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Kotzarig or Cozarig, a name intricately associated with the land of Kedar, was, according to Sandilch, the second son of Ernakh, after whom the Kozarigur Huns were named, Ernakh's second son being Utig after whom the Utigur Bulgars were named. Kozar could mean "Goat-Herder" in Slavonic languages. According to Bar Hebraeus and the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian, the name was given to one of three brothers who came from the Imaon mountains to rule Hunnish tribes in the East European grasslands in 583. Kotzarig's subjects became known as Khazars. His brother Bulgarios with 10,000 men acquired Dacia from Emperor Maurice (emperor) (582-602). This report could refer to one of four possible events.

1.The arrival of the Onogurs in 463. In this situation the brother probably adopted the name as new ruler of Dengizich's Akatziroi whose lands the Onogurs seized under Ernakh's leadership. The events were long before Emperor Maurice but confused with his time because of his support for Patria Onoguria.

2.The arrival of the Eurasian Avars in 557. In this eventuality, the Avars would be identified with Kidarite Huns who had sought to escape the Gokturk expansion. Kazrig would be identified with Kandig and Bulgarios could be identified with the Avar Samar Khan who was also leader of the Cotzarigs. Tiberius II Constantine was acting for Justin at the time, so the acquisition of Dacia was not immediate and would have been a hostile take-over (see Maurice's Balkan campaigns). This case might prove right a frequently drawn parallel between these three brothers and the three brothers Shchek, Khoriv, and Kii (who founded Kiev in the 6th century) to whom the Khazars are said to be related.

3.The arrival of Gokturk rulers in 569. In this situation, the three brothers would be Uar of Khwarezmia who the Gokturks supported against the Pseudo-Avar Huns who had entered Europe in the previous decade under Kandig. Bulgarios could thus be identified with Sandilch, and Kozarig would have taken his name from the Avar-Hun tribes he established his rule over in the Kuban Steppe.

4.Events during Houdbaad's rule of Onoguria as a result of civil war in the Gokturk state.

The name is later given to one of the sons of Khagan Kubrat who, following a dispute with his brother Batbayan, established his rule in Bolghar.

In the 630s, 9,000 Cozarigs fled Pannonia to Italy as a result of Khagan Kubrat's war with the Avars.

Finally Menumorut is said to have been friendly towards the Cozarigs in the Hungary, but after his time the name disappears.

Beatrice of Bar (also Beatrix) (c. 1017 – 18 April 1076) was the marchioness of Tuscany from 1053 to her death as the wife of Boniface III of Tuscany. She was the daughter of Frederick II, Duke of Upper Lorraine, who was also count of Bar, and Matilda of Swabia.

In 1037, she became the second wife of Boniface III of Tuscany in a splendid ceremony. She bore him the following children:

Beatrice (died 17 December 1053)
Frederick (died July 1055), briefly successor before imprisonment
Matilda (1046 – 24 July 1115), successor as marchioness of Tuscany
With Boniface' death on 6 May 1052, Beatrice assumed the regency for her son Frederick. In 1054, to give her son the protection she could not militarily provide, she married Godfrey, former duke of Lower Lorraine. However, in 1055, the Emperor Henry III arrested Beatrice for marrying a traitor. She was brought to Germany a prisoner while Frederick was summoned to Henry's court at Florence. He refused to go and died before any action was taken against him. The heir of Boniface was now his youngest daughter Matilda, who was imprisoned with her mother.

On the death of Henry, Godfrey was reconciled with his heir, Henry IV, and exiled to Italy with his wife and stepdaughter. In January 1058, as a partisan of the newly-elected Pope Nicholas II, Leo de Benedicto had the gates of the Leonine City thrown open for Godfrey and Beatrice. Godfrey immediately possessed the Tiber Island and attacked the Lateran, forcing Benedict X to flee on January 24. Beatrice and Godfrey were allied with the reformers, including Hildebrand and Pope Alexander II, against the emperor. In 1062, Beatrice tried to stop the Antipope Honorius II from reaching Rome, but she failed.

In 1069, Godfrey died. Matilda was of age, yet Beatrice continued to exercise government in her name until the day she died. She was buried in the Cathedral of Pisa, where the Late Roman sarcophagus, bearing reliefs illustrating the story of Hippolytus and Phaedra, from which Nicola Pisano adapted nude figures for his pulpit in the cathedral,[1] reused for her sepulture can still be seen. The added 11th-century inscription reads:

Quamvis peccatrix sum domna vocata Beatrix
In tumulo missa iaceo quæ comitissa
On 29 August 1071, Beatrice founded the monastery Frassinoro at the Apennine pass of Foce della Radici.

Matilda of Tuscany (1046 – 24 July 1115) was an Italian noblewoman, the principal Italian supporter of Pope Gregory VII during the Investiture Controversy. She is one of the few medieval women to be remembered for her military accomplishments. She is sometimes called la Gran Contessa ("the Great Countess") or Matilda of Canossa after the her ancestral castle of Canossa.

She was the daughter of Boniface III, ruler of many counties, among them Reggio, Modena, Mantua, Brescia, and Ferrara. He held a great estate on both sides of the Apennines, though the greater part was in Lombardy and Emilia. Matilda's mother was Beatrice, a daughter of Frederick II, Duke of Upper Lorraine, and of Matilda, daughter of Herman II of Swabia.

Matilda's place of birth is unknown. Mantua, Modena, Cremona, and Verona have all been suggested, though scholarly opinion favours Lucca or the nearby castle of Porcari.[1] Based on her fluency in German, some authors have asserted that she was born in Lorraine, her mother's province. She was her parents' youngest child, but her father was murdered in 1052 and one year later (1053) her older sister Beatrice (namesake of their mother) also died. The elder Beatrice, in order to protect her children's inheritance, married Godfrey the Bearded, a cousin who had been Duke of Upper Lorraine before rebelling against the Emperor Henry III. The two were married in 1053 or 1054 in the church of San Pietro at Mantua by Pope Leo IX himself as he returned from a trip to Germany. At the same time, Matilda was betrothed to Godfrey the Hunchback, a son of Godfrey the Bearded by a previous marriage and thus her stepbrother.

Henry III was enraged by Beatrice's unauthorised marriage to his enemy and he descended into Italy in the early spring of 1055, arriving at Verona in April and then Mantua by Easter. Beatrice wrote to him seeking a safe-conduct to explain herself; this granted, she travelled with her young son Frederick, now Margrave of Tuscany, and her mother, Matilda of Swabia, a sister of the emperor's grandmother Gisela. The younger Matilda was left in either Lucca or Canossa and she may have passed the next few years between those two places in the custody of her stepfather. Initially, Henry refused to see Beatrice, but eventually he had her imprisoned in rough conditions; the young Frederick was treated more appropriately, but he died in Henry's custody nonetheless (the rumours that he was murdered are baseless).[2] The death of her brother made the eight-year-old Matilda the sole heiress of the vast lands of her father, under her stepfather's guardianship.

With his wife now imprisoned, Godfrey returned to Germany to stir up rebellion and draw Henry out of Italy, but the emperor merely took Beatrice and Frederick with him. Some later historian aver that Beatrice went willingly to see her former homeland. Whatever the case, Godfrey and his ally, Baldwin V of Flanders, had forced the emperor to come to terms of peace by mid-1056 and Godfrey was permitted to return to Italy to administer his stepdaughter's estates. Henry soon died and the council which was held under the direction of Pope Victor II at Cologne formally restored Godfrey to imperial favour. He and Beatrice were back in Italy by late that year.

Matilda's family became heavily involved in the series of disputed papal elections of the last half of the eleventh century. Her stepfather's brother Frederick became Pope Stephen IX, while both of the following two popes, Nicholas II and Alexander II had been Tuscan bishops. Matilda made her first journey to Rome with her family in the entourage of Nicholas in 1059. Her parents' forces were used to protect these popes and fight against antipopes. Some stories claim the adolescent Matilda took the field in some of these engagements, but no evidence supports this.

Under the tutelage of Arduino della Padule, however, she did learn the military arts, such as horseriding and arms. According to Lodovico Vedriani, there were two suits of her armour in the "Quattro Castelli" until 1622, when they were sold in the market of Reggio. The "Qattro Castelli" were four castles — Montezane, Montelucio, Montevetro, and Bianell (Bibianello) — perched by Matilda atop hills to guard the route up to Canossa. Matilda could speak "the Teuton tongue" (German) and "the beautiful language of the Franks" (French) according to her biographer, Domnizo. She could also write in Latin.

Sometime in this period, Matilda finally married her stepbrother Godfrey the Hunchback, for whom she had great disdain. She gave birth in 1071 to a daughter, Beatrice. Virtually all current biographies of Matilda assert that the child died in its first year of infancy, however genealogies contemporaneous with Michelangelo Buonarroti claimed that Beatrice survived, and Michelangelo himself falsely claimed to be a descendant of Beatrice and, therefore, Matilda. Michelangelo's claim was supported at the time by the reigning Count of Canossa. The Catholic Church, possibly motivated by its claim against her property, has always asserted that Matilda never had any child at all. Matilda and Godfrey became estranged after Godfrey the Bearded's death in 1069, and he returned to Germany, where he eventually received the duchy of Lower Lorraine.

[edit] Conflict between Henry IV and the Papacy
Matilda from the Vita Mathildis, accepting her biography from its monkish author Donizo and guarded by a man-at-arms (left).Both Matilda's mother and husband died in 1076, leaving her in sole control of her great Italian patrimony as well as lands in Lorraine, while at the same time matters in the conflict between Pope Gregory VII and the German king Henry IV were at a crisis point. The Pope had excommunicated the King, causing a weakening of Henry's German support. Henry crossed the Alps that winter, appearing early in 1077 as a barefoot penitent in the snow before the gates of Matilda's ancestral castle of Canossa, where the pope was staying.

This famous meeting did not settle matters for long. In 1080 Henry was excommunicated again, and the next year he crossed the Alps, aiming either to get the pope to end the excommunication and crown him emperor, or to depose the pope in favor of someone more co-operative.

Matilda controlled all the western passages over the Apennines, forcing Henry to approach Rome via Ravenna. Even with this route open, he would have difficulties besieging Rome with a hostile territory at his back. Some of his allies defeated Matilda at the battle of Volta Mantovana (near Mantua) in October 1080, and by December the citizens of Lucca, then the capital of Tuscany, had revolted and driven out her ally Bishop Anselm. She is believed to have commissioned the renowned Ponte della Maddalena where the Via Francigena crosses the river Serchio at Borgo a Mozzano just north of Lucca.

In 1081, Matilda suffered some further losses, and Henry formally deposed her in July. This was not enough to eliminate her as a source of trouble, for she retained substantial allodial holdings. She remained as Pope Gregory's chief intermediary for communication with northern Europe even as he lost control of Rome and was holed up in the Castel Sant'Angelo. After Henry had obtained the Pope's seal, Matilda wrote to supporters in Germany only to trust papal messages that came though her.

Henry's control of Rome enabled him to have his choice of pope, Antipope Clement III, consecrated and in turn for this pope to crown Henry as emperor. That done, Henry returned to Germany, leaving it to his allies to attempt Matilda's dispossession. These attempts foundered after Matilda routed them at Sorbara (near Modena) on July 2, 1084.

Gregory VII died in 1085, and Matilda's forces, with those of Prince Jordan I of Capua (her off and on again enemy), took to the field in support of a new pope, Victor III. In 1087, Matilda led an expedition to Rome in an attempt to install Victor, but the strength of the imperial counterattack soon convinced the pope to retire from the city.

Around 1090, Matilda married again, to Welf V of Bavaria, from a family (the Welfs) whose very name was later to become synonymous with alliance to the popes in their conflict with the German emperors (see Guelphs and Ghibellines). This forced Henry to return to Italy, where he drove Matilda into the mountains. He was humbled before Canossa, this time in a military defeat in October 1092, from which his influence in Italy never recovered.

In 1095, Henry attempted to reverse his fortunes by seizing Matilda's castle of Nogara, but the countess's arrival at the head of an army forced him to retreat. In 1097, Henry withdrew from Italy altogether, after which Matilda reigned virtually uncontested, although she did continue to launch military operations designed to restore her authority and regain control of the towns that had remained loyal to the emperor. She ordered or commanded successful expeditions against Ferrara (1101), Parma (1104), Prato (1107) and Mantua (1114). In 1111, at Bianello, she was made viceroy of Liguria by the Emperor Henry V.


Matilda's signature ("Matilda, Dei gratia si quid est"), quite tremulous due to her old age. Notitia Confirmationis (Prato, June 1107), Archivio Storico Diocesano of Lucca, Diplomatico Arcivescovile, perg. ++ I29[edit] Death and legacyMatilda's death of gout in 1115 at Bondeno di Roncore marked the end of an era in Italian politics. It has been reported that she left her allodial property to the Pope for reasons not known however this donation was never officially recognized in Rome and no record has reached us. Henry had promised some of the cities in her territory he would appoint no successor after he deposed her. In her place the leading citizens of these cities took control, and the era of the city-states in northern Italy began. In the 17th century, her body was removed to the Vatican, where it now lies in St. Peter's Basilica.

The story of Matilda and Henry IV is the main plot device in Luigi Pirandello's play Enrico IV. She is the main historical character in Kathleen McGowan's novel The Book of Love (Simon & Schuster, 2009).

[edit] Foundation of churchesTraditionally, people say Matilda founded some churches; among those:

Sant'Andrea Apostolo of Vitriola, at Montefiorino (MO)
San Giovanni Decollato, at Pescarolo ed Uniti (CR)
Santa Maria Assunta, at Monteveglio (BO)
San Martino in Barisano, near Forlì
San Zeno, at Cerea (VR).

Boniface III (also Boniface IV or Boniface of Canossa) (c. 985 – 6 May 1052), son of Tedald of Canossa and the father of Matilda of Canossa, was the most powerful north Italian prince of his age. By inheritance he was Count (or lord) of Brescia, Canossa, Ferrara, Florence, Lucca, Mantua, Modena, Pisa, Pistoia, Parma, Reggio, and Verona from 1007 and, by appointment, Margrave of Tuscany[1] from 1027 until his assassination in 1052. He was the son of the Margrave Tedald and Willa of Bologna. The Lombard family's ancestral castle was Canossa and they had held Modena for several generations. They possessed a great many allodial titles and their power lay chiefly in Emilia.

Boniface was probably associated with his father before the latter's death. In 1004, with the title marchio, he donated land to the abbey of Polirone, and he appears in two documents of the same year as gloriosus marchio. He kept his court at Mantua, which he transformed into a city of culture:

“ With so many magnificent spectacles and feasts that all posterity and all their contemporaries marvelled thereat.[2] ”

In 1014, Boniface aided the Emperor Henry II in putting down Arduin, Margrave of Ivrea, self-styled King of Italy, a royal title that the Emperor did not recognise. His father nominated him as heir over his brothers and, in 1016, he was again fighting alongside the emperor, this time against the Margrave of Turin, Ulric Manfred II.

In 1020, he defeated a rebellion of his brother Conrad, but the two reconciled and both were later recorded as duces. In 1027, he supported the candidacy of Conrad II of Germany for the Iron Crown of Lombardy and the Imperial Crown against the other claimaints: William V of Aquitaine, Robert II of France, or Hugh Magnus. When Boniface's Lombard enemies tried to incite his brother against him, the two (Boniface and his brother Conrad) offered battle to them at Coviolo, near Reggio, and emerged victorious, though Conrad was killed.[3] When Conrad II finally succeeded in entering Italy, he was met with defiance at Lucca and he deposed the reigning margrave of Tuscany, Rainier, and gave his lands and titles to Boniface. This seems to be the probable scenario, though the exact date of Boniface's assumption of the Tuscan lordship is uncertain.[4]

Boniface subdued Pavia and Parma, in revolt against the Emperor, and the Emperor made a treaty with Boniface, an act which has been construed as recognition of Boniface's independence.[5] In 1032, he was at war with the rebel Odo II, Count of Blois, Chartres, Meaux, and Troyes. In 1037, he helped put down a revolt against the Emperor Conrad. In 1043, for services rendered the Empire, he received the Duchy of Spoleto and Camerino. He also acquired more land in Parma and Piacenza, and his chief residence in this time was at Mantua.

In 1039, he travelled to Miroalto to aid the Emperor Henry III against the rebellious Odo of Blois. While he was returning, he destroyed the grain fields of the region and the enraged populace retaliated and stole some of his retainers' horses. It was during his blood reprisal that Boniface made his most famous recorded statement. Preparing to hack off the ears and nose of a young man, Boniface was confronted by the youth's mother, who begged him be spared and promised him her son's weigh in silver. Boniface replied to his offer that he "was no merchant, but a soldier," adding:

“ Absit ut hostes ferro capti redimantur argento.
Far be it that what was captured by steel should be redeemed with silver.[6]
”

In 1046, Henry III entered Italy to be crowned Emperor. Boniface received the emperor and his empress, Agnes of Poitou, with honour and munificence on their arrival at Piacenza and his governor did so at Mantua on their return journey. The relationship between Boniface and Henry, however, soon deteriorated in 1047. The reasons for this are debated. Henry may have been fearful of Boniface's wealth and power, and on several subsequent occasions tried to arrest him.[7] On the other hand, Boniface may have allied with the Counts of Tusculum, their relatives the Popes, and Guaimar IV of Salerno.[8] Thus, despite his quashing revolts on Henry's behalf, Henry came to resent his power, as he did with Guaimar.

In 1048, he supported the abdicated Pope Benedict IX when he tried to retake his throne and he extended his domains at the expense of ecclesiastic lands. In fact, his habit of cheating the church of land, especially the Diocese of Reggio, by offering some small farm land and an annual rent in turn for it was legendary. He rarely paid the promised rents. However, Boniface eventually joined the reform party of Leo IX and was present at the Synod of Pavia in 1049.

In his later years, he kept the Abbey of Pomposa well-endowed for the sake of his soul and even confessed to simony and permitted Guido of Pomposa to flagellate him in punishment for it.

He tried to restrict the rights of his valvassores, despite Conrad's imperial edict of 1037. It was this action against his undertenants which got him killed in 1052, during a hunting expedition. This version of Boniface's death is disputed. Some have alleged that Henry played a part in his assassination. It is also held by some that in 1044 there was an attempt made on the margrave's life at Brescia and that the conspirators fled to Verona, which Boniface subsequently sacked before expelling some Veronese conspirators from Mantua as well. One Scarpetta Carnevari apparently nursed a grudge for this act and years later, while Boniface was preparing a galley for a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, shot him with a poisoned arrow on the river Oglio, near Martino dall'Argine in the region of Spineta while on the hunt.[9]

Boniface's first marriage (before 1015) was to Richilda, daughter of Giselbert II, Count Palatine of Bergamo. Richilda took little part in Boniface's government and was dead by 1034, leaving him no children. In 1037, he married Beatrice, daughter of Frederick II, Duke of Upper Lorraine and Count of Bar, and niece of the Empress Gisela, wife of Conrad II. They celebrated their marriage in high style, keeping court at Marengo for three months afterwards. Beatrice also had but a small role in the rule of Tuscany, but she did bear her husband three children. The eldest, Beatrice, died in 1053, shortly after Boniface. The only son, Frederick, succeeded his father, but died soon after. The youngest child was Matilda, who inherited the great patrimony from Frederick. Beatrice remarried in 1054 to Godfrey III, Duke of Lower Lorraine, who ruled until his death in 1069.