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

A Bishop of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries

The rebellion was crushed for a time; during the five remaining years of John’s pontificate the presence of Otto overawed the refractory Romans. He ruled in peace. At his death the undisturbed vacancy of the see for three months implies the humble consultation of Otto’s wishes (he had now returned to Germany) on the appointment of his successor.

The choice fell on Benedict VI, as usual of Roman birth (January 19th, 973). The factions of Rome now utterly baffle conjecture as to their motives, as to the passions, not the principles, which actuated their leaders. Twice (the second time after an interval of ten years, during which he was absent from Rome), the same man, a cardinal deacon, seizes and murders two popes; sets himself up as supreme pontiff; but though with power to commit these enormities, he cannot maintain on either occasion his ill-won tiara.

The formidable Otto the Great died the year of the accession of Benedict VI (December 25th, 967). Otto II, whose character was as yet unknown, had succeeded to the imperial throne; he had been already the colleague of his father in the empire. He had been crowned at Rome by Pope John XIII.

[974-985 A.D.]

The year after the accession of Otto II, on a sudden, Boniface, surnamed Francone, described as the son of Ferruccio, a name doubtless well known to his contemporaries, seized the unsuspecting pope Benedict and cast him into a dungeon (July, 974), where shortly after he was strangled. Boniface assumed the papacy, but he had miscalculated the strength of his faction; in one month he was forced to fly the city. Yet he fled not with so much haste but that he carried off all the treasures, even the sacred vessels from the church of St. Peter. He found his way to Constantinople, where he might seem to have been forgotten in his retreat. The peaceful succession of Benedict VII, the nephew or grandson of the famous Alberic, may lead to the conclusion that the faction of that family still survived, and was opposed to that of Boniface. The first act of Benedict, as might be expected, was the assembling a council for the excommunication of the murderer and anti-pope Boniface. This is the first and last important act in the barren annals of Pope Benedict VII. Under the protection of the emperor Otto II, or by the strength of his Roman faction, he retained peaceful possession of the see for nine years, an unusual period of quiet. He was succeeded, no doubt through the influence of the emperor, by John XIV, who was no Roman, but bishop of Pavia. But in the year of John’s accession (983), Otto II was preparing a great armament to avenge a terrible defeat by the Saracens. He had hardly fled from the conquering Saracens, and made his escape from a Greek ship by leaping into the sea and swimming ashore. He now threatened with all the forces of the realm to bridge the Straits of Messina, and reunite Sicily to the empire of the West. In the midst of his preparations he died at Rome.

The fugitive Boniface Francone had kept up his correspondence with Rome; he might presume on the unpopularity of a pontiff, if not of German birth, imposed by foreign influence, and now deprived of his all-powerful protector. With the same suddenness as before, he reappeared in Rome, seized the pope, imprisoned him in the castle of St. Angelo, of which important fortress he had become master, and there put him to death by starvation or by poison (August 20th, 984). He exposed the body to the view of the people, who dared not murmur. He seated himself, as it seems, unresisted, in the papal chair. The holy see was speedily delivered from this murderous usurper. He died suddenly. The people revenged themselves for their own base acquiescence in his usurpation by cowardly insults on his dead body; it was dragged through the streets, and at length buried, either by the compassion or the attachment (for Boniface must have had a powerful faction in Rome) of certain ecclesiastics. These bloody revolutions could not but destroy all reverence for their ecclesiastical rulers in the people of Rome.g