The Historians' History of the World 08 [Parthians, Sassanids and Arabs; The Crusades and the Papacy]

A Monk of the Middle Ages

The pontificate of Stephen soon came to an end. A new revolution revenged the disinterment of the insulted prelate. And now the fierceness of political rather than religious faction had utterly destroyed all reverence for the sacred person of the pope. Stephen was thrown into prison by his enemies, and strangled. The convenient charge of usurpation, always brought against the popes whom their adversaries dethroned or put to death, may have reconciled their minds to the impious deed, but it is difficult to discover in what respect the title of Pope Stephen VI was defective.

[897-911 A.D.]

Pope now succeeded pope with such rapidity as to awaken the inevitable suspicion, either that those were chosen who were likely to make a speedy vacancy, or they received but a fatal gift in the pontificate of Rome. Romanus and Theodore II survived their promotion each only a few months. The latter, by his restoration of Formosus to the rights of Christian burial, and by his reversal of the acts of Stephen VI, may be presumed to have belonged to that faction. The next election was contested with all the strength and violence of the adverse parties. John IX was successful; his competitor Sergius, according to some accounts formerly the discomfited competitor of Formosus, and his bitter and implacable enemy, fled to the powerful protection of the marquis of Tuscany. Sergius was excommunicated, with several other priests and inferior clergy, as accessory to the insults against the body of Formosus. Sergius laughed to scorn the thunders of his rival, so long as he was under the protection of the powerful house of Tuscany. With John IX, who died July, 901, closed the ninth century of Christianity; the tenth, in Italy at least the iron age, had already darkened upon Rome; the pontificate had been won by crime and vacated by murder.

This iron age, as it has been called, opened with the pontificate of Benedict IV (900-903), the successor of John IX. The only act recorded of Benedict IV was the coronation of the unfortunate Louis of Provence, the competitor of Berengar for the empire. Louis, according to imperial usage, set up his tribunal and adjudged causes at Rome. On the death of Benedict, the prudent precautions established by John IX to introduce some regularity and control over the anarchy of an election by a clergy rent into factions by a lawless nobility, and still more lawless people, during this utter helplessness and the abeyance, or the strife for the empire between rival princes, fell into utter neglect or impotency. The papacy became the prize of the most active, daring, and violent. Leo V won the prize; before two months he was ejected and thrown into prison by Christopher, one of his own presbyters and chaplains. The same year, or early in the next, Christopher was in his turn ignominiously driven from Rome.

It was under the protection of the powerful Tuscan prince Berengar that the exiled Sergius, at the head of a strong force of Tuscan soldiers, appeared in Rome, deposed Christopher, who had just deposed Leo V, and took possession of the papal throne. Sergius had been seven years an exile in Tuscany; for seven years he ruled as supreme but not undisputed pontiff. This pope has been loaded with every vice and every enormity which can blacken the character of man. Yet as to his reign there is almost total obscurity. The only certain act which has transpired is his restoration of the Lateran palace, which had fallen into ruins; an act which indicates a period of comparative peace and orderly administration, with the command of a large revenue. In these violent times Sergius probably scrupled at no violence; but if he drove a pope from the throne of St. Peter, that pope had just before deposed his patron, and with great cruelty.