Tuscan Countess: The Life and Extraordinary Times of Matilda of Canossa

By Michele K. Spike

“[This] marvelous biography peels back layer upon layer of previous myth to render a startling new portrait of the countess. . . . Absorbing.” —Publishers Weekly
 
Tuscan Countess is a fast-paced and colorful exploration of the life of Matilda of Canossa (c. 1046–1115), a woman who loved a pope and was loved by him, successfully defied the Holy Roman Emperor, and changed the map of Europe. Matilda of Canossa, the “Great Countess,” was a remarkable woman. Her personal power was so extraordinary that even centuries after her death she became the first woman to be interred in St. Peter's Basilica. She is best remembered for her role in the conflict between the papacy and the Holy Roman emperor, the climax of which took place at her castle of Canossa. This unique biography is also a journal of the author's travels through contemporary Tuscany as she explores the palaces where Matilda held court, the blood-stained plains on which her soldiers battled, the churches and cathedrals she endowed, and the fortified aeries where she sought refuge. Readers will be swept along on this engrossing journey retracing the steps of a courageous and brilliant woman.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780865652811

Book preview

EAR MANTUA THE MONASTERY OF San Benedetto Po lies surrounded by low damp meadows. It is hard to imagine how it was originally: an island in the midst of roiling waters where the Lirone river flows into the Po. A stand of poplars, their roots cooling in green water, marks the site of a vanished village called Bondeno, where Matilda died on July 24, 1115. Holding a crucifix to her chest, Matilda prayed, Always, as long as I lived, I placed my hope in You, O Lord, now that I have arrived at the end, I pray you, purify me of my sins and turn to me your face that saves.¹ At her death, Matilda was laid reverentially in the tomb waiting for her at the monastery. In accordance with her last wishes the monks agreed to celebrate a special mass on the anniversary of her death and, in her memory, to distribute food to the poor on the first Monday of every month. They did so faithfully for the following five centuries.

In 1635 an imperious pope decided that Rome had more urgent need of Matilda’s bones. The vast new Basilica of St. Peter was ready to be decorated. Urban VIII reserved for her the second pier in the long nave of immense marble pillars, but the monks at San Benedetto Po had no desire to violate Matilda’s sacred trust, let alone relinquish their protectress. So the pope resorted to subterfuge. Two priests were dispatched from Rome carrying a private missive for the abbot and a payment reputed to be six thousand ducats. The monastery had fallen on hard times, which may explain why the abbot relented and accepted the money in exchange for Matilda’s remains. In the deep of night, while the monks slept, the priests pried open the alabaster casket. The torch flames sparkled on gold and silver filaments woven in moldered strips of faded silk. Astonishingly, Matilda’s diminutive skeleton was perfectly intact, with large even teeth, and some strands of fine reddish blond hair still clinging to the skull. As quickly as possible, the Roman priests spirited her bones away. By the time the monks awoke, Matilda’s body was on the road to Rome.

The duke of Mantua protested in vain. The pope refused to reconsider. Word came from Rome that recovery would be impossible. The pope is too attached to the memory of that most serene princess and has composed verses about her.² Through Urban’s resolve, Matilda became the first person who was neither a pope nor a saint to be laid to rest in the church built on the apostle Peter’s tomb.

I DISCOVERED MATILDA OF CANOSSA quite by chance in 1991 at an exhibition in the Palazzo Te in Mantua. The show spotlit in stylish Italian fashion crusty chalices and marble fragments in homage to a woman named Matilda, of whom I had never heard. She had left an enormous legacy in stone, endowing countless abbeys throughout northern Italy and embellishing their portals with statues of recoiling snarling lions—by far the best pieces in the show. Her sculptor, Wiligelmo, was the first artist to sign his name since antiquity—and she had paid him to do it. Five hundred years before Machiavelli wrote The Prince, Matilda had eliminated two husbands and countless opportunists who coveted her domains, which spanned the Apennine mountains from Mantua to Florence. Defiant and pious, sensuous and resolute, Matilda of Canossa (c. 1046–1115) was a bundle of medieval contradictions. I wanted to know more about her.

Monastery of San Benedetto Po as it appears today.

The museum bookshop had two biographies of her, both long on romance and short on facts. There were inexplicable gaps in her story, which no one seemed to mind particularly. I dug a little deeper and found only one Matilda book in English, a charming period piece published in 1909.³ Matilda’s accomplishments, told and retold with little or no examination over nine centuries, seemed puzzling and vague. Yet by any standard her life had left quite a mark.

Matilda is one of only five women⁴ whose bones lie within a hundred yards of the apostle Peter’s. On her casket the sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini carved the scene that etched her name in history: the humiliation of her cousin, the German king Henry IV, as he kneels before the Roman pope Gregory VII at her castle of Canossa. In Bernini’s eloquent stone rendering, Matilda stands demurely beside the pope. The modest maid reappears, remarkably transformed, in the marble statue that towers over the casket. Indomitable and commanding, Matilda looks like a warrior, gripping a general’s baton in her outstretched right hand and, cradling the papal tiara in the crook of her elbow, she holds the key of St. Peter in her left hand. Above her tomb, Pope Urban VIII placed the following inscription:

URBAN VIII HOLY PONTIFF TRANSLATED THE BONES FROM

THE MONASTERY OF SAN BENEDETTO IN MANTUA OF THE

COUNTESS MATILDA, A WOMAN WITH A VIRILE SOUL

AND CHAMPION OF THE APOSTOLIC SEE, KNOWN FOR HER

PIETY CELEBRATED FOR HER GENEROSITY WITH ETERNAL

GRATITUDE AND MERITED PRAISE IN THE YEAR 1635

Exactly what the church should be eternally grateful for is not spelled out. Modern histories are content to portray Matilda substantially as she is on the casket frieze: a wealthy widow, who placed her armies and money in the hands of a brilliant and somewhat reckless pope, then retired to the sidelines while Gregory VII slugged it out with the German emperor. Perhaps Matilda was only a local heroine exploited by Urban VIII to keep the Lutherans off balance.

Running contrary to that version is a mountain of evidence: the items I saw in the show at Mantua and—most importantly—her memoirs, which were set into verse by a Benedictine monk named Donizone. His original manuscript is carefully preserved in the Vatican Library (where later in my quest I would travel to turn its thousand-year-old pages). From his slightly stilted chronicle emerges a woman who was anything but shy. She defied strictures, ignored laws, and fought the consequences until the day she died. Matilda was one feisty lady; rather more like that statue than the frieze, I began to suspect.

As I peeled back crust after crust of pious legend, I found myself in touch with a woman as vulnerable as she was ruthless and of an intelligence superior to that of all her peers, save one—Hildebrand, Pope Gregory VII. The spark of attraction between these two intellects ultimately cost him his papacy—an issue curtly acknowledged by papal historians, but never explored. And, the paradoxical undercurrent of her bellicose life is that she endured every danger, every privation, and every hardship because she loved him.

Out of the medley of impressions other facts began to emerge. I noticed that the Cambridge Medieval History dates the end of the Dark Ages to the year of her death, 1115. The histories of the free Italian communes—Florence, Lucca, Ferrara, Mantua, Modena, Reggio Emilia— begin in that same fateful year; every one had been under Matilda’s control. Kenneth Clark attributes the creative fervor in these same towns to a mysterious transformation that occurred in Europe around 1100 in the space of a single lifetime.⁵ I started to wonder what Matilda’s connection might have been to that glorious past. Were these simply a string of odd coincidences or did at least a part of this story belong to her? Had Matilda’s traces been lost because the monks who wrote history were loath to attribute any of its greatness to a woman, let alone one who had been accused of adultery with a pope?

Surprising as it may seem, many ancient and beautiful edifices hauntingly evoke the imprint Matilda left on Italy. Desperately seeking Matilda, I learned as much by prowling among the stones she left as I did by reading the mass of literature written about her. My companions were the words she wrote: the paperback edition of Donizone, as translated into Italian and annotated by Professor Paolo Golinelli.

Here then is my portrait of Matilda, written as a journal of my travels to the palaces where she held court, the bloodstained plains of her battles, the holy shrines she endowed, and the fortified aeries where she sought refuge. In part it is a conversation between Matilda and me—quoting liberally from Donizone, who is as eloquent about events on which he remains silent, as he is when he speaks. It represents my struggle to understand what this fiercely independent, headstrong, and passionate woman had achieved to earn her place alongside the apostle Peter.

OST OF WHAT I KNOW ABOUT Matilda, her father, and his dynasty, I learned from her. She recounted her life’s stories to a Benedictine monk named Donizone, instructing him to compile her biography. His Vita Mathildis soars above the secular writing of the twelfth century, even granting that the competition was slim. Its constant insertion of personal commentary into an epic poem modeled on Virgil’s Aeneid makes it obvious that Matilda reviewed every line. The story begins with the bold declaration that were Plato and Virgil still alive they would have exalted Matilda and her illustrious forebears. No one in antiquity was greater than the dukes of Canossa, not even the sons of Priam.¹ For Matilda, her tale rivaled the fall of Troy and the founding of Rome.

As shrewd as any media magnate, Matilda created herself in the image of the last heir of a line of rich feudal princes that began with her greatgrandfather Atto Adalberto. She traced her roots through these Lombard feudal lords who ruled northern Italy on behalf of the German kings. She ignored her mother’s family entirely, although their blood was bluer, because it was through her father’s family that Matilda claimed her property and her wealth.

Matilda wrapped herself in that mythic glow. The frontispiece to Donizone’s text shows her seated regally on a throne bedecked with attributes of wealth and station. Her golden crown rises to a point. Her dainty feet, clad in golden slippers, rest on a pillow. Sheathed in blue silk, her slim figure is enveloped in a sumptuous red velvet robe, encrusted with jewels. She looks out with a clear steady gaze. At either side of her throne stand two small figures symbolic of her two natures. To her right is the monk Donizone, respectfully delivering his manuscript. To her left is a sword-bearing captain looking vigilant. As proud of her literacy as she was of her battles, Matilda chose to be remembered as one who ruled.

Portrait of Matilda of Canossa on the frontispiece in Vita Mathildis by Donizone, c. 1116. (Codice Vaticano 4922, Biblioteca Apostolica, The Vatican)

Like many women of a certain age, Matilda gave no details about her birth. Donizone revealed her secret in his epilogue, stating that she was sixty-nine when she died on July 24, 1115. Her place of birth, Mantua, is inferred mostly from Matilda’s tirades against the citizens of this city, consuming pages of verse, echoing Virgil’s own lament about this town where he too was born.

At least once I wish I could arrive at Mantua by riverboat on the Mincio. It would be truer to Matilda’s moment. Mantua’s origins may be shrouded in myth, but it was always a river town. Virgil claimed that Mantua was founded by a child of the river god Tiber who named it after his mother, the prophetess Manto. The Mincio was domesticated in 1198 when the ingenious Mantuans changed its course, connecting one side of the island town to the mainland and creating lakes on the other three sides. Its many canals are now mostly filled, replaced by black ribbons of road. The city retains a narrow strip of shoreline as a pleasant public park overlooking peaceful expanses of lake. Along the mud shores fishermen, equipped with tall nets, half-submerged, cast their reels for the eels, carp, and catfish, traditionally served in Mantua’s restaurants. Strong, natural flavors dominate Mantua’s cuisine; they still eat horses here.

I have visited Mantua in every season. The centro storico unfolds along a thoroughfare as straight as a spine. This was, and in one section is still, called the Via Roma, the road to Rome. Two piazzas, the small, intimate Piazza delle Erbe and the spacious, elegant Piazza Sordello, have been the twin centers of the life of this city since before Matilda’s time. The ducal palace, the cathedral church, and the archbishop’s residence line the Piazza Sordello in the same configuration as in Matilda’s day, although the buildings have been much aggrandized in the intervening centuries. The piazzas are still paved with the same round river stones, rough and wearying to walk on. In the summer children freed from the confinement of a long Mass or a tedious guided tour chase pigeons and each other while their parents watch them from the café tables. By autumn wisps of fog float up from the three lakes just behind the buildings, playing hide and seek in and around the arched columns. Tourists are fewer in this season, and the piazzas nearly empty. Water droplets give haloes to the street lamps, which gleam a dull yellow and cast no light. In winter, the fog closes in, cold, damp, and dense, forcing pedestrians to feel their way along the walls of buildings. As headlights pass, pale white circles emerge for an instant, then quickly melt away.

In the clarity of summer I forget how impenetrable the mist can be … like Matilda herself. There have been moments when her thoughts and actions are as clear to me as though we were chatting over a cappuccino in the Piazza Sordello. But just when I feel I know her, she disappears completely, as if she were swallowed up in the thick swirls of a winter fog.

MATILDA’S MANTUA ROSE LIKE A DREAM out of the wilderness: a river port on an island surrounded by dense forests of oaks, frequently flooded. The thickets were inhospitable storehouses of lumber, game, fowl, and wild fruits. The brick and wood settlement appeared in the lonely landscape as if by enchantment, tempting conqueror and trader alike. Merchants from the ports of Venice and Ravenna on the Adriatic Sea traveled up the Po to the Mincio carrying salt and fragrant spices and colorful silks from the Orient, sugar, citrus, and cotton from Sicily. Germans who came down from Bavaria across the Brenner Pass through the Alps brought wool, furs, iron, and silver from the Harz mountains of northern Saxony. For several centuries invaders and brigands choked off commerce, but shortly after the millennium a trickle of intrepid merchants began to ply their trade along the rivers and travel the disused roads.

Bonifacio, Matilda’s father, was among the first of the German overlords to leave his mountaintop fortress that looked down upon the lush Po river plain, north to Modena and Mantua and east to Reggio. Descending from Canossa, Bonifacio took charge of Mantua, the remnant of a Roman town, where a scruffy community of traders lived under the control (more or less) of a bishop. Bonifacio seems to have known instinctively where the future lay and how he could profit from it. His first step was to make himself indispensable by organizing patrols of the Mincio and the Po rivers. In exchange for protecting the river trade from pirates, Bonifacio exacted taxes for the use of rivers and docks. By 1030, if not earlier, the marchese Bonifacio was traveling by boat up and down the Po, stopping at the settlements along its shores, holding public hearings on local disputes and issuing judgments.²

As rich as Solomon and as wise, Bonifacio lacked nothing from the earth or from the sea.³ He was a powerfully built man, tall and handsome, full of self-confidence. In Donizone’s portrait miniature of him, every item of his wardrobe from the soft blue cloth tunic to the luxurious green cape is trimmed in gold leaf and studded with jewels. Golden cuffs ring his shins and wrists. He lived, extravagantly. To show how great and immensely rich he was, ⁴ Bonifacio rode north to fetch his new bride, Matilda’s future mother, with an entourage riding horses trapped out with silver and shod with silver shoes affxed with silver nails. Crowds followed them to collect the trail of silver left by the horses as they thundered through the streets and fields.

The bride, Beatrice of Lorraine, was an ambitious choice for his second spouse. Lauded for her virtue, Beatrice—a dark beauty, with raven hair and black eyes—would have been no more than twenty when she married Bonifacio, then a childless widower in his mid-fifties. Portrayed in the miniature in Donizone’s text as elegant and expensively adorned, Beatrice does not appear personally powerful, and her gaze, solemn and resigned, evokes a sadness she did not bother to hide. A direct descendent of Charlemagne, her family from the Lorraine belonged to the aristocratic elite of Europe. Bonifacio earned her in the only way his Lombard race knew: through valor in war. His spectacular victories for his sovereign Conrad II, the German king, convinced the king to grant him the hand of Beatrice, Conrad’s wife’s niece. The marriage united the house of Canossa with the dynasty of Conrad, rulers of Germany, Lorraine, and Italy.

Portraits of Matilda’s father, Bonifacio, and her mother, Beatrice, from Vita Mathildis by Donizone, c. 1116. (Codice Vaticano 4922, Biblioteca Apostolica, The Vatican)

Bonifacio married Beatrice at Marengo, in the Lombard royal palace on the Mincio river, just north of Mantua. Their lavish nuptials lasted three days. The cooks used rare and expensive spices in such quantities that the spices had to be ground in a grain mill. Guests feasted off plates of gold and silver while listening to music from lyres, horns, and bells. Wine as sweet as nectar was served from wells with silver dippers hung from silver chains.

Beatrice naturally accepted the king’s decision to give her family’s properties along the Rhine to Bonifacio for her dowry. She really had no choice. Orphaned in 1030 at the death of her parents, Frederick, duke of Lorraine, and his wife, Matilde, Beatrice had lived at the charity of her mother’s sister, Queen Giselda, who raised her in the German royal court. It was not just that Beatrice was an orphan and her uncle was king. What law there was assumed her incapable of taking legal action with respect to her parents’ property. A woman passed through her life from father to brother, to husband, to son, as each in his turn acted for her welfare.⁵ Men contracted marriages to arrange alliances without considering the woman’s desires or preferences, and she performed her part of the bargain by bearing an heir.⁶

Beatrice quickly gave Bonifacio three children: Frederick, the eldest, then Beatrice, and finally Matilda in 1046. Of the three only Matilda would prove to share Bonifacio’s instinct for survival or his iron constitution. A beautiful girl, slim with pale white skin, Matilda had a tender face crowned with a mass of shining, golden red hair. She idolized her father and later remembered being his favorite, lavishly pampered and totally adored.

After the wedding Bonifacio and Beatrice settled in Mantua in a palace at the eastern end of the triangular island. They chose the site for its strategic value: defended on three sides by unnavigable marshes, its brick ramparts offered a clear view of boats descending the river channel. Bonifacio created the administrative center of the town by constructing his palace, the church, and a residence for the bishop around a small piazza. These—and the city wall at mid-island—were probably the only buildings of solid construction apart from whatever minor Roman ruins were serviceable (the town had never had an amphitheater or triumphal arch). A maze of alleyways and a jumble of wooden houses, mostly lean-tos against the sturdy brick walls, filled the remainder of the island’s tip.

I TOURED THE PRESENT DUCAL PALACE, which was constructed and expanded by the Gonzaga on the foundations of Bonifacio’s own. It is an extravagant affair, huge and sprawling, now mostly empty. Just walking through its rooms can take the better part of a day. If nothing else, the palace, as ostentatious as any Texas spread, reminds us that tax collection is a heady business.

Matilda worshipped in a cathedral of which only the ancient, squat, brick bell tower, adorned with simple Romanesque arches, remains. Generations upon generations have been called to mass by the clanging of its bells. On the opposite end of the piazza stands the Palazzo del Podestà, built about a century later, after her death. Podestà means power in Italian, more specifically people’s power. The palace, heavy and simple like a crude obstinate peasant, guards the exit from the Piazza Sordello into the marketplace and the Piazza delle Erbe, once the site of the monastery of Sant’Andrea.

When Matilda was but two years old, her mother Beatrice joined the bishop and a crowd of Mantuans in a strange procession. Led by a blind monk named Adalberto, they marched from the cathedral to a spot in the monastery’s garden where an angel had revealed to Adalberto the hiding place of the town’s most precious relic. About 150 years earlier, a vial of the Precious Blood of Jesus had been buried by Benedictine monks to save it from the Hungarian hordes overrunning the city. None of the monks survived and the location of the precious relic was forgotten.

Following their route, I left the Piazza Sordello through a narrow street that led into the more intimate Piazza delle Erbe. Of the monastery of Sant’Andrea only the arches remain. The church was redone in the Renaissance by Leon Battista Alberti and is most famous for its classical porch and the funerary chapel of Andrea Mantegna. I passed these monuments as I strode down the cavernous nave in search of an altarpiece, a mediocre work of art by an anonymous painter, but priceless to me as a prephotographic documentary of the relic’s miraculous recovery. In the center of the canvas Beatrice swoons at the sight of the excavation in the dirt. The blind old man in a coarse brown habit by her side must be Adalberto, and next to him stands the bishop. A naked baby in the arms of a nurse stares toward Beatrice with infantile bewilderment. Some say this is Matilda, although she does not look like a pampered princess to me. The crowd is so overwhelmed, in this painter’s rendition, by the miracle that the relic itself seems overlooked at the bottom of the picture. Tradition has it that Beatrice endowed an altar over this spot in the monastery’s garden, and that Matilda built the Rotunda of San Lorenzo to enclose that holy place.

View of the Rotonda of San Lorenzo and the Torre dell’Orologio, Mantua.

Nothing remains of the cloister’s silent garden today. Instead a daily market hums with commerce. Stalls overflow with bright flowers, purple eggplants, and green and orange striped pumpkins.

Presiding over this boisterous bustle is a medieval clock tower gussied up by the Gonzaga at a later date. Attached to it is the Palazzo della Ragione, the Hall of Justice. On the Palazzo’s spacious piano nobile frescoes of very ancient date, probably from no more than fifty years after Matilda’s death, reappeared only in 1990 during a restoration. To see them I climbed the worn steps, concave from use, of the ancient tower.

On the day I visited, I found an antiques fair in progress. Local picture dealers had rented the great hall with high rafters where judges once heard arguments and resolved disputes. They had installed temporary walls and high-tech lights that cast a glare on everything, except for the medieval paintings above their heads on the end walls of the room. On opposite tympanums are two vast frescoes, each stretching across five meters of wall. One side represents land, the other the sea (or is it a river?), but both are so damaged that their subject matter remains perplexing. Nevertheless, the paintings comprise one of the most extensive civic decorations to survive from the twelfth century, and they seem to depict the principal activities of an emerging river port: trade and war.

Like details from the Bayeaux Tapestry enlarged a hundredfold, two deep-hulled ships with double masts, striped sails billowing, are painted above the entrance doorway. These ships plow through blue waves filled with menacing fish. One tows a smaller, empty craft. A single sailor steers each large ship, using a long brown rudder. Heads peek out from inside the boats, wearing no helmets, seemingly unarmed. Left to our imagination is who these intrepid travelers are and where they are going. They may be pilgrims set for the Holy Land, but nothing proves that. Neither menacing nor particularly saintly, to me they could easily be merchants searching for a port, like Mantua. Finding one, they might leave their wares under guard on the large seafaring craft in mid-water and board the smaller boat to seek markets along the shore.

On the opposite wall, knights fight furiously in pursuit of some lost objective. That central portion was obliterated by a gothic Madonna and Child enthroned with saints in 1240, in an epoch nearly as remote. German knights dressed in black armor, their faces shielded by helmets with horizontal narrow slits for the eyes, appear to the right of the Madonna. The geometric design of their black and white coats of arms has not been identified, but at the bottom is a red shield decorated with the white fleur-de-lis of Lorraine: the house of Beatrice, Matilda’s mother. To the left are Norman soldiers with their typical cone-shaped helmets and flat nose guards. They bear two standards on square painted cloths, bedecked with three tails. The standard near the top of the fresco is emblazoned with a gold papal cross and the red dragon adopted by William the Conqueror after he vanquished the Angles in 1066. It reminds me that Pope Alexander II, on the advice of Hildebrand, the future pope Gregory VII, sent his banner and his blessing to William before he set off to conquer England. The other Norman pennant shows the crusader’s colors: a white cross on a red field. The First Crusade to regain the Holy Land was announced at Clermont-Ferrand in 1095 with Matilda’s fervent support.

MATILDA DESCENDED FROM KNIGHTS SUCH AS THESE. Her paternal great-grandfather, Atto Adalberto, was a commander of the Lombards, fierce warriors whose invasion of Italy in 568 sealed the fate of the ancient Roman empire and plunged Europe into six hundred convulsive years of anarchy. (Charlemagne reigned over a window of enlightenment around 800, but it was the exception that proved the rule.) Matilda was of the fourth generation and the final heir of a dynasty dating back to 940, the year that Atto Adalberto erected an impregnable fortress on the vertical rock of Canossa. His castle was strategically sighted to offer prospects of the Po river plain already notorious as a battleground and from whence all danger came.

Canossa’s invulnerability and Atto Adalberto’s political savvy catapulted his family to power. In 950 Canossa honorably protected Adelaide, widow of the king of Lombardy, from a siege led by her husband’s murderer, Berengar, who wanted to marry Adelaide in order to legitimize his succession. During that siege, Atto Adalberto cannily switched allegiance to the Germans by arranging, with Adelaide’s consent, her marriage to the German king. Thus Otto obtained a wife and the iron crown of Lombardy at one fell swoop— and by Matilda’s telling, entirely due to the efforts of her own great-grandfather. Atto Adalberto fought alongside Otto to crush Berengar and complete the conquest of Italy down to Rome by 962.

Pope John XII crowned Otto Holy Roman emperor and granted him, as part of the famous Ottonian Privilege, the church offices and properties in his domains to dispose of at his pleasure. This cynical pope has gone down in history as a man totally devoid of scruples. In the words of papal historian von Matt, The cynicism of his vices knew no bounds. He transformed the Lateran into a brothel, whores received holy vessels as gifts, a deacon was consecrated in a horse stable.⁷ The Privilege allowed Otto to use bishops and their clergy, among the only literate people in Europe, to administer his empire. Within a short time, nobles began offering gifts to the king, or the local lord, in order to obtain a bishop’s see.

Atto Adalberto profited handsomely in his new role as Lombard vassal of the German empire. Among Otto’s first acts as emperor was to name the wily Atto Adalberto as his count for the regions of Modena and Reggio Emilia, with authority to collect taxes and mete out justice. Within a few years Atto Adalberto had persuaded the king to nominate and invest his son as bishop of Brescia.

In these same years Atto Adalberto acquired from the bishop of Mantua an isolated piece of land between the Po and its tributary the Lirone. The small island of silt was named for its rustic chapel dedicated to St. Benedict. The Canossan’s son Tedaldo, Matilda’s grandfather, later founded the monastery of San Benedetto Po in 1007 in memory of his wife, Giulia.⁸ Tedaldo’s gift to the monks is precisely described in a parchment still preserved in the monastery archives. In addition to one half of all the land’s bounty—from vines, fruit trees, pastured sheep, game, fish, and three mills—the Lombard lord also transferred six peasants, attached to the land, and belonging to the lowly race known as Italian. Matilda was ultimately to take the Italians’ side against their German overlords. But that comes later.

I read in my histories that Bonifacio inherited the titles of count of Modena and Reggio and marchese of Mantua from his father, citing general principles of legal succession and inheritance. They refer to a single document dated September 30, 1001, in which Bonifacio’s presence is recorded beside his father as he presided at a tribunal in Carpi. But Matilda dictated to Donizone an account I find more convincing. Sometime after Tedaldo’s death on January 11, 1013, a powerful group of dukes pushed Bonifacio’s younger brother Conrad to contest Bonifacio’s inheritance although Conrad, a warrior nearly as fearsome as Bonifacio, ultimately refused.⁹ The brothers, Matilda says, fought together to quell the envious dukes’ rebellion. Their horses’ hooves were red with blood as they rode down those who turned their backs and attempted to flee the massacre of beasts and men. It seemed to their enemies that Bonifacio’s lance was a thousand arms long and the width of Conrad’s a hundred cubits.¹⁰ At battle’s end Conrad noticed a thin line of blood on his own breastplate; his wound never healed, and he