A Dictionary of Saintly Women/Adelaide (5)
B. Adelaide (5) of Susa, Dec. 19. c. 1010-1091. "The mighty Marchioness," countess of Turin. Regarded as one of the founders of the house of Savoy. That family was already extending its borders on the ruins of the kingdom of Burgundy, but its first footing in Italy was given to it by the marriage with Adelaide, elder daughter and heir of Manfred, marquis of Susa, whose rule extended from the top of the Alps to the Dora Baltea and the Po. His wife was Bertha, daughter of Aubert, marquis of Ivrea, and sister of Hardouin, king of Italy.
Adelaide married three times: (1) Herman, duke of Suabia; (2) Henry of Montferrat; (3) Odo of Savoy. It is supposed that she was not very young at the time of her first marriage. The marquisate of Susa could not be held by a woman, but she could transfer her claim to her husband. Accordingly, Herman obtained the investiture of the marquisate from his stepfather, the Emperor, Conrad II. Herman died, still young, in 1038, and Adelaide took upon herself the government of her father's inheritance. She soon married again, and it was not long before she was again a childless widow. In 1044 she married Odo, son of Humbert, of the race of the counts of Savoy, lord of the countships of Maurienne and Tarantaise, one of the most powerful princes of the kingdom of Burgundy. Humbert died in 1048, and was succeeded by his eldest son Amadeus I., surnamed Cauda, and he, in 1069, was succeeded by his brother Odo, the husband of Adelaide. Little is knwn of him; Adelaide is the more prominent person. With masculine courage and energy, she knew right well how to rule. It was of immense importance to the family destined to become so great that Adelaide could hold the command of the Burgundian as well as the Italian possessions of the house. Far and wide the marchioness of Susa was known as a woman of no less decision than prudence. As her sons Peter and Amadeus grew up, she used them as assistants, but kept the power in her own hands. She maintained order and justice in her territories. She was grasping and hard, rather feared and respected than beloved. Her neighbours had to be on the alert. She more than once took up arms against her own towns. She waged a long war with the citizens of Asti, and in 1070 she took the town and destroyed it. The year before that she had besieged Lodi and reduced it almost to a heap of rubbish. Thousands of persons were killed; cloisters and churches were not spared. She inflicted so much misery that when she asked the Pope for absolution he had difficulty in devising a sufficient penance for her. She was in touch with all the conflicting movements of that restless time, yet carried away by none of them, and although upright and conscientious, she kept her eye constantly on the interests of her own family and country. She was an enthusiastic partisan of the German Imperial side against the Papal party; but still she was religious, and favoured the ecclesiastical reforms then emanating from Rome, including steps and protests against simony and the marriage of the clergy. Such was the woman whose alliance was sought by the Emperor, Henry III., the Black, in order to balance the power of two other masculine and masterful women, the marchioness Beatrice of Tuscany, and her daughter the countess Matilda, whose influence was often in the opposite scale to his interests. In 1055 he betrothed his son Henry at five years old to Bertha, the eldest daughter of Adelaide. In less than a year that good Emperor died. Henry IV. and Bertha were married July 13, 1066, but the young Emperor meantime had fallen into bad hands, and suspected everybody. He supposed his wife to be a tool of his enemies, and, not withstanding her beauty and amiability, he lived apart from her, and in 1069 declared his intention of being divorced, although he made no accusation against her. This resolution was, however, overruled, and when almost under compulsion he brought her to court, he fell in love with her, and they continued to be devotedly attached to each other as long as Bertha lived.
Instead of the brotherly co-operation of the Emperor and Pope when Henry III. planned reforms with Leo IX. and his successor, Victor II., twenty years afterwards, there was a long and obstinate struggle going on between Gregory VII. (the famous Hildebrand) and Henry IV. A violent-tempered, self-indulgent youth like Henry could never be the victor in a long and complicated dispute and rivalry with Gregory, a far-seeing, patient, determined man of extraordinary ability and blameless life. In 1076 Henry drew upon himself the ban of the Church, which gave strength to many powerful rebels in his own country, while it hampered and depressed his adherents. It was most important to all his interests to have the sentence rescinded, and for this purpose he resolved to go and meet the Pope, who was now on his way to cross the Alps and enter Germany, there to hold a council, which would probably depose the Emperor and set up in his place Rudolph of Suabia, who was married to Adelaide's younger daughter Adelaide. Henry's mother, B. Agnes, empress, was in great grief about him, but although Gregory had a warm regard for her, she was of little account in politics, and was powerless to help or guide her son. In his dire distress Adelaide of Susa undertook to assist him, and but for her aid he would probably have lost his crown and his liberty. At the same time, she exacted from his necessity some increase to her own dominions, for she bargained for the cession of five rich bishoprics as the reward of her assistance.
Beauregard supposes that tho advantage she then obtained from her son-in-law was the right to certain territories and privileges in the marquisate of Ivrea, to which she had a claim through her mother, but which she could not grasp without the imperial sanction. She must now have been very near seventy; but she, with her son Amadeus, came to meet the fugitive Emperor, his wife and infant son Conrad, and braved with them the hardships and difficulties of the passage across the Alps in January, 1077. It was one of the coldest winters ever known, and the snow lay deep in Rome for weeks; the Rhone and the Po were frozen so hard that horses and carriages passed over on the ice. The usual routes were well- nigh impassable. They had oxen led by the peasants to trample a path before them through the masses of snow. The horses proceeded with the greatest difficulty, and some of them perished in the struggle. Arduous as was the ascent, their plight was even worse when they had passed the summit and began to descend on the Italian side—the way was so steep and so slippery that they almost despaired of getting any further. Creeping, climbing, scrambling, rolling, came the men, cutting their hands on the ice. The women were dragged along in sledges made of ox-hides, the guides holding on to the ice by grappling-irons. At last they arrived at a hospitable monastery in the Val d'Aosta. They were well received in Italy, where there seemed more favour for the king, and less for the Pope, than in Germany; but even now all would be lost if Henry did not receive the Holy Father's absolution, so, leaving his wife and child at Reggio, he hurried on, accompanied by his heroic old mother-in-law, to Canossa, where Gregory was resting in the impregnable castle of his devoted partisan, the countess Matilda. These two famous women had so much power in the affairs of Italy that the king's fate was, to a considerable degree, in their hands. Matilda, though devoted to Gregory, pitied the humiliations and sufferings to which the Emperor was subjected, and it was she who at length prevailed on her guest to put an end to the cruel delays and abasement of his unfortunate penitent, so that after days of miserable entreaty, during which he shivered outside the gate in the garb of the humblest penitent, on Jan. 28, 1027, he was admitted to the Pope's presence, and threw himself at his feet Gregory gave him absolution, but made his own hard terms, to which Henry was obliged to agree.
Adelaide's other son-in-law, Rudolph of Suabia, who still had a large party on his side, did not at once give up the struggle for the crown. He won a battle against Henry, but died of his wounds the next day. Adelaide lived fourteen years after the melancholy expedition to Canossa. She was still alive when, in 1084, Henry led an avenging army to Rome, and compelled Gregory to take flight to Salerno.
In her old age her conscience was troubled, not apparently by the slaughter of her rebellious subjects, but because she had had three husbands. She tried to atone for her sins by works of beneficence, and gave bountifully to religious institutions. Fructuaria and other monasteries throve under her patronage. She died very old, Dec. 19, 1091, at Canischio, where the remains of her tomb are still to be seen. By her third marriage she left five children—Peter, to whom she bequeathed the marquisate of Italy; Amadeus, called by the Italians Adelaö; Odo, bishop of Asti; Bertha, the empress; and Adelaide, who married, as his second wife, Rudolph of Suabia, the rival Emperor. He was unkind to his wife, and this circumstance was, perhaps, not without weight in Adelaide's ardent espousal of the fortunes of Henry and Bertha.
Her life is promised by the Bollandists when their calendar comes down to her day. She appears in Ferrarius' Catalogue of the Saints who are not in the Roman Martyrology, She occupies an important place in every history of the house of Savoy. Frézet, Histoire de la Maison de Savoie. Costa do Beauregard, Mémoire Historique de la Maison royale de Savoie. Saint-Genis, Savoie. Paradin, Chronique de Savoie, Sismondi, Histoire des Français, iii. 161. Stephen, Hildebrand and his Times, Giesebrecht, Deutschlands Kaiserzeit, iii. Biographie Universelle.