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Schwoiser gives Henry a sidelong glare, not the bowed head of a man asking forgiveness. He painted this in 1862, when Germans saw Canossa as a king cornered rather than a king converted.

The gate stays shut. It is the last week of January 1077, the coldest month anyone can remember. Henry, king of the Germans and heir to the western empire, is standing outside the wall of a castle in the Apennines called Canossa. He is barefoot. He is wearing a rough wool shift, the dress of a penitent, and he has been at the gate for three days asking to be let in. Inside is Pope Gregory the Seventh, who has taken the castle of his ally Matilda of Tuscany for shelter. He is in no hurry to open the door to the man who has come to beg. The quarrel was about who owned the church. For a century, German kings had appointed their own bishops, handing each new man the ring and the staff of his office as if the office were theirs to give. Gregory said it was not. He said the choosing of bishops belonged to Rome alone. When Henry kept naming his own, the pope did the thing no pope had done to an emperor before. On the twenty-second of February 1076 he excommunicated him, and released every subject in the kingdom from their oath of loyalty. It worked. Henry’s dukes, who had their own reasons, told him to his face that if he was not absolved within the year they would elect another king. The year was almost up. That is why he had crossed the Alps in winter, with his wife and infant son and a handful of servants, to find the one man who could lift the sentence. Gregory told the story himself, in a letter to the German princes written from Canossa on the twenty-eighth of January, still a little astonished at what he had seen. Henry had come, he wrote, and stood at the gate barefoot and in wool, weeping, for three days, until everyone around the pope was in tears and pressing him to relent. On the fourth day Gregory opened the gate and gave him the kiss of peace and said Mass with him. He had won the point of principle absolutely. Nobody humbled a king; this one had stood barefoot in the snow for a priest, and every ruler in Europe heard about it. And it changed almost nothing. Within three years the two men were at war again. Henry marched on Rome, drove Gregory out, and set up a pope of his own. Gregory died in exile at Salerno in 1085, saying he had loved justice and hated iniquity and therefore died far from home. The phrase that outlived them both belongs to a later German, Bismarck, who told his parliament in 1872 that he would not go to Canossa, and everyone in the room knew exactly what he meant. Eduard Schwoiser painted the standoff in 1862 for the Maximilianeum in Munich, a hall hung with history pictures. He read it the way most Germans did by then: not a repentant king but a cornered one. Henry glares sidelong from under his hair, Gregory stands small and warm above him on the parapet with a hand raised, and a guard in mail fills the gateway between them.