Hello and welcome to the history of the Germans.

Episode 30, the three roads to Canossa.

First, apologies for missing last week.

I had to deal with a long-anticipated family issue that took me back home to Germany

and left little or no time to work on the podcast.

I'm actually at the airport right now writing up this episode, so it's all hands on deck.

The enforced break had, however, a positive side.

I could spend a bit more time on thinking about the structure of our narrative.

And that is important since the time period we're entering right now

is extremely complex, even by history of the German standards. And what makes it worse is that

events between 1056 and 1125 go bang, bang, bang, with important strands of the narrative

happening in parallel before violently intersecting and

then occasionally looping back on themselves.

There is a confusing array of characters and locations, erratic behaviors and theological

disputes.

It's a genuine playwright's nightmare.

What is needed is a framework.

And that framework, which have made up entirely out of thin air, breaks down the story

into three different main historical trends. Some of them we already know quite well. So the

first one is the conflict between the Imperial Central Authority and the German magnates.

That's been going on since, well, since time immemorial.

And the second strand is the church reform, specifically the rise of lay piety that demanded

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