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As penance for his sins, and echoing his own punishment of the Saxons after the First Battle of Langensalza, he dramatically wore a hairshirt and stood in the snow barefoot in the middle of winter in what has become known as the Walk to Canossa.
In the First Battle of Langensalza (known in Germany as the "Battle of Homburg on the Unstrut", Homburg being a former monastery near Bad Langensalza) on 9 June 1075 he dealt the Saxon army, which consisted mainly of simple peasants, a crushing defeat and then rampaged through Saxony and Thuringia laying waste.