The Road to Canossa“That he is permitted to depose emperors.” Perhaps it was just as well that Gregory chose to keep this particular proposition from the youthful Caesar. Henry IV, as befitted the heir of Constantine and Charlemagne, was hardly the man to accept that he could be deposed by anyone. King of the various princedoms of Germany, he also laid claim to the rule of Italy – Rome included. Yet it is doubtful that Henry, even had he been alerted to the new pope’s pretensions, would have been able to do much about them. Not straight away, at any rate. There was way too much already on the royal plate. Far from being in any position to contemplate a campaign in Italy, Henry was locked into a desperate struggle to maintain his authority within Germany itself. War, having already plunged the empire of Constantinople into chaos, had come as well, in the summer of 1073, to the empire of the West.It was no race of pagans that had brought about this sudden calamity, however, no breed of savage invaders from beyond the frontiers of Christendom, but rather a people who ever since the time of Otto the Great had appeared the very wellspring of imperial greatness: none other than the Saxons. Yet Otto’s own dynasty had long since passed away; and its replacement in 1024 by a line of Rhineland kings, sprung from the opposite end of the Reich, had led many in Saxony to feel increasingly exploited and oppressed. Even during the triumphant reign of Henry III, the local princes had been growing fractious; and some of them, during the troubled years of his son’s minority, had actively plotted to do away with the infant king. Mistrust had bred mistrust in turn; and the adult Henry, with that same blend of suspiciousness and obstinacy that marked so many of his dealings, had disdained to mollify the restless Saxons. Instead, taking a leaf out of the Norman book, he had set himself to securing his hold on the dukedom in the most up-to-date manner possible: by raising castles. A threat to the local nobility, of course – but also to the entire Saxon people. As in France, as in England, so in Saxony, the battlements suddenly sprouting up on “high hills and wild places”
62 appeared to the locals an inversion of all that they held most precious: forbidding and sinister threats to their ancient liberties.Henry’s greatest castle, a stronghold raised at the foot of the Harz mountains, where Christendom’s most lucrative gold mines were to be found, was regarded with particular hatred: for its walls and towers appeared all too grimly suited to the fell situation in which they had been raised. Indeed, at the very onset of the insurrection, when the Saxon rebels sought to trap Henry there, they found it an impossible task, so dense was the forest surrounding the Harzburg. “No matter all the efforts of the besiegers, they could not prevent the comings and goings of those who were shut in.”63 Henry, fleeing the castle without supplies, and relying on a huntsman to guide him through the trackless wilds, reached safety at last only after having travelled through bogs and briars for three whole days.It was a common fantasy, no doubt, among the oppressed everywhere to see a castle-builder forced into humiliating flight. That the Harzburg and every other royal stronghold be levelled, that the onward march of military innovation be reversed, and that the “tyranny” which it facilitated be kept at bay: such were the demands of the Saxon rebels. Yet, for all the indignant talk of fortifications spreading across “every hill and mountain, so as to threaten Saxony with ruin,”64 an excess of castle-building on its own could hardly serve to sanction treason against an anointed king. Other justifications too were urgently needed. So it was that the insurgents, dredging up memories of Henry’s scandalous attempt to secure a divorce, fell to accusing him of a whole host of sinister practices: incest, groping abbesses, and hints of even worse. Such charges, in an age which had witnessed even the saintly Agnes accused of nymphomania, might easily have been dismissed as the common currency of political abuse – except that Henry, like his mother before him, was finding himself acutely vulnerable to muck-raking.For just as under the empress, so now under the king, the most venomous gossip of all was being whispered by princes. The movers and shakers of the Reich, having developed a taste for insubordination during Henry’s minority, were finding it hard to kick the habit. It was no coincidence, perhaps, that the leader of the rebellious Saxons should have been Otto of Northeim: the same duke who, back in the days of Agnes’s regency, had featured so prominently in the kidnapping at Kaiserswerth. True, Otto was a Saxon himself; but even among the princes of the Rhineland there was no lack of would-be jackals. Far from backing their lord against the rebels, the southern dukes were widely suspected of plotting his deposition. The greatest of them all, Rudolf of Swabia, was an object of particular royal suspicion. Already, in 1072, both Agnes and Henry’s godfather, Abbot Hugh of Cluny, had been called upon to patch up relations between the king and his most powerful vassal. Then, at Christmas-time in 1073, trouble had flared up again. A court insider, tipping off Rudolf that Henry was plotting his assassination, had insisted on proving his claim by undergoing trial by combat. Only the unexpected abduction of the accuser “by a terrible demon,” just a few days before the duel was due to be fought, had served to exonerate the king.