+53° 21' 4.59", -2° 17' 0.09"

So there I am, or there I was—yesterday, or early this morning, whenever—anyway, I'm in the Manchester Airport bar, on a long layover, talking to this Czech couple about how this whole Walk to Canossa thing got started, and I'm really on a roll, I mean, for the first time, I'm actually making this story work—which is great, because when I try to explain the history to people back in Waukegan, I usually get these blank stares.

So the Czech couple buy me a another cocktail, and I start to tell them what the world was like in 1050, which is when Henry IV was born. In 1050 his Dad, that would be Henry III, is at the peak of his powers—he had gone down to Rome, fired three popes, picked his own pope, I mean things looked really good for the Holy Roman Emperor at that point—the Catholic Church under control, and all the German princes were pretty well-behaved as well, even the Saxons. But of course, there was a reaction brewing. Henry III's big year in 1046, his display of imperial prerogative, had really pissed off a lot of people in Italy—by people, I mean priests and monks and bishops, not ordinary people—and all these pissed-off clergy, including all the backers of the now-deposed Pope Gregory VI, well they organized themselves into a reform movement.

Now some of these reformers were true believers, real purists, hard-core sex-negative fanatics like St. Peter Damian, who genuinely wanted to clean up the church, wipe it down with bleach, if you know what I mean, but there was one reformer, an ambitious young monk named Hildebrand, who saw the reform movement as a political opportunity. This Hildebrand told everyone he was a blacksmith's son from a small town, who had risen from his humble origins through brilliance and hard work to become a protege of Gregory VI. Some people say he wasn't a blacksmith's son at all, but Gregory's nephew, part of the same rich Roman family. According to this version, Hildebrand made up the blacksmith story after he saw how his uncle got bounced out of the pope job for acting too rich, too entitled, just too damn obvious when he tried to buy the papacy. Or maybe Hildebrand actually was a smart hard-working poor kid. It's possible.

Anyway, Hildebrand goes into exile when Henry III fires Gregory VI, and a few years later he turns up again as the toughest ecclesiastical operative in Rome. He's the stage manager, the behind-the-scenes guy who basically runs the town. Sure he's a reformer, but he's not some kind of starry-eyed idealist. Put it this way: Hildebrand was the kind of reformer they know all about in Chicago. He would have fit right in.

As soon as I said it, I knew I shouldn't have mentioned Chicago. When you're from Waukegan, people just cannot understand the difference. Pretty soon the conversation is totally off track, and the Czech couple are asking me about Oprah, and Al Capone, and Michael Jordan, like they're personal friends of mine. I tried to bring up Rahm Emmanuel, as a way of getting back to Hildebrand, but the Czech couple had never heard of him. Then I tried to explain how Hildebrand pushed through the rule change that gave the College of Cardinals the right to pick the Pope, but they started talking to each other in Czech, so I dropped it.

Anyway, the cocktails did their job: I slept like a baby on the flight to Hamburg.