I absolve all
Christians from the oaths they have made or may make to him, and I forbid
that any one should obey him as king." [Footnote: Migne, CXLVIII, 790.]
Henry marched on Italy, but in all European history there has been no
drama more tremendous than the expiation of his sacrilege. To his soldiers
the world was a vast space, peopled by those fantastic beings which are
still seen on Gothic towers. These demons obeyed the monk of Rome, and his
army, melting from about the emperor under a nameless horror, left him
helpless.
Gregory lay like a magician in the fortress of Canossa: but he had no need
of carnal weapons, for when the emperor reached the Alps he was almost
alone. Then his imagination also took fire, the panic seized him, and he
sued for mercy.
On August 7, 1106, Henry died at Liege, an outcast and a mendicant, and
for five long years his body lay at the church door, an accursed thing
which no man dared to bury.
Gregory prevailed because, to the understanding of the eleventh century,
the evidence at hand indicated that he embodied in a high degree the
infinite energy. The eleventh century was intensely imaginative and the
evidence which appealed to it was those phenomena of trance, hypnotism,
and catalepsy which are as mysterious now as they were then, but whose
effect was then to create an overpowering demand for miracle-working
substances.
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