No less monumental in the plastic unity of his character was the monk Hildebrand, who for twenty years before his elevation to the Papacy had been the maker of Popes and the creator of the policy of Rome.  When he was himself elected in the year 1073, and had assumed the name of Gregory VII., he immediately began to put in practice the plans for Church aggrandisement he had slowly matured during the previous quarter of a century.  To free the Church from its subservience to the Empire, to assert the Pope’s right to ratify the election of the Emperor and to exercise the right of jurisdiction over him, to place ecclesiastical appointments in the sole power of the Roman See, and to render the celibacy of the clergy obligatory, were the points he had resolved to carry.  Taken singly and together, these chief aims of Hildebrand’s policy had but one object—­the magnification of the Church at the expense both of the people and of secular authorities, and the further separation of the Church from the ties and sympathies of common life that bound it to humanity.  To accuse Hildebrand of personal ambition would be but shallow criticism, though it is clear that his inflexible and puissant nature found a savage selfish pleasure in trampling upon power and humbling pride at warfare with his own.  Yet his was in no sense an egotistic purpose like that which moved the Popes of the Renaissance to dismember Italy for their bastards.  Hildebrand, like Matilda, was himself the creature of a great idea.  These two potent personalities completely understood each other, and worked towards a single end.  Tho mythopoeic fancy might conceive of them as the male and female manifestations of one dominant faculty, the spirit of ecclesiastical dominion incarnate in a man and woman of almost super-human mould.

Opposed to them, as the third actor in the drama of Canossa, was a man of feebler mould.  Henry IV., King of Italy, but not yet crowned Emperor, had none of his opponents’ unity of purpose or monumental dignity of character.  At war with his German feudatories, browbeaten by rebellious sons, unfaithful and cruel to his wife, vacillating in the measures he adopted to meet his divers difficulties, at one time tormented by his conscience into cowardly submission, and at another treasonably neglectful of the most solemn obligations, Henry was no match for the stern wills against which he was destined to break in unavailing passion.  Early disagreements with Gregory had culminated in his excommunication.  The German nobles abandoned his cause; and Henry found it expedient to summon a council in Augsburg for the settlement of matters in dispute between the Empire and the Papacy.  Gregory expressed his willingness to attend this council, and set forth from Rome accompanied by the Countess Matilda in December 1076.  He did not, however, travel further than Vercelli, for news here reached him that Henry was about to enter Italy at the head of a powerful army.  Matilda hereupon persuaded