In his contest with the Pope, Henry's chances of winning were from the outset diminished by the readiness of his subjects to take advantage of his misfortunes to recover political privileges they had lost under his vigorous rule. In October, 1076, the leading German nobles, lay and clerical, encouraged by the papal decree of the preceding February, assembled at Tribur, near Mainz, and proceeded to formulate a plan of action. Henry, with the few followers who remained faithful, awaited the result at Oppenheim, just across the Rhine. The magnates at last agreed that unless Henry could secure the removal of the papal ban within a year he should be deposed from the throne. By the Oppenheim Convention he was forced to promise to revoke his sentence of deposition against Gregory and to offer him his allegiance. The promise was executed in a royal edict of the same month. Seeing that there remained no hope in further resistance, and hearing that Gregory was about to present himself in Germany to compel a final adjustment of the affair, Henry fled from Speyer, where he had been instructed by the nobles to remain, and by a most arduous winter journey over the Alps arrived at last at the castle of Canossa, in Tuscany,[390] where the Pope, on his way to Germany, was being entertained by one of his allies, the Countess Matilda. Gregory might indeed already have been on the Rhine but that he had heard of the move Henry was making and feared that he was proposing to stir up revolt in the papal dominions. The king was submissive, apparently conquered; yet Gregory was loath to end the conflict at this point. He had hoped to establish a precedent by entering German territory and there disposing of the crown according to his own will. But it was a cardinal rule of the Church that a penitent sincerely seeking absolution could not be denied, and in his request Henry was certainly importunate enough to give every appearance of sincerity. Accordingly, the result of the meeting of king [Emperor] and Pope at Canossa was that the ban of excommunication was revoked by the latter, while the former took an oath fully acknowledging the papal claims. Inasmuch as he had saved his crown and frustrated the design of Gregory to cross the mountains into Germany, Henry may be said to have won a temporary advantage; and this was followed within a few years, when the struggle broke out again, by the practical expulsion of Gregory from Rome and his death in broken-hearted exile (1085). Nevertheless the moral effect of the Canossa episode, and of the events which followed, in the long run operated decidedly against the king's position and the whole imperial theory. The document below is a letter of Gregory to the German magnates giving an account of the submission of the king at Canossa, and including the text of the oath which he there took.