What luck! This profession will never cease to amaze…
Wandering around archives it is still possible to come across rare, precious, strange documents
This is the case of one of the Pomposa documents kept in the State Archive of Modena: the “purple” of Henry IV, the privilege of the third Henry of the Salic dynasty to become emperor, destined to the Pomposa Abbey, drawn up on Lake Garda, on an autumn day, the ninth day of October (7 October), in the now distant year 1095.
The chancellor’s voice thunders: Henricus IV imperator reconfirmat omnia bona, iura, iurisdictiones, immunitates favore monasterii Pomposiani.
At Pomposa, Henry IV reconfirmed all the rights he exercised over the territory and the patrimony that the abbey had always held, starting from the delta areas of Volano, Goro and Ostellato up to the properties located in Ravenna and in all the committees of the territory that were once part of the Exarchate and the Pentapolis. Above all, it reconfirms its exemption from taxes, “ab omni angaria sive fodro”, usually due to the emperor.
But I was saying, rare, precious and strange. All together.
And, I insist, not so much for its content – a typical confirmation of goods, rights and privileges granted by an emperor of the Holy Roman Empire to a pro-imperial Abbey, moreover “copied” from the confirmations of previous emperors – as for its outward appearance, as a very rare document produced by the imperial chancellery of the West, written in gold ink and on purple-coloured parchment.
Henry’s chancellery deliberately imitates a typical model common in the Eastern Roman Empire, a must at the time when it comes to elegance. The gold and purple are evidently used to give the document all the prestige associated with the external signs that Roman imperial sovereignty could bestow on a document of its own making.
In addition to its historical and juridical value, therefore, this confirmation of assets immediately acquires an enormous symbolic value and a formidable “propagandistic” value on a visual level, destined to survive over time and to make it, over the centuries, an “object” of undisputed rare, precious, strange beauty!

Copy of the signum of Henry IV

Postscript for scholars, statistics lovers, collectors and detectives:
the pomposian “purpureo” is one of the six examples of documents of this category currently existing and known in the world. One of the two preserved in Italy.

– contribution by Anna Fuggi (pen of shrewd impulse), with thanks to Enrico Angiolini –