+53° 21' 4.59", -2° 17' 0.09"

So yesterday—or was it this morning?—I was sitting in the airport bar in Manchester, (layover #2 on my bargain itinerary, O'Hare—Newark—Manchester—Hamburg—Mannheim), having a cocktail so I'd be sure to sleep on the connecting flight to Hamburg—at that point I really, really needed an hour or two of unconsciousness, and I figured I could start pounding coffee once I landed in continental Europe—and anyway I started talking to this couple, it turned out they were from the Czech Republic and they asked me where I was going and I told them I was a blogger and I was flying to Mannheim so I could recapitulate or re-enact or re-something the Gang Nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, and the amazing thing is, this couple sorta knew what I was talking about.

I mean they knew the phrase, in German and in English, and they knew it had something to do with church and state, and they knew that snow was involved, and Bismarck, and a king named Henry and a pope named Gregory, although they were kinda mixed up about which Henry and which Gregory. It turned out that they had seen the American cable telenovela about Bertha of Savoy (dubbed into Czech, wouldn't that be wild!) and the two of them had had this running argument for like two years about whether the show was historical fiction or a totally off-the-wall fantasy—these were intelligent people, this Czech couple, he was an engineer and she was a lawyer, or maybe the other way around—but, still, I was really impressed that they made that distinction, that they could actually argue about the difference between a story that's based in fact but takes liberties and a story that refers to our memories of other stories in order to create its own mythic reality. They actually said things like that, in the airport bar.

So anyway, they thought I was some kind of expert, and they asked me to tell them what really happened on the Walk to Canossa. Of course I slithered out of that one, but I gave them my spiel, the same story I told my co-workers back in Waukegan when I requested a month off:

Well, I said, when we talk about Gang nach Canossa, the Walk to Canossa, l'umiliazione di Canossa, we're really talking about an image—a king kneeling in the snow, outside a lonely castle, begging forgiveness from a Pope. Now to understand that image, you've gotta understand all the games that the pope and the king were playing—and to understand those games, you've really have to go back a generation, to an earlier Henry and an earlier Gregory.

That's right. To understand what was going on in 1076 and 1077, you've gotta go to the year 1046, when Henry III, King of the Romans—that means a king of the Germans who hasn't yet been anointed as Holy Roman Emperor—came down to Italy to clean up a mess. And Rome was a total mess. In 1046 there were three popes, and all three of them had sordid back stories—even Gregory VI, the supposed reform pope, had actually purchased the papacy from one of the other popes, a guy who wanted to get married, but then the chick dumped him (I think actually said "chick"—the Czechs were really into the American vernacular, and my cocktail was surprisingly strong) so the first pope decided he wanted to keep his old job, and meanwhile the other guy, etc... etc...

It was bad, the whole situation, disgusting even, so Henry III deposed all three of them and picked a new pope, his own personal confessor in fact, a fellow German, who took the name Clement II and promptly christened Henry as Holy Roman Emperor and for good measure gave him the title of Patricius, which basically meant he had the right to appoint popes. This was a big deal to Henry, for while it was obvious to everyone that he had the power to appoint popes, Henry III was as devout as he was power-hungry, and he wanted the right.

The Czech couple seemed to find this stuff fascinating. At least, they bought me another drink.