Canossa

The castle of Matilda of Tuscany, where Gregory VII was staying when the Emperor Henry IV made a pilgrimage to Italy, in 1077, to make his submi ion to the Pope, who had excommunicated him. He was treated in the most humiliating fashion by Gregory, who left him for three days in the snow in the courtyard of the Castle before consenting to receive him. It is to this incident that Bismarck referred in the famous phrase, “Nach Cano a gehen wir nicht” (We are not going to Cano a), uttered in the Reichstag in 1872, during the Kulturkampf.