Matilda of Canossa (
Italian Matilde,
Latin Matilda,
Mathilda; 1046 –
24 July 1115), called
la Gran Contessa or
the Great Countess, was an
Italian noblewoman, the principal Italian supporter of
Pope Gregory VII during the
Investiture Controversy. She is one of the few medieval women to be remembered for her military accomplishments. She is called "of Canossa" after the
ancestral family castle of
Canossa, but in English she is often described as
Matilda of Tuscany.
She was the daughter of Boniface III, count of many counties, among them Reggio, Modena, Mantua, Brescia, and Ferrara. As this string of titles implies, he held a great estate on both sides of the Apennines, though the greater part was in Lombardy and Emilia. Matilda's mother was Beatrice, a daughter of Frederick II, Duke of Upper Lorraine, and of Matilda, daughter of Herman II of Swabia.
Matilda's place of birth is unknown. Mantua, Modena, Cremona, and Verona have all been suggested, though scholarly opinion favours Lucca or the nearby castle of Porcari.[1] Based on her fluency in German, some authors have asserted that she was born in Lorraine, her mother's province. She was her parents' youngest child, but her father was murdered in 1052 and one year later (1053) her older sister Beatrice (namesake of their mother) also died. The elder Beatrice, in order to protect her children's inheritance, married Godfrey the Bearded, a cousin who had been Duke of Upper Lorraine before rebelling against the Emperor Henry III. The two were married in 1053 or 1054 in the church of San Pietro at Mantua by Pope Leo IX himself as he returned from a trip to Germany. At the same time, Matilda was betrothed to Godfrey the Hunchback, a son of Godfrey the Bearded by a previous marriage and thus her stepbrother.
Henry III was enraged by Beatrice's unauthorised marriage to his enemy and he descended into Italy in the early spring of 1055, arriving at Verona in April and then Mantua by Easter. Beatrice wrote to him seeking a safe-conduct to explain herself; this granted, she travelled with her young son Frederick, now Margrave of Tuscany, and her mother, Matilda, a sister of the emperor's grandmother Gisela. The younger Matilda was left in either Lucca or Canossa and she may have passed the next few years between those two places in the custody of her stepfather. Initially, Henry refused to see Beatrice, but eventually he had her imprisoned in rough conditions; the young Frederick was treated more appropriately, but he died in Henry's custody nonetheless (the rumours that he was murdered are baseless[2]). The death of her brother made the eight-year-old Matilda the sole heiress of the vast lands of her father, under her mother's guardianship.
