Patricius
27 April 2009, 3:31 p.m.
53° 21' 4.59" N, 2° 17' 0.09" W
So yesterday—or was it this morning?—I was sitting in the airport bar in Manchester, (layover #2 on my bargain itinerary, O’Hare—Newark—Manchester—Hamburg—Mannheim), having a cocktail so I’d be sure to sleep on the connecting flight to Hamburg....
Now that I think about it, it definitely was morning there in Manchester, right around dawn maybe, but the rhythms of my life had been just been trashed by a night of transoceanic travel and at that point I just wanted to sedate myself a little, set myself up for an hour or two of unconsciousness on the next flight, and I figured I could start pounding coffee once I landed in continental Europe....
Anyway I started talking to this couple, it turned out they were from the Czech Republic and they asked me where I was going and I told them I was a blogger and I was flying to Mannheim so I could re-enact or re-live or re-something the Gang nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, and the amazing thing is, this couple sorta knew what I meant.
That is, they knew the phrase, in German and in English, and they knew it had to do with church and state, and they knew that snow was involved, and Bismarck, and a king named Henry and a pope named Gregory, although they were kinda mixed up about which Henry and which Gregory. It turned out that they had seen the American cable telenovela about Bertha of Savoy (dubbed into Czech, wouldn’t that be wild!) and the two of them had been having this running argument for like two years about whether the show should be taken as historical fiction or total fantasy—these were intelligent people, this Czech couple, he was an engineer and she was a lawyer, or maybe the other way around—but, still, I was impressed that they made that distinction, that they could argue about the difference between a story that’s based in fact but takes liberties and a story that refers to our memories of other stories in order to create its own mythic reality. They actually said things like that, in the airport bar. Or maybe I said those things, but they nodded their heads so enthusiastically that it felt like they were talking.
So anyway, they thought I was some kind of expert, and they asked me to tell them what really happened. Of course I slithered out of that one, but I gave them my spiel, the same deep background I’ve been giving my co-workers in Waukegan when I try to explain my plans for this journey:
Well, I said, when we talk about the Gang nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, l’umiliazione di Canossa, what we’re talking about is an image—a king kneeling in the snow, outside a lonely castle, begging forgiveness from a Pope. Now to understand that image, you’ve gotta understand all the games that the pope and the king were playing—and to do that, you’ve gotta go back a generation, to an earlier Henry and an earlier Gregory.
That’s right. What was going on in 1076 and 1077 had its start back in 1046, when Henry III, King of the Romans—that means a king of the Germans who hasn’t yet been anointed as Holy Roman Emperor—came down to Italy to clean up a mess. And Rome was a total mess. In 1046 there were three popes, and all three of them had sordid back stories—even Gregory VI, the supposed reform pope—he had purchased the papacy, just gone ahead and bought it, like it was on Craigslist or something, from one of the other popes, this guy who wanted to get married, but then the chick dumped him (I think I actually said “chick”—the Czechs were totally into the American vernacular, and the airport cocktail, for once, had a little oomph to it) so the first pope decided that if he was going to stay single then he wanted to keep his old job, and meanwhile the other guy, etc... etc...
It was bad, the whole situation, disgusting even, at least to the kind of Catholic who wants the church to be pure, so Henry III deposed all three of them and picked a new pope. The new guy was his own personal confessor, a fellow German, who took the name Clement II and promptly christened Henry as the Holy Roman Emperor and for good measure gave him the title of Patricius, which basically meant he had the right to appoint popes. This was a big deal to the emperor, for while it was obvious to everyone that he had the power to appoint popes, Henry III was as devout as he was power-hungry, and he wanted the right.
The Czech couple seemed to find this stuff fascinating. One of them, I think it was the woman, made an interesting comment.
“So this Henry, this Patricius,” she said, “he would have been one of the Kaisers of the First Reich.”
The way she said it, I got a sense that German Reichs, whatever the number, were not very popular in the Czech Republic.
“Sounds scary when you put it that way,” I said. “But yeah, that’s it exactly. The Holy Roman Empire. Heiliges Römisches Reich.”
My German pronunciation was terrible, but they didn’t even try to correct me. In fact, they bought me another drink, and told me to keep going. They wanted to know how the next Kaiser ended up at Canossa.
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