the introduction of this evidence, that the pope was constantly influenced by the advice of women, that swayed the remaining bishops into signing the decree of deposition. The counsel of women in matters of state was deemed far more scandalous and unforgivable than adultery.
Henry signed off on all the accusations, as well as the statement decreeing that Gregory had been deposed as pope and was required to step down with what would become an infamous signature:
I am Henry, king not by usurpation, but by the pious ordination of God, to Ildebrando Pierleoni, no longer pope but a false monk. I am Henry, king by the grace of God, and with all of my bishops, say to you, come down, come down, and be damned throughout the ages.
Ildebrando Pierleoni did not become the most powerful pope thus far in history by succumbing to the will of such men. He knew what was brewing in Worms but chose to ignore it until the German bishops made their formal presentation of the charges. They chose to do this at the third synod of his papacy, in February of 1076, which was attended by two hundred bishops and assorted nobles from all over France and Italy. None of the German bishops had the courage or audacity to attend and present such accusations in person. It fell upon an ill-equipped priest who had likely drawn the short straw to present the letter to the pope. He informed the council coarsely, “You are ordered by the king and bishops to leave this throne of which you are not worthy!”
Gregory, so experienced in the theater of the papacy, expressed his sympathy for the poor man who had obviously been terribly misinformed and carried the unfortunate fate of making such ludicrous pronouncements against the pope. He followed the accusations with an eloquent dissertation and graceful reading of scripture, making it clear to all in attendance that he was every bit the great leader that they believed him to be. By the end of Gregory’s elegant performance, the messenger priest was reduced to a shivering heap in fear of the outrage that was turned upon him by the attendant bishops, who supported their pope without question. It was unanimously decided that there was no option except the excommunication of Henry IV, King of Germany.
The pope waited until February 22, 1076, so as to add the full weight of the date—the feast day of Saint Peter—to his proclamation:
I deprive King Henry, son of the emperor Henry, who has rebelled against the Church with unheard-of audacity, of the government of the kingdoms of Germany and Italy and I release all Christians from any allegiance they have sworn to him, and I further forbid anyone to serve him as king.
For the first time in history, a formal sentence of anathema had been enforced upon a reigning and legally ordained monarch. It sent shock waves throughout the Christian world. Now it was a waiting game to see who had the greater power: the king who had deposed the pope, or the pope who had excommunicated the king. And there was an interesting and most critical factor in the deciding of the outcome: the land and territories that separated these two bitterest of enemies and would determine strategic military victory, while technically the holdings of Duke Godfrey of Lorraine, were entirely controlled by Matilda of Tuscany.
Pisa
February 1076
AS WITH ALL OUTRAGES imposed upon her by Godfrey the Hunchback, Matilda ignored the charges of adultery that came out of the Synod of Worms. She knew that Gregory in his wisdom had made such an elaborate and dramatic show of Henry’s excommunication for a number of reasons, chief among them to distract attention from the adultery charges against her. So for the moment he had bought her time, which she needed with her dying mother. Matilda was also focused on keeping her armies intact in the event that Henry attempted to cross the Alps into Italy and march through her lands to get to Rome. She would never allow that to happen, but the German army was in a swelled state and would be difficult to defeat if it came after her with all its might. She had sent messengers to her commander in chief Arduino, who was in Canossa, but was confident that he had the situation well in hand, as
he always did.
In spite of her confidence and bravado, Matilda was worried and had stayed up for most of the night with Conn discussing strategy. There were rumblings that Godfrey was heading back to Lorraine to gather his troops and march on Tuscany, intent on reclaiming his titles with a vengeance. Because Matilda now faced a formal and evidenced adultery charge, brought against her by the king himself, her husband had the legal right to lock her in a convent at his pleasure. He would eliminate her influence as he allowed Henry’s troops free access to the Apennine passes, on his way to capture Rome and install his own man on the throne of Saint Peter.
Matilda went out for a walk, hoping to clear her head in the chill winter air after spending the early morning with her mother. She had fed Beatrice with a few sips of broth and wiped her brow with a soft cloth in those few moments of moderate strength. But the efforts, small as they were, exhausted Beatrice, and she had gone back to sleep.
Matilda stopped when she saw Conn securing a pack to his horse, surrounded by a small retinue of men. Not just any men. These were nicknamed “the Incorrigibles” and were the most hardened of the guard, those with whom Matilda was most uncomfortable. She had strong codes of conduct for her armies and enforced them without compromise. She would not put up with pillaging or wholesale slaughter in any battle, and the rules of war were to be observed at all times. These men who surrounded Conn at the moment were some she had censured and even threatened to release for their excessively violent behavior. The Celtic giant had stopped her before she could alienate them. For all their flaws, they were loyal to her, just as their fathers had been loyal to Bonifacio. And sometimes, he explained patiently, it was necessary to have men this hard in an army. Every commander needed a few incorrigibles. Conn promised that he would be responsible for their conduct and would ensure that they never took pillage or ravaged innocents in any war circumstance or otherwise. Matilda had agreed, reluctantly. But she also knew that she had to give her friend free rein to do his duty and to reinforce her absolute trust in his judgment.