In any case the question of female inheritance in this age dominated by force turned more on practicalities than on theories. Where an heiress was concerned, her husband would tend to exercise her military obligations because he was judged physically capable of doing so, although she herself might literally inherit (and later transmit possession of her lands to her children). Similarly, where kingdoms, duchies and counties were at stake, a female’s ability to inherit in fact rather than theory often depended on what masculine support she could muster. This is illustrated by the story of the fight for the English crown between Stephen and his cousin Matilda (or the Empress Maud) to be considered in the next chapter: by modern rules of descent, Maud, the King’s daughter, had a better claim than her first cousin, Stephen, son of the King’s sister. But, as will be seen, such a claim was not necessarily upheld if it could not be enforced. The need for strength or at least protection, and marriage for the sake of protection – these were the elements which dominated the lives of women (and little girls) in high positions, as the need for strength and powerful allies dominated the lives of their menfolk.
Under these circumstances, the swift remarriage of Matilda’s mother Beatrice to her cousin Duke Godfrey of Upper Lorraine a year after Boniface’s death is easily understood; although by choosing a husband who was at the time in open revolt against the German Emperor, she was hardly likely to achieve a reconciliation in that direction. At one point Beatrice and Matilda were taken hostage. It was not until after the death of Henry III in 1056 that some kind of political calm was temporarily established. The new Emperor Henry IV was another child (at six years old, he was four years younger than Matilda) and the regency was left in the hands of his mother, the Empress Agnes. The conditions of Matilda’s own life became less perilous: Duke Godfrey, no longer considered a rebel vassal, was allowed together with her mother Beatrice to govern Matilda’s estates during her minority.
Where the chroniclers of her education are concerned, naturally the Tomboy Syndrome is found to be at work.5 Matilda, like Zenobia, was said to have been eager to learn martial accomplishments to the detriment of traditionally female arts like embroidery: ‘Disdaining with a virile spirit the art of Arachne she seized the spear of Pallas’, wrote Vedriani in 1666; Arduino della Paluda, later a general, was said to have taught her to ride like a lancer, spear in hand, to bear a pike like a footsoldier and to wield both battleaxe and sword. Fortunately for these activities, Matilda grew up under this treatment tall and strong, if slender. According to later tradition, she was certainly accustomed to the weight of armour: in his lifetime Vedriani declared that he knew of a suit of her armour sold for a song in the Reggio market in 1622.
Whether or not Matilda actually wore armour, which is doubtful, she did, as a matter of fact, embroider: she embroidered well and she sent presents of her work (an embroidered standard) to male contemporaries such as William the Conqueror.6 The stereotype of the tomboy has to disdain ‘the art of Arachne’ (spinning) if she dares to pick up the spear, but the real woman had no intention of sacrificing a possible advantage by disdaining those pursuits common to her sex and rank which signalled femininity and gentleness.
Furthermore, Matilda’s education left her accomplished in four languages – the four languages concerned, German, French, Italian and Latin, expressing the polyglot nature of her future responsibilities – and, in an age when most Northern rulers usually signed documents with a mere cross, this female would in adulthood be able to write letters herself unaided by a clerk. One should not ignore the effect of this excellent education in giving her confidence to rule her estates. (Queen Elizabeth I had the same kind of education and exhibited the same kind of intellectual confidence towards her male contemporaries.)
At some point during her youth Matilda was married. Like her mother’s second marriage, this was another inevitable and practical step, although myth, wishful thinking and the fact that it had taken place beyond the Alps combined to allow a lot of nonsense to be written on the subject later on. The chosen bridegroom was the son of Duke Godfrey by an earlier marriage, a boy known – all too accurately, alas, since he was severely deformed – as Godfrey the Hunchback. Three facts can be extracted for certain out of the various fantasies surrounding this, the first of Matilda’s two marriages: that she did marry, that the marriage was consummated because at least one child, who died in infancy, was born of the union, and that the marriage itself was a failure.
The various elaborate legends on the subject divide into those intended to bolster up Matilda’s ‘holy’ image (that the marriage if indeed it took place was never consummated, or, if consummated, only reluctantly in the line of duty) and those intended to denigrate her by making of her some kind of insatiable witch-like creature. It is significant that exactly the same kind of legends – the Chaste Syndrome versus the Voracity Syndrome – attached themselves to Matilda’s second marriage at the age of forty-three to Welf of Bavaria. According to the scurrilous accounts, both Godfrey and Welf were supposed to have been impotent in face of Matilda’s treatment – in the case of Welf, Matilda was alleged to have boxed his ears with disappointment and sent him home; Godfrey was supposed to have been killed, as were Matilda’s two children by Godfrey, both hunchbacks.7
On the other hand, a pious story has Matilda cropping her hair deliberately short on her wedding night, adopting a hair shirt and then starkly inviting her husband to a joyless but dutiful coupling for the sake of the dynasty: ‘Come, let us to our union.’8 It is possible of course that the two versions, lubricious and pious, actually bear some relation to each other: one cannot help observing that Matilda’s wedding-night tactics required a delicate balance to be struck between performance (desirable) and pleasure (undesirable) in which there may have been an unfortunate degree of miscalculation on her part.
On the subject of Matilda’s chastity, two important sources for her life unite in following a more moderate course. The Vita Mathildis is a long biographical poem in Latin by the Countess’s chaplain Donizo which he intended to present to her personally; her death intervened and the poem was published later. For all its flourishes, it preserves details which would otherwise be lost, and the fact that it was designed for Matilda’s own perusal suggests that wild inaccuracies would not have been permitted. Donizo stresses Matilda’s personal holiness, while not actually claiming her celibacy. Rangerius, biographer of Anselm of Lucca, Matilda’s spiritual adviser, takes the same line: Matilda, he wrote, was not keen on the carnal aspects of matrimony, nevertheless ‘her mother’s exhortations prevented her from committing herself to the deep religious desire for a chastity which was, in her case, no longer permissible in view of the obligations she had assumed’.9
Donizo and Rangerius between them put forward a plausible picture; it is certainly more plausible if less exciting than that of an eighteenth-century Italian work, for example, with the full wind of myth in its sails: ‘Matilda, embellished with all the virtues, had the rare destiny of causing lilies to bloom among her martial laurels, and these she bore ever unharmed to her tomb; wife and widow to be sure, but always a virgin too.’10 Matilda’s marriage, for which she had not felt much enthusiasm in the first place given the unprepossessing nature of her husband, petered out with her return to Tuscany from beyond the Alps and her enthusiastic adoption of the papal cause. It ended technically with Godfrey the Hunchback’s death in 1076 but before that politics, far more than physical disinclination, had driven the couple apart.
The politics which transformed Matilda from a dissatisfied but dutiful wife into the right-hand woman warrior of Pope Gregory VII were painted in theory on a broad canvas of noble aspect. The eleventh century witnessed that great battle between Pope and Emperor to exercise jurisdiction over each other – and each other’s subjects – which had at its heart the relative importance of Church and state in directing men’s lives.
Two and a half centuries later, Dante would suggest in De Monarchia that the divine plan for the government
of the world consisted of a universal emperor acting in harmony with a universal pope; man had ‘a twofold end’, both spiritual and temporal, and thus needed ‘a twofold directive power’ to achieve it: ‘to wit, the supreme pontiff to lead the human race, in accordance with things revealed, to eternal life; and the Emperor to direct the human race to temporal felicity, in accordance with the teachings of philosophy …’11 Nothing like this ideal was however established in the lifetime of Matilda. And there were some murky details in the corners of the broad canvas of Church and state. As emperors deposed popes to set up rival popes in holy Rome and popes interfered with German affairs by declaring emperors excommunicated (which might result in their own deposition) their motives might be construed as spiritual (the preservation and purification of the Church of Christ) or they might be seen as the less sympathetic ones of power-seeking and power-broking.
It is probable that Matilda’s first appearance on the public scene was at just such an ambivalent occasion. In 1059, when she would have been about thirteen, she was present with her mother and stepfather Godfrey of Lorraine at the Council held at Sutri, in the mountains between Rome and Viterbo. The death of Pope Stephen IX, Godfrey’s brother, in March 1058 had been a blow to the family interests when the Roman nobles took the opportunity to elect their own candidate. He was however deposed at Sutri in favour of the Bishop of Florence, backed by Godfrey’s faction, who took the title of Nicholas II. The death of Nicholas II in 1061 produced yet another crisis. While Anselm of Lucca – a worthy incumbent of the office – was duly elected as Pope Alexander II, a sense of the imperial interests in Italy, somewhat dormant during the childhood of Henry IV, began reviving in Germany. Thus an anti-pope was put forward in the shape of Caladus of Parma, a prelate of notoriously evil character (according to his enemies) who took the title of Honorius II; what was more the lax bishops of Lombardy preferred his cause to that of Alexander II, fearing the upheavals in the name of Church discipline which the latter had promised.
The circumstances surrounding the Council of Sutri of 1059, the election of Alexander II and the years of fighting which followed it give an indication of the background, turbulent, complicated, ever-changing and contentious, against which Matilda grew up. If it were true to say that ‘mere anarchy’ was ‘loosed upon the world’ in which she lived, her devotion to the papal cause in the shape of the Pope she principally served, Gregory VII, was the natural reaction of a singularly unanarchic character to such a situation. It was however to be over a decade before the Papacy was so vigorously incarnated. In the meantime Matilda was learning the arts of battle.
So far as one can piece together her story, she made her first foray on the battlefield at the side of her mother, defending the interests of Alexander II against those of the schismatics in 1061 shortly after his election. The seventeenth-century account is eloquent: ‘Now there appeared in Lombardy at the head of her numerous squadrons the young maid Matilda, armed like a warrior, and with such bravery, that she made known to the world that courage and valour in mankind is not indeed a matter of sex, but of heart and spirit.’12 Matilda was also probably present in 1066 when her stepfather finally put an end to the Roman and Norman support for the anti-Pope Honorius II: at the battle of Aquino, at which Godfrey of Lorraine defeated the Normans, she is even said to have shared the command of four hundred archers with the General Arduino, although this is surely an exaggeration.
According to Vedriani, Matilda was by now generally seen as ‘the new Bellona among the armed companies’.13 But although there are later reports to establish Matilda’s presence at various military engagements in the 1060s in the cause of Alexander II, it seems unlikely that she had carried out any kind of real military command before the death of Duke Godfrey in 1069.f1 This was the effective moment in Matilda’s life when, aided by her mother, she began to exercise proper authority in Italy – in the absence of any male figure able to stop her. Her husband, Godfrey the Hunchback, battled on in Lorraine (physical disability did not prevent him being a doughty fighter) but increasingly failed to support Matilda in Italy with reinforcements.14 The fact was that Lorraine was beginning to turn away from the Papacy back towards the imperial cause, just as Matilda’s own commitment became yet further strengthened by the election of a new pope.
In the summer of 1073 the great reformer and former monk Hildebrand was consecrated as Pope Gregory VII. A strong character, believing in the centralization of the Church as a means to this reform, Hildebrand had already acted as the power behind the throne during the pontificate of Alexander II. In particular he was dedicated to rooting out that practice of lay investiture, by which the symbols of their office were granted to ecclesiastics by laymen. The new Pope Gregory was convinced that the Church would never be purified so long as laymen had in effect an opportunity to buy and sell Church offices, although he would initially have preferred to work through rather than against the Emperor. (In the previous reign, Henry III had been a noted supporter of Church reform.)
In 1075 Pope Gregory prohibited lay investiture under pain of excommunication, and later that year carried out that sentence against various offenders: these included favourites of Henry IV who had been appointed to the vacant sees of Milan, Fermo and Spoleto. At Mass in Rome on Christmas Eve 1075, however, as part of the rough internal politics of the city, the Pope was first violently assaulted and then abducted. The intention was to take him as prisoner to Germany. Only the furious uprising of the Roman people (to whom he had endeared himself) rescued him.
The incident, shocking in its brutality, may well have put the finishing touches to the unofficial break-up of Matilda’s marriage. Although there is some evidence that Godfrey the Hunchback suggested a reconciliation about this point, Matilda did not take up the offer: the fact that Godfrey’s sympathies were increasingly towards the imperial cause was hardly likely to endear him to her, in view of the Holy Father’s beleaguered state. For was not Matilda, wife of Godfrey, by now happily transformed into Pope Gregory’s hand-maid, and one ‘distinguished by her excellence’ (egregia indolis puella) in his own words?15
The Pope’s excellent hand-maid was recommended to throw herself at the feet of the Blessed Virgin whom she would find more attentive than any human mother; frequent Holy Communion was suggested in order that Christ himself might nourish her. Matilda for her part declared herself as devoted to Gregory as Paul had been to Christ. While nothing in Gregory and Matilda’s language – or indeed their respective characters – gives any credence whatsoever to the calumnies of their opponents concerning their carnal relationship, the intensity of the mission which they shared cannot be doubted. Matilda, a deeply religious woman, victim of an unhappy marriage, had found a far more satisfying role as the Pope’s ‘daughter Matilda’. Unlike anything more sinister, the paternal role which Pope Gregory played in Matilda’s life – he was twenty-six years older than the Countess – does emerge very strongly through their correspondence.16
It was Matilda’s good fortune that the love which she undoubtedly bore for Gregory, a love compounded of veneration and affection, was an emotion actually sanctified by the Church since it was the prescribed attitude of any pious Christian ‘daughter’ towards the ‘Holy Father’. Writing of a period many many centuries before the emergence of psychoanalysis, it is fruitless and anachronistic to probe further into the sexual elements which may have lurked into this ‘daughter’s’ passionate devotion to her ‘father’, since if they existed Matilda herself would have been quite unconscious of them. To make a more pagan allusion, however, Matilda’s reporting of her military victories to Pope Gregory sometimes reminds one of Wagner’s Brünnhilde reporting her triumphs to her godly father Wotan.
It was Anselm of Lucca, her spiritual adviser, who commented that Matilda combined the will and energy of a soldier with the mystic and solitary spirit of a hermit.17 Fighting for the head of the Church gave an opportunity to fulfil both sides to her nature; marriage to Godfrey the Hunchback, on the contrary, no
t even solid in his support of the Papacy, gave her an opportunity to fulfil neither.
At all events 1076 was to be a dramatic year in Matilda’s life, as well as in the fortunes of the Papacy. Matilda found a new independence: Godfrey was killed in Antwerp in February and her mother Beatrice died in April. Ironically enough the facet that Matilda’s child (or children) by Godfrey had died in infancy added to this independence since Matilda had no male heir to challenge her position. At the same time the Emperor Henry moved against the Pontiff: at the Council of Worms in January 1076 he had renounced obedience to ‘Hildebrand, now not Pope but false monk’ and declared him deposed. Lastly, and most dramatically of all, Gregory employed the most powerful weapon at his own command in retaliation, a mighty one indeed, that of excommunication.
The terms worked out at Canossa were as follows: an excommunicated monarch – even an emperor – had twelve months in which to make penance; otherwise his subjects were absolved from all obedience to him and he himself forfeited all civil rights and stood to be deposed from every civil and political office (which meant that the Pope was in effect interfering with the political affairs of Germany, much as the Emperor’s practice of lay investiture was now seen as interfering in Church affairs). Of course the practical consequences of such a ban depended very much upon the behaviour of those in a position to benefit from the possibilities of independence if offered: that is to say, the Emperor’s vassals. When Henry’s Saxon subjects used the excuse to rise up in revolt again – for they had rebelled earlier – they made it unpleasantly clear what the consequences were likely to be, including the most hideous possibility of all, the election of another king of Germany. So, as Henry’s other vassals began to fall away from him, the scene was set for that celebrated scene of political (and politic) repentance: at Canossa, Matilda’s Apennine fortress, in January 1077.