Walk to Canossa

In October 1076 at Trebur the German princes resolved that unless Henry was freed from excommunication within a year they would no longer recognize him, and they invited the pope to Augsburg in February 1077 to sit in judgement on the king. To forestall them, Henry left Speyer in December with his wife Bertha and their infant son and, since the hostile south German dukes held the nearer passes, crossed the Alps by Mont Cenis in harsh winter weather. Gregory, already on his way north, withdrew to Matilda's castle in the Apennines. Henry arrived on 25 January 1077 and, according to Lambert of Hersfeld and to letters of both protagonists, waited at the gate for three days in a penitent's hair shirt, reportedly barefoot and fasting, while Matilda and Henry's mother-in-law Adelaide of Susa mediated. On 28 January he was admitted, confessed and was absolved.

The immediate effect was limited: in March the princes elected Rudolf of Rheinfelden as anti-king at Forchheim, and in 1080 Gregory excommunicated Henry again. Contemporaries attached less weight to the penance than to the excommunication itself. Historians have long debated whether Canossa was a humiliation for Henry or a shrewd move that saved his crown; Johannes Fried has argued that it was a prearranged settlement, with the absolution granted on 25 January and a pact concluded on 28 January, a reading rejected by Gerd Althoff, Stefan Weinfurter and Steffen Patzold. On 14 May 1872, during the Kulturkampf, Bismarck told the Reichstag: "We will not go to Canossa — neither in body nor in spirit."