This decree provided occasion for all German nobles whom Henry IV had alienated to gather under the banner of the papal legate, and for the oppressed Saxon countryside to renew the serious revolt which had broken out two years before. Even the German bishops grew frightened of the part they had played in deposing Gregory, so that the once-powerful ruler found himself looked upon as an outlaw with scarcely a real friend, save the wife he had ill-treated, and no hope save submission. In the winter of 1066, as an old story tells, when the mountains were frozen hard with snow and ice, he and his wife and one attendant crossed the Alps on sledges, and sought the Pope in his castle of Canossa, built amidst the highest ridges of the Apennines. Gregory coldly refused him audience. The King, he intimated, might declare that he was repentant, he had done so often in the past, but words were not deeds. Putting aside his royal robes and clad in a penitent’s woollen tunic, Henry to show his sincerity remained barefoot for three days like a beggar, in the castle yard. Then only on the entreaty of some Italian friends was he admitted to the presence of the Pope, who at his cry of ‘Holy Father, spare me!’ raised him up and gave him formal forgiveness. The scene at Canossa is so dramatic in its display of Hildebrand’s triumph and the Emperor’s humiliation that it has lived in the world’s memory: yet it was no closing act in their struggle, but merely an episode that passed and left little mark. Henry IV, as soon as he could win himself a following in Germany and Italy, returned to the practice of lay investiture, and Gregory VII, who had never believed in his sincerity, continued to denounce him and plan the coronation of rival emperors. Imperial ambitions at last reached their height, for Henry IV succeeded in inducing German and Italian bishops to depose Gregory once more and even appoint an Anti-Pope, in whose name imperial armies ravaged Lombardy, forced their way as far south as Rome, and besieged Hildebrand in the castle of St. Angelo. From this predicament he was rescued by the Normans of South Italy under Robert Guiscard; but these ruthless vassals of the Church massacred and looted the Holy City directly they had scaled the walls, and when they turned homewards, carrying Gregory VII with them, they left half Rome in ruins. Gregory VII died not long afterwards, homeless and deposed, but with unshaken confidence in the righteousness of his cause. ‘I have loved justice and hated iniquity,’ he said, during his last illness, ‘therefore I die in exile.’ ‘In exile thou couldst not die,’ replied a bishop standing at his bedside. ‘Vicar of Christ and His Apostles, thou hast received the nations for thine inheritance and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.’ Future history was to show that Hildebrand in defeat had achieved more than his rival in victory.