![]() 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. 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. (And the warmth of the surviving letters between them certainly do nothing to dispel that conclusion.)īut Michele K Spike argues, powerfully, in Tuscan Countess, much else that has been written about Matilda is so much tosh. ![]() (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. 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. ![]()
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