Matilde di Canossa (MED0051)

Matilda of Canossa, the Great Countess

Between 1076 and 1115 the lands running from the river Po to the Tuscan-Emilian Apennines were held by a woman who controlled castles, collected tolls and took armies into the field. Matilda of Canossa inherited the Canossa domains at a time when female lordship was possible but always open to challenge, and she held them for nearly forty years against emperors, rival bishops and her own relatives. Her strength lay not in a standing army — none existed — but in command of the Apennine passes linking the Po plain to Tuscany and central Italy.

That geography explains the most famous episode of her life. In January 1077 Henry IV crossed the Alps to reach Gregory VII, who was staying as Matilda’s guest at the fortress of Canossa; the countess acted at once as host and as broker of a negotiation on which the political settlement of the Empire depended. Canossa settled nothing. In the years that followed Matilda fought the imperial forces at length, was defeated at Volta Mantovana in 1080 and won at Sorbara in 1084, striking an imperial camp by night.

Giuseppe Rava places her in her proper military setting: the heavy cavalry of the late eleventh century, mail hauberk, nasal helm and kite shield — the same equipment fighting in the Holy Land in those very decades.