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 It was most important to all his interests to have the sentence rescinded, and for this purpose he resolved to go and meet the Pope, who was now on his way to cross the Alps and enter Germany, there to hold a council, which would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
