But with Bonifacio dead his daughter seemed helpless. Still this was some prisoner: a direct descendant through her mother of Charlemagne, Matilda read and wrote Latin, she spoke the precursors of German, Italian and French. Later she accumulated what was for her time an immense library, mostly sermons, essays on the Christian life, and on the letters of St Paul, many now preserved in Mantua and the monastery at Nonantola. Her illuminated gospel is in the Morgan Library in New York.
Spike is heavily dependent on the account of Matilda’s life provided by Donizone, the monk who the modern author strongly represents as in effect Matilda’s ghost autobiographer. There are omissions and apparently curious errors of fact in the text, but Spike argues convincingly that these were deliberate attempts to obfuscate and confuse - all with the aim of establishing Matilda’s right to her father’s lands, and thus right to decide their fate after her death.
That must have seen very distant when at 16 she was pushed reluctantly into marriage with “Godfrey the Hunchback”. They were together about two years, then, Spike suggests, although the evidence is thin, after she gave birth to a child that soon died. In the background of all of this - Spike follows the elevation, and usually the quick deaths of pope after pope in the struggle - is a church battle royal, between the Lombard bishops who favoured married clergy and the purchase of bishoprics, and the reforming Cluniac faction, which wanted to abolish both.
So Matilda, possibly mourning, and certainly determined not to return to her husband, lands in Rome in 1073, just as the consummate politician Hildebrand, whose family had already made a couple of popes, became one himself, despite being neither a priest nor a monk. But now he was Gregory VII, aligned firmly with the reform faction, and Matilda was not just a beautiful face, but a political opportunity, as he was to her. If she could claim her father’s lands, they could help the papacy. With the pope’s support, she had a much better chance than on her own.
And that’s just what she and her mother jointly did - while also acting as a go-between for Gregory and King Henry IV. And she was advising the pope. And he admitted it! That sent to German bishops into a spin.
The new pope was in trouble, but Matilda was setting her own course, arranging the vicious murder of her husband, to get him out of the road. That’s an adjective I wouldn’t usually use in that context - but since the method was a sword thrust through the anus while he was on a privy, it seems appropriate. Within two months, her father’s vassals, seemingly appreciating her ruthlessness, were accepting her as their governor. On June 15, 1076, “Dom Mathildae Comitissae” held court for the first time on her own..
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