The power of Matilda, like that of its ancestors, was based on a dense strategic network consisting of castles, outposts and isolated towers, a system that allowed close control of the communications network (roads, crossings, rivers). Benedetto Polirone, in the place where, after having been for a long time in the front line, she had withdrawn and had chosen to live with the disease (perhaps gout) which weighed on the last years of his life. Matilde had long ago rested in the mists, woods and marshes of S.

But it is the new emperor, Henry V, to reopen the games: in exchange for a reinvestment of his jurisdictions in Northern Italy, Matilde is willing to give him the passage in his territories (1111), as well as the right of succession in his assets, in spite of a donation of all its heritage to the Church of Rome documented for the first time in 1080 and, according to the traditional documentation, later repeated (1102): this is an aspect that historians have recently shown to want to re-examine, since this becomes the subject of further contention when, at the death of Matilda (1115), the emperor descends to Italy to take possession of the Matilda legacy.

The resulting isolation explains the increased confidence in his major vassals, one of whom, Guido Guerra, is mentioned between 10 as his 'adoptive son'. In 1089 he also failed his second marriage with the very young Guelph of Bavaria, together with the hopes of assuring a descent to his dynasty. The attempt of Matilde to oppose to Henry IV another emperor, first with Rudolph of Swabia (prematurely dead) and then with Corrado III (the firstborn of Enrico himself, perished in mysterious circumstances in 1101 in Florence) fails miserably. The main cities of the Matildic dominions rebel, first Mantua, then Lucca and then Ferrara, Modena, Parma, all cities governed by schismatic bishops and close to the party of the emperor and the antipope. Faced with the failure of his mediation, Matilde suffers the consequences of his choice when he is deprived of the sovereign of most of his lands, until he has to get inside the appennine castles loyal to him, from which he will succeed in inflicting a defeat at the emperor only in 1092. In 1080, struck by the second excommunication, Henry IV deposed Gregory VII in the Council of Bressanone and had the bishop of Ravenna Guiberto elected as antipope, with the name of Clement III. Matilde is at this point the absolute protagonist of the attempt at reconciliation between the Pope and the Emperor (of whom she is the second cousin), an extreme attempt at fidelity to the pro-imperial policy of her ancestors: this is demonstrated in 1077 by the meeting organized in Canossa Beyond the emphasis given to the humiliation suffered by Henry and beyond the dramatization imposed by the importance of the event, it makes it possible, precisely through the necessity of papal pardon, to re-launch the emperor's margins of maneuver. From this moment on she is the key figure of intermediation in the struggle between the papacy and the empire, the greatest conflict of that time. In 1069 Matilde married her half-brother Goffredo di Lorena, called the Hunchback, but the marriage does not last, even for the choice of Matilde to stand on the side of the Church, in contrast to that of her husband oriented towards the empire. In 1061 Anselmo da Baggio was elected Pope with the name of Alexander II. Three years later Pope Nicholas II indicated the Lateran Council, which established that the election of the pontiff be reserved for the college of cardinals. In 1056 the emperor Henry III died his son Henry IV succeeded him with his mother Agnese regency. The father was treacherously killed in 1052, and in the following years the brothers Federico (the only male) and Beatrice disappeared, leaving Matilde a complex and heterogeneous legacy.

Daughter of the Marquis Bonifacio di Canossa and Beatrice di Lorena, born around 1046 with the destiny already written: to govern the vast family dominance including the Tuscia brand, the duchies of Modena, Reggio and Mantua, as well as vast territories of Parma, Brescia, Bologna and del Veronese, and the city of Ferrara, first together with the mother, then from 1076, the year of the latter's death, alone.

Matilde di canossa