| #### 5. THE ROMAN SEE AND THE ANARCHY, 900-1046 |

| #### #### So far as the Papal State was concerned, the death of John IX was the end, for nearly a century, of even the elementary decencies of life. Berengar, who claimed now to be emperor, was wholly taken up with the war against his rival Louis the Blind, of Provence. The empire had at last ceased to matter anywhere at all. The huge state of Charlemagne was now everywhere at the mercy of the local great man -- bishop, abbot or count -- all, or almost all, jealously disputing jurisdictions and territory, endeavouring in the general chaos to annex rights long coveted and to extend their existing possessions. The plague of the Scandinavian invasions had indeed for the moment been broken, but in their place there appeared a new horde of ferocious nomads from the steppes of Asia -- the Hungarians. Arnulf had used them as auxiliaries in his wars, but in 895 the whole nation, a million in all, was streaming into central Europe. For the next sixty years, almost unhindered, their disciplined cavalry swept over central and southern Europe, Italy, Provence, Lorraine and, especially, Germany, the most terrible affliction that even these centuries had seen. #### These years between the disappearance of the empire and the emergence of the German King Otto I (936-973) are, except in England, perhaps the darkest in all known European history. Nowhere are they darker than in Rome, where, for sixty years a single noble family dominated, making and unmaking popes at its pleasure. The details of this story are so grotesque that they lose all relation to reality. They have scarcely any power to shock, so great is their incredibility. The head of this family was the nobleman charged with the government of Ravenna, who was also something like the commander-in-chief of the army, Theophylact. In the reign of John IX's short-lived successor, Benedict IV (900-903), another reforming pope, Theophylact plays no part. To Benedict there succeeded Leo V, whom after a few months another priest, Christopher, managed to overthrow. Christopher was in turn deposed (904) by the disappointed candidate of the election of 898, Sergius III, and sent to the prison that still held Leo V. A few weeks later the two ex-popes were murdered " out of pity" ! Sergius, a blackguardly ignoramus, was now supreme. Theophylact's hour had come. #### Sergius renewed all the censures against Formosus, and honoured the tomb of the vile Stephen VI with an epitaph that exalted the infamous trial in words that defy translation. Next, annulling all the ordinations made by Formosus and the " Formosan" popes, John IX and Benedict IV, he threw the whole of Italy into indescribable confusion. Theophylact, through his wife, Theodora, slipped into the new post whence he came to control the whole papal administration, while his daughter, Marozia, there is reason to believe, became the pope's mistress. Of Anastasius III, and of Lando, who succeeded Sergius and, together, reigned for little more than two years (911-914) ] we know hardly anything save that the principate of Theophylact was in no way interrupted. Next came John X (914-928) alleged to be the lover, not of Marozia, but of her mother. He, too, was of the party of Stephen VI and Sergius III, but he showed himself a strong ruler and a capable soldier, organising a league of princes against the Saracens, defeating them in a great battle in 916 and routing them from their stronghold on the Garigliano. John X was long-lived, but towards the end of his reign he broke with the Theophylact clan. Its chief was now Marozia. She had married, in 915, one of the heroes of the war with the Saracens. Her husband soon died and it was her two sons, Alberic and John, who were, for the next few years, to play the leading parts in political life. Civil war broke out in the Papal State, between John X and Marozia. The pope called in the Hungarians, but before long a riot in Rome brought his reign to an end and in 928 he died in prison, smothered, it is said, at Marozia's orders. The next three popes were nominated by Marozia -- Leo VI, who lasted six months, Stephen VII for two years, and finally, in 931, her own son, John XI, a young pope, certainly, since his mother was scarcely forty! #### Marozia's supremacy was fated soon to disappear. She now married, as her third husband, Hugh, the King of Italy. Her son, the pope, officiated at the marriage and all seemed well. But Marozia's elder son, Alberic, aspired to the mastery of Rome. Between him and Hugh, who hoped for the same prize through a revival of the empire in his favour, there could be nothing but enmity. The troubles soon came to a head; Hugh was driven back to Pavia, Marozia imprisoned, and Alberic was master as Theophylact, his grandfather, had been. During the next twenty years he was all powerful, the real ruler of the Papal State and the decisive factor in what passed for papal elections. His brother, John XI, died in 935: the next four popes [ ] were all Alberic's nominees. #### A double aim inspired Alberic's policy as ruler of the Papal State (931-954). He desired to render permanent the family hold on the State, and to prevent any revival of the empire; for, whoever was crowned as emperor, this family ambition would find in him, inevitably, an opponent; the official protector of the Holy See could not allow any other master of the Roman See but himself. The danger of such revival came in the first place from Alberic's father-in-law, King Hugh. He made a series of attempts to capture Rome -- an event which would of course have been followed by his coronation as emperor -- in 933, In 936 and in 941. Each time Alberic was too strong for him and Hugh died his ambition unachieved. His son and heir, Lothair, did not live long enough to be a danger to Alberic; but a more serious competitor by far was the King of Germany, Otto I, whom Lothair's widow, Adelaide, now called in to deliver her from Berengar of Ivrea who had usurped her rights. #### So, in 951, the German king descended on Italy. He took Pavia, liberated Adelaide, and married her. Then he turned towards Rome. But Alberic, once more, successfully warded off the Charlemagne-to-be; and Otto made his way back to Germany. #### As ruler of Rome, Alberic was at least satisfactory. The four popes of his choice were men of good life, and the period was one of religious restoration, thanks very largely to the influence of St. Odo of Cluny. It came to an end all too soon, in the most singular departure from tradition that the century produced. Alberic's health failed prematurely. He was scarcely forty when, in 954, death claimed him, while his heir Octavian was still in his teens. Octavian, despite his age, succeeded peacefully to his father's power, and to the hope of something more, for before Alberic died he had extracted a promise on oath from the electors that, when the pope died, they would choose Octavian. So it fell out. Octavian succeeded his father in the temporal sovereignty of Rome, with its new tradition of naming the pope, and a few months later he also succeeded the pope, Agapitus 11 (956). He was then sixteen years of age. #### There was this to be said for the scheme that it ended, for once, the rivalry of nobility and clergy, of the temporal and spiritual interests, since John XII -- Octavian's new style -- combined them, eminently, in his person. The pope was once more supreme in his State, and supreme because, before he was pope, he happened to be, like his father before him. "prince and senator of all the Romans. " #### It was already a serious disadvantage that the person in whom these offices were combined was so young; it was another that he did not in the least realise the obligations which his spiritual rank entailed. The most serious thing of all was that the older he grew the less he seemed to care. He was master as no pope had been master since the Papal State began. How he used his power is most decently told in the spare and reticent lines of Mgr. Duchesne. [ ] #### " We know, too, in what other fashion his youthful spirits overflowed, and how Rome was soon the witness of truly appalling scandals. The young pope took little pleasure in the ritual ceremonies of the Church. Matins scarcely ever saw him present. His nights, no less than his days, were spent in the company of women and young men, in hunting and in banqueting. His sacrilegious love affairs were flaunted unashamedly. Here no barrier restrained him, neither the rank of the women for whom he lusted nor even his kinship with them. The Lateran was become a bad house. No decent woman was safe in Rome. This debauchery was paid for from the Church's treasury, a treasury filled by a simony utterly regardless of the character of those who paid. We hear of a boy of ten consecrated bishop, of a deacon ordained in a stable, of high dignitaries deprived of their eyes or castrated. Cruelty crowned the debauchery. That nothing might finally be lacking, impiety, too, was given its place, and men told how, in the feasting at the Lateran, the pope used to drink to the health of the devil. " #### None the less the administrative machine continued to work. What occasion the almost universal breakdown of communications left to these popes for the exercise of their primacy was not neglected. Even John XII could regulate the lives of the monks of Subiaco recently restored by his father. #### The regime went on for six years. Then, driven by dire necessity, for the young pope had none of his father's political gifts, an appeal was sent to the German king. Otto, barred from Rome in 951 by Alberic, needed no second invitation from Alberic's son. As in 951, he met with little resistance in the Italian kingdom. He entered Rome, and on the Feast of the Purification, 962, John set the imperial crown on his head. This time the pope himself had knotted the rope that was to hang him. #### The emperor swore to defend the pope and the pope swore to be loyal to the emperor. Once more the imperial rights in papal elections were carefully set out. In practice the only difference was to be that a German prince would now choose the pope where, for the last sixty years, he had been chosen by an Italian. #### The emperor was soon called upon to exercise his privilege. Scarcely had he left Rome (February, 963) than John XII began to plan an anti-imperialist league with the defeated King of Italy. Otto returned. A hastily gathered council listened to the numerous complaints of the pope's scandalous life. He was summoned to appear and then, after a month's delay, solemnly deposed (December 4, 963). In his place, with the emperor's consent, they elected one of the lay officers of the State -- Leo VIII. The new pope lasted just as long as Otto remained in Rome. When the emperor left, John XII reappeared with his partisans and Leo fled. A new council now pronounced Leo's election invalid, since no council was competent to pass sentence on the pope and since Leo, at the moment of his election, was a layman. A few months later John XII died, in circumstances as scandalous as those in which most of his life had passed. In his place, ignoring Otto's pope, the Romans elected Benedict V (May 22). But Otto returned and, a month later to the day, Leo VIII was reinstated while Benedict was transported to Hamburg to live there as the prisoner of the archbishop. #### The ascendancy of the house of Theophylact was ended. Henceforth they had a powerful rival, in their schemes to dominate the papacy. But this powerful rival, none the less, was not all-powerful and to the regime of 904-963 there succeeded a period of confusion where the emperor or the great Roman family chose the pope, according to the opportunity of the moment. It was Otto I who appointed John XIII (965-972) -- a relative of John XII, for he was the son of Marozia's younger sister -- and then, on John XIII's death, Benedict VI. The next year (973) the Roman family came once more to the fore, in the person of Crescentius, brother to the dead pope John XIII. Benedict VI was now deposed; and, through the influence of Crescentius, Boniface VII was elected in his place. At his orders Benedict was, apparently, strangled Boniface was now (June 974) driven out in his turn by the imperial commissioners, who chose as pope Benedict VII. This pope -- a reformer who, as Bishop of Sutri, had been a friend to the new monastic reform of Cluny -- reigned for nine years. When he died the emperor, Otto II, [ ] chose for pope his own chancellor, who took the name of John XIV (983). Then, prematurely, a few weeks later, Otto II died, leaving for successor a baby three years old. It was the opportunity for Boniface VII -- murderer of Benedict VI -- to return from Constantinople where, since 974, he had found shelter. John XIV was overthrown, and imprisoned in St. Angelo; where he died miserably a few months later (August 20, 984). #### Boniface thenceforth reigned peaceably until his sudden death, eleven months later. His patron, Crescentius, had predeceased him. It was, then, this man's son who "managed" the new pope, John XV. When, in 996, this pope died, Otto III, now of age, was himself in Italy. Crescentius "II" dared not ignore the emperor;. and, on the Roman petition for a new pope, Otto named one of his own cousins, Bruno of Carinthia, who took the name of Gregory V: he was the first German pope. [ ] The emperor had no sooner left Rome than, as before in 963, the pope imperially imposed was expelled; and Crescentius installed a pope of his own -- John XVI. Otto however returned in the spring of 998. Crescentius was beheaded; and John XVI, his ears and nose slit, his eyes and tongue torn out, was solemnly deposed. #### Gregory V did not long survive his restoration. In February, 999, he died -- poisoned, it is likely, by some henchman of the rival faction. The emperor, since the victory over Crescentius, had made Rome his residence -- the only detail he was destined to realise of his dream of really restoring the empire of Augustus. He now appointed to succeed his cousin his old tutor Gerbert, Archbishop successively of Rheims and Ravenna -- the first French pope, in immediate succession to the first German. This new pope, Silvester II, was the most distinguished scholar of the time. But the learning which made him almost a legend even to his own contemporaries, could not supply for the weakness of the young emperor; nor could it exorcise the brutal determination of the factions to regain their century-old supremacy in Rome. Otto III was driven out, two years after Silvester's succession, to die a wanderer at the foot of Soracte in January, 1002. Nor were his followers, nor the pope, strong enough to secure the burial in Rome of this last emperor to dream of making the ancient city once more the capital of the world. #### Otto, twenty years of age, was not yet married. The succession passed to his kinsman Henry, Duke of Bavaria. In Rome another Crescentius had appeared -- the son of the victim of Otto's justice. It was he who, in Rome, was Otto's effective successor. The rivalry for supremacy, and for what went with this -- the power of naming the pope -- between the house of Theophylact and the foreign kings seemed ended. It was just a hundred years since the first Theophylact had arisen to power through Sergius III; and his family still maintained their hold. But it was to last only a few years longer. A rival clan was to wrest it from them; and then, after scandals that recalled John XII, a king from Germany was again to interfere. For yet another fifty years the Holy See was to remain enslaved to one lay master or another. #### Silvester II died peaceably, at Rome, in 1003. John XVII who followed him reigned only for six months. Next came John XVIII (1003-1009) and Sergius IV (1009-1012). All these were the choice of the third Crescentius, and good men. Crescentius "III" predeceased his last nominee by a matter of months, and when Sergius IV died (May 12, 1012) there was a double election. The faction of Crescentius elected Gregory; while another and equally powerful band of the same old family, represented by the Count of Tusculum, supported Theophylact, one of the count's own younger sons. It was Theophylact who was finally installed -- under the style of Benedict VIII -- and Gregory carried his case, as usual, outside Italy to the German king, Henry II. Henry, however, decided for Benedict, and in 1014 received from him in St. Peter's the imperial crown. #### Once again the empire of Charlemagne had been revived to honour the king of the Germans. But this time it was no mere forced compliment on the part of the pope. Benedict VIII was a strong pope who set himself to the task of repairing the damage wrought by the upheavals of the past century and a half. The invasions had finally ended. Missionaries were at work converting the Northmen in the country coming to be called Normandy and the Magyars in Hungary. At a great council at Pavia the pope opened the campaign for a religious restoration by an attack on the most serious of the novelties that had developed during the chaos -- clerical marriage. To the end of his reign he remained on the best of terms with the emperor, who, indeed asked nothing better-himself a man of saintly life [ ] -- than to co-operate in the revival. #### Another powerful auxiliary was the pope's brother, Romanus, who was in practice the ruler of the State -- much as Alberic had been, eighty years before, in the time when his brother, John XI, was pope. When Benedict died, in 1024, Romanus, for all that he was a layman, took his place. He called himself John XIX, and, alas, continuing to be the secular noble, revived the worst traditions of his tenth-century predecessors. St. Henry II also had died in 1024. The new emperor, Conrad II (1024-1039), was too interested in his chances of making money out of abuses to regret the appearance of a pope in whom abuses found the highest of sanctions. #### John XIX was sufficiently scandalous. His successor outdid even the scandals of John XII. John XIX died in 1032. He had still a third brother living, Alberic. This man had two sons, Gregory and Theophylact. Gregory was made ruler of the Papal State, with the title of Consul, and Theophylact became pope as Benedict IX. The emperor, Conrad II, found the arrangement excellent. The new pope was treacherous and dissolute, but he lent himself easily to the emperor's schemes. He lasted twelve years, until, in 1044, the Romans rose and drove him out, possibly with the aid of the Crescentius faction; and then, lavishly. thereto, they elected as pope the Bishop of Sabina, Silvester III (January 1045). Benedict's party, however, speedily restored him, and Silvester returned to his old see (March 10). On May 5 Benedict suddenly resigned in favour of his godfather, the archpriest of St. John-before-the-Latin-Gate. The new pope took the title of Gregory VI, and all that was healthy in Italy hailed his accession with relief. St. Peter Damian wrote to congratulate him and, from a Benedictine monastery on the Aventine, Gregory called one of the monks to be his secretary, Hildebrand. It was the entry into the history of the Church and of Europe of a man so great that it is hard to characterise him. But it was not yet his hour. There remained the Crescentius' pope, Silvester III; there remained Benedict IX, soon to return, and backed by his powerful clan; there remained, too, the question of Gregory VI's own election. [ ] In all these stirring events of the past year all parties had ignored the emperor. It was obvious, given the tradition since Charlemagne's time, that the ultimate decision between the three claimants would lie with him; and Benedict IX stood for a family always strongly imperialistic. What would the emperor -- Henry III -- do? #### Throughout what was the empire of Charlemagne the same causes produced, during this century, the same effects: ecclesiastical discipline in decay, simony rife and clerical marriage the rule, nobles appointing their own kin to abbeys and sees in order the more easily to plunder them. Richard I, Duke of Normandy, gives Rouen to his son, Bayeux and Avranches to nephews, Lisieux to his grandson. Richard II continues the tradition. It is the same in the south of France where sees become a family possession, passing from uncle to nephew, and the same is frequently the case in Burgundy too. Where the lord has no rights in the election the vacancy is often the occasion for his illegal intervention, bribery and violence making the election a nullity. As one lord's son becomes pope at sixteen years old, so for another boy of ten his father buys the Archbishopric of Narbonne, and for the rest of his long episcopate this curious archbishop is put to selling lands, castles, privileges, and even ordinations, in order to pay off the debt of his initial expenses, endeavouring to sell at a profit in detail what he had bought in bulk! Sees were still, for the princes, an easy means of rewarding service; their revenues were even made over to women, as witness the French queen whose security for her creditors was her expectation of a see! In the abbeys which passed into the hands of such strange abbots the most extraordinary developments are recorded. We learn of abbots married and living in the abbeys with their families and, less credible still, that their monks followed their example, such abbeys apparently being transformed into the equivalent of a vast country club. The matter of the monastic vows was, in such places, a joke, and the abbot who tried to introduce reforms there did so at the risk of his life. Thus Erluin, who strove to restore the religious life of the great abbey of Lobbes lost his eyes and his tongue and was left for dead by the indignant monks. Between these brigands installed in cloisters, or in sees, private wars raged as furiously as between the other robber-barons. In England, too, the same kind of disorders appeared, and at one time Pope Formosus had it in mind to excommunicate the whole English hierarchy. #### It was the most serious feature of all that men grew used to the sight of these abuses, and that the usurpations seemed well on the way to acquire force of law. The prince, nominating and deposing bishops now for centuries, comes to regard such nominations as appertaining to his prerogative. The see has become his property as truly as the other lordships recommended to his protection by their owners and received back from him as from their lord. Where such a development has taken place -- that is to say in the generality of abbeys and sees -- election means no more than the lord's right to appoint. That right -- and the right to exploit the monastic properties -- he disposes of as he disposes of any other property. He divides it; he bequeaths it, he sells it; he gives it as a dowry. In southern France it was more common for such rights to be owned collectively. In the north the lord generally tended to keep it whole in the hands of his family. Germany, more than anywhere, these rights remained with the king -- the emperor to be. As the Romans approached the emperor when the see was vacant, asking him to name the new pope, so did the chapters of such sees petition the lord who owned the right to name the new bishop. #### Such "rights" once established there were not wanting lords to exploit them financially. The lord of Narbonne received 100,000 pieces of gold from Guifred of Cerdagne when he appointed the latter's son, the boy of ten, as archbishop. Sometimes the right to elect was sold for a single occasion, the owner being careful to arrange for a commission. It is one of the glories of William the Conqueror, set out by his biographer with all the praise it deserves, that he never sold a single ecclesiastical dignity. Systematic simony, and the other contemporary practice of clerical marriage, combined to produce the beginnings of a third abuse. The married bishop and priest had but one thought -- how best to transmit his benefice to his own family. The clergy, if such practices spread, would become a hereditary caste, and the property originally given to the churches for the support of charity be the rich endowment of the privileged few. We meet such married bishops in Normandy and in Brittany, at Rouen, Le Mans, Seez, Quimper and Nantes, at Gascogne and at Agen, all of them leaving their sees to their sons, and, in one case at least, securing the succession by associating the son with the power while the bishop himself was still alive, as the princes were beginning to have their heirs crowned in their own lifetime. The old law, that forbade the ordination of the sons of a priest born after their father's ordination, had fallen into oblivion. #### With such abuses in the hierarchy, and in the monasteries, it is not surprising that the religious life of the parochial clergy suffered to the point of disappearance. The best elements of the time sought to protect themselves by enlistment in some abbey of good repute. Despite the immense losses through the long-endured royal supremacy, such abbeys still existed, and in no small number. It was now that the practice became general that the monk should be a priest, and as priests -- and not merely as preachers -- the monks began to serve the countrysides about their abbeys. Between such abbeys, loth to submit to the destructive authority of the local bishop -- and therefore often exempted from it by the Holy See -- and the bishops there was sometimes a feud that developed into war. #### A final consequence of the confusion of the time was the reflected confusion in theological thought. The horror inspired by the sight of wicked bishops bred the relieving thought that such wickedness must destroy their spiritual power. The blessings, masses, ordinations of such prelates were, then, mere ritual gestures, void of real effect -- an old and often condemned heresy had reappeared, and it was to take hold of a strong party among the coming reformers. In this era of chaos it escaped condemnation, and it possibly drew support from the condemnations and re-condemnations of their predecessors' ordinations made by so many of the popes of this time. ####  |