Matilda of Canossa has, at the hands of history, suffered the fate of many women - been dismissed in a footnote as a weak and willful character, buffeted by fate and frequently reacting irrationally - and what’s more, the mistress of a pope. (That despite the fact that her bones were the first to be laid in St Peter’s in Rome that belonged to neither a pope nor and saint.) And that’s despite the fact that the last bit of the traditional insulting portrait is almost certainly true - when a charismatic, powerful and politically adept man of 50, and a beautiful, strong-minded woman who’s determined never to be forced back to live with the husband she hates spend years in close proximity, and six months alone (well except for the servants of course) in an isolated mountain fortress, it seems pretty fair to assume what happened. (And the warmth of the surviving letters between them certainly do nothing to dispel that conclusion.)
But Michele K Spike argues, powerfully, in Tuscan Countess, much else that has been written about Matilda is so much tosh. After all here was a woman destined, it seemed, by her time, the 11th century (running a little way into the 12th), to live her life as a pawn.
In the northern Italy of her time, part of the German empire, under Salic law, which allows inheritance through the female line, but not by females. So although Matilda is the daughter of Bonifacio, the Lombard count of Modena and Reggio and duke of Tuscany, hen she was left fatherless by a “hunting accident” - such “accidents” were astonishingly common at the time - popes being almost equally as prone as noble leaders to sudden, unexpected demises - she was left stranded. She was formally betrothed to the son of a rebellious noble (to whom her mother was hurriedly married, despite them being first cousins), a move perhaps related to suspicions that the German King had a hand in the “accident”. Nonetheless King Henry III swept down on Italy, took all of her father’s lands and wealth for himself, and took Matilda and her mother Beatrice to live at his court , under his charity, as his prisoner.
This was a time that, although the idea of law was starting to take hold, military might was really the only argument that counted, and women, everyone would tell you, couldn‘t lead armies. Society was again developing and growing after the centuries of turmoil after the Roman collapse: Bonifacio had become so wealthy by being one of the first Lombards to come down from his mountain fortress of Canossa and take interest in the scruffy Roman remnants of Mantua. He provided security for its traders, and taxed them for the privilege, and both sides flourished under the deal.
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