Women of the Romance Countries (Illustrated) / Woman: In all ages and in all countries Vol. 6 (of 10)

by John R. Effinger

To make the broadest and most general classification possible, the women of that time might be divided into ladies of high degree and women of the people. The former were naturally fitted by their training to take their part in the spectacle of feudal life with proper dignity; more than that, they were often skilled in all the arts of the housewife, and many times they showed themselves the careful stewards of their husbands' fortunes. The women of the people, on the other hand, were not shown any special consideration on account of their sex, and were quite generally expected to work in the fields with the men. Their homes were so unworthy of the name that they required little care or thought, and their food was so coarse that little time was given to its preparation. Simple-minded, credulous, superstitious in the extreme, with absolutely no intellectual uplift of any kind, and nothing but the sordid drudgery of life with which to fill the slow-passing hours, it is no wonder that the great mass of both the men and the women of this time were hopelessly swallowed up in a many-colored sea of ignorance, from which, with the march of the centuries, they have been making slow efforts to rise. So the lady sat in the great hall in the castle, clad in some gorgeous gown of silk which had been brought by the patient caravans, through devious ways, from the far and mysterious East; surrounded by her privileged maidens, she spun demurely and in peace and quiet, while out in the fields the back of the peasant woman was bent in ceaseless toil. Or again, the lady of the manor would ride forth with her lord when he went to the hunt, she upon her white palfrey, and he upon his black charger, and each with hooded falcon on wrist; for the gentle art of falconry was almost as much in vogue among the women as among the men of the time. Often it happened that during the course of the hunt it would be necessary to cross a newly planted field, or one heavy with the ripened grain, and this they did gaily and with never a thought for the hardship that they might cause; and as they swept along, hot after the quarry, the poor, mistreated peasant, whether man or woman, dared utter no word of protest or make moan, nor did he or she dare to look boldly and unabashed upon this hunting scene, but rather from the cover of some protecting thicket. Scenes of this kind will serve to show the great gulf which there was between the great and the lowly; and as there was an almost total lack of any sort of education in the formal sense of the word, it will be readily understood that all that education could mean for anybody was that training which was incident to the daily round of life, whatever it happened to be. So the poor and dependent learned to fear and sometimes to hate their masters, and the proud and haughty learned to consider themselves as superior and exceptional beings.

With society in such a state as this, the question will naturally arise: What did the Church do under these circumstances to ameliorate the condition of the people and to advance the cause of woman? The only answer to this question is a sorry negative, as it soon becomes apparent, after an investigation of the facts, that in many cases the members of the clergy themselves were largely responsible for the wide prevalence of vice and immorality. It must be remembered that absolution from sin and crime in those days was but a matter of money price and that pardons could be easily bought for any offence, as the venality of the clergy was astounding. The corruption of the time was great, and the priests themselves were steeped in crime and debauchery. In former generations, the Church at Rome had many times issued strict orders against the marriage of the clergy, and, doubtless as one of the consequences of this regulation, it had become the custom for many of the priests to have one or more concubines with whom they, in most cases, lived openly and without shame. The monasteries became, under these conditions, dens of iniquity, and the nunneries were no better. The nunnery of Saint Fara in the eleventh century, according to a contemporary description, was no longer the residence of holy virgins, but a brothel of demoniac females who gave themselves up to all sorts of shameless conduct; and there are many other accounts of the same general tenor. Pope Gregory VII. tried again to do something for the cause of public morality, in 1074, when he issued edicts against both concubinage and simony--or the then prevalent custom of buying or selling ecclesiastical preferment; but the edict was too harsh and unreasonable with regard to the first, inasmuch as it provided that no priest should marry in the future, and that those who already possessed wives or concubines were to give them up or relinquish their sacred offices. This order caused great consternation, especially in Milan, where the clergy were honestly married, each man to one wife, and it was found impossible to exact implicit obedience to its requirements.

So far as the general influence of women upon the feudal society of Italy in the eleventh century is concerned, it is not discoverable to have been manifest in the ways which were common in other countries. It will be understood, of course, that, in speaking of woman's influence here, reference is made to the women of the upper classes, as those of the peasant class cannot be said to have formed a part of social Europe at this time. It is most common to read in all accounts of this feudal period, which was the beginning of the golden age of the older chivalry, that women exerted a most gentle influence upon the men about them and that the honor and respect in which they were held did much to elevate the general tone of life. In Italy, however, chivalry did not flourish as it did in other countries. Since the time of the great Emperor Charlemagne all Italy had been nominally a part of the imperial domain, but owing to its geographical position, which made it difficult of access and hard to control, this overlordship was not always administered with strictness, and from time to time the larger cities of Italy were granted special rights and privileges. The absence of an administrative capital made impossible any centralization of national life, and it was entirely natural, then, that the various Italian communities should assert their right to some sort of local government and some measure of freedom. This spirit of citizenship in the free towns overcame the spirit of disciplined dependence which was common to those parts of the empire which were governed according to the usual feudal customs, and, as a result, Italy lacks many of those characteristics which are common to the more integral parts of the vast feudal system.

The most conspicuous offspring of feudalism was chivalry, with its various orders of knighthood; but chivalry and the orders of knighthood gained little foothold in Italy, where the conditions necessary for the growth and development of such a social and military order were far from propitious. Knights, it is true, came and went in Italy, and performed their deeds of valor; fair maidens were rescued, and women and children were given succor; but the knights were foreign knights, and they owed allegiance to a foreign lord. So far, then, Italy was without the institution of chivalry, and, to a great degree, insensible to those high ideals of fealty and honor which were the cardinal virtues of the knightly order. Owing to the absence of these fine qualities of mind and soul, the Italian in war was too often of fierce and relentless temper, showing neither pity nor mercy and having no compassion for a fallen foe. Warriors never admitted prisoners to ransom, and the annals of their contests are destitute of those graceful courtesies which shed such a beautiful lustre over the contests of England and France. Stratagems were as common as open and glorious battle, and private injuries were revenged by assassination and not by the fair and manly joust à l'outrance. However, when a man pledged his word for the performance of any act and wished his sincerity to be believed, he always swore by the parola di cavaliere, and not by the parola di cortigiano, so general was the acknowledgment of the moral superiority of chivalry.

It was in the midst of this age of ignorance that Matilda, the great Countess of Tuscany, by means of her wisdom and intelligence and her many graces of mind and body, made such a great and lasting reputation for herself that her name has come down in history as the worthy companion of William the Conqueror and the great monk Hildebrand, later Pope Gregory VII., her most distinguished contemporaries. Matilda's father, Boniface, was the richest and most powerful nobleman of his time in all Italy, and as Margrave and Duke of Tuscany, Duke of Lucca, Marquis of Modena, and Count of Reggio, Mantua, and Ferrara, he exerted a very powerful feudal influence. Though at first unfriendly to the interests of the papal party in Italy, he was just about ready to espouse its cause when he fell under the hand of an assassin; and then it was that Matilda, by special dispensation of the emperor, was allowed to inherit directly her father's vast estate, which she shared at first with her brother Frederick and her sister Beatrice. Generally, fiefs reverted to the emperor and remained within his custody for five years--were held in probate, as it were--before the lawful heirs were allowed to enter into possession of their property. Frederick and Beatrice were short-lived, however, and it was not many years before Matilda was left as sole heir to this great domain; she was not entirely alone, as she had the watchful care and guidance of her mother, who assisted her in every emergency.

As the result of this condition of affairs, both mother and daughter were soon sought in marriage by many ardent and ambitious suitors, each presenting his claims for preferment and doing all in his power to bring about an alliance which meant so much for the future. Godfrey of Lorraine, who was not friendly to the party of the Emperor Henry III., while on a raid in Italy, pressed his suit with such insistency that the widowed Beatrice promised to marry him and at the same time gave her consent to a betrothal between Matilda and Godfrey's hunchback son, who also bore the name of Godfrey. This marriage with an unfriendly prince, after so many years of imperial favor, and this attempt at a consolidation of power for both present and future, so angered Henry that he insisted that Beatrice must have yielded to violence in this disposition of her affairs. Finally, in spite of her repeated denials, she was made a prisoner for her so-called insubordination, while Matilda was compelled to find safety in the great fortress at Canossa. In the meantime, Godfrey had gone back to Lorraine, more powerful than ever, to stir up trouble in the empire.

In this same year, 1054, Henry III. died, and his son, Henry IV., won over by the prayers of Pope Victor II., made peace with Godfrey and restored Beatrice to liberty. They, being more than grateful to Victor for this kindly intervention, invited him to come to their stately palace in Florence and tarry with them for a while. From this time on, in the period when Matilda was growing into womanhood, the real seat of the papal power was not in Rome, but in Florence, and Godfrey's palace became an acknowledged centre of ecclesiastical activity.

Matilda was a girl of a mystic temperament, credulous, it is true, and somewhat superstitious like all the other people of her time, and yet filled with a deep yearning for a greater knowledge of the secrets of the universe. Her ideal of authority was formed by intercourse with the various members of her own circle, who were all devoted heart and soul to the cause of the Holy See, and it was but natural that, when she became old enough to think and act for herself, all her inclinations should lead her to embrace the cause of the pope. While it is beyond the province of the present volume to describe in detail the exact political and religious situation in Italy at this time, it should be said that the pope was anxious to reassert the temporal power of his office, which had for a long time been subservient to the will of the emperors. He desired the supremacy of the papacy within the Church, and the supremacy of the Church over the state. Early filled with a holy zeal for this cause, Matilda tried to inform herself regarding the real state of affairs, so that she might be able to act intelligently when the time for action came. Through skilful diplomacy, it came to pass that Matilda's uncle--Frederick--became Pope Stephen X.; and then, of course, the house of Lorraine came to look upon the papal interests as its own, and the daughter of the house strengthened the deep attachment for the Church which was to die only when she died. Nor must it be thought that the priestly advisers of the house were blind to the fact that in Matilda they had one who might become a pillar of support for the fortunes of the papacy. The monk Hildebrand, for a long time the power behind the pope until he himself became pope in 1073, was a constant visitor at Matilda's home, and he it was who finally took her education in hand and gave it its fullest development. She had many teachers, of course, and under Hildebrand's guiding genius, the work was not stopped until the young countess could speak French, German, and Latin with the same ease as she did her mother tongue.

Finally, in 1076, when she was thirty years of age, her mother--Beatrice--died, and also her husband, Godfrey le Bossu. The great countess, acting for the first time entirely upon her own responsibility, now began that career of activity and warfare which was unflagging to the end. No other woman of her time had her vast power and wealth, no other woman of her time had her well-stored mind, and no other, whether man or woman, was so well equipped to become the great protector of the Holy Church at Rome. People were amazed at her ability--they called her God-given and Heaven-sent, and they felt a touch of mystery in this woman's life. Surely she was not as the others of her time, for she could hold her head high in the councils of the most learned, and she the only woman of the number! Nor was she one-sided in her activity and indifferent to all interests save those of the papal party, as her many public benefactions show her to have been a woman filled with that larger zeal for humanity which far transcends the narrow zeal for sect or creed. For, in addition to the many temples, convents, and sepulchres, which she caused to be scattered over the northern part of Italy, she built the beautiful public baths at Casciano, and the great hospital of Altapascio.

Never strong physically, Matilda was possessed of remarkable vitality and an iron will, and she showed great powers of execution and administration, never shirking the gravest responsibilities. A part of her life was spent in the rough camps of her devoted feudal soldiery, and--weak woman though she was--she led them on to battle more than once, when they seemed to need the inspiration of her presence. Women warriors there have been in every day and generation in some part of the world perhaps, but never one like this. Clad in her suit of mail, and urging on her battle horse at the head of her followers, her pale face filled with the light of a holy zeal, it is small wonder that her arms triumphed, and that before her death she came to be acknowledged openly as by far the most important person in all Italy.