Absolute Monarchs (10 page)

Almost immediately afterward the Basilica of St. John Lateran was largely destroyed by an earthquake—a disaster that was widely interpreted as a sign of divine displeasure at Pope Stephen’s conduct. But supernatural portents were hardly necessary; to every Roman it must have been abundantly clear that the pope had overstepped the mark. Six months later he was deposed, stripped of his papal insignia, and thrown into prison, where he was shortly afterward strangled.

After six popes in seven years, a parish priest from the unfortunately named village of Priapi was elected as Leo V in 903. How this came about is unclear, but it hardly matters: after a month there occurred a palace revolution, in the course of which a cleric called Christopher overthrew him, flung him into prison, and had himself proclaimed and consecrated. Christopher—who has gone down in history as an antipope—fared better than Leo, lasting four months instead of one; but he in turn was toppled early in 904 by an aristocratic Roman who had taken an active part in the “trial” of Formosus and who now assumed the name of Sergius III. Christopher was sent to join Leo in jail. Not long afterward—moved, as he claimed, by pity—Sergius had them both strangled.

At this point there appears in papal history the ravishingly beautiful but sinister figure of Marozia, senatrix of Rome. She was the daughter of the Roman Consul Theophylact I, Count of Tusculum, and his wife, Theodora; Bishop Liudprand of Cremona described her as “a shameless strumpet … who was sole monarch of Rome and wielded power like a man.” The two daughters of this unlovely couple, Marozia and another Theodora, were, he continues, “not only her equals but could even surpass her in the exercises beloved of Venus.” He may well have been wrong about the younger sister, of whom little is known; but for Marozia it was an understatement. Lover, mother, and grandmother of popes—“a rare genealogy,” sniffs Gibbon—she was born in about 890 and at the age of fifteen became the mistress of Sergius III, her father’s cousin. (Their son was to be the future Pope John XI.) In 909 she married an adventurer named Alberic who had made himself Duke of Spoleto and by whom she had a second son, Alberic II. By this time the papal Curia, which had long been the effective government of Rome, had come completely under the control of the local aristocracy, of whom she was by far the most powerful representative; the Papacy was in her hands.
⁵

Of the five popes intervening between Sergius and John XI, two were puppets of Marozia; together they reigned for less than three years. The third, John X, was of a very different caliber: it was he, together with Theophylact of Tusculum and Alberic I, who inflicted a decisive defeat on the Saracens at the Garigliano River in June 915. But Marozia hated him. Her hatred may partly have been due to the fact that he had been her mother’s lover—when he had been appointed Bishop of Ravenna, the elder Theodora had actually summoned him back to Rome and thrust him into the papal chair—but can best be explained by her own ambition. John was too tough, too intelligent, and when, toward the end of 927, he began to show serious signs of opposition and even appeared, with his brother Peter, to be threatening Marozia’s authority, she moved against him. Peter was struck down in the Lateran before his brother’s eyes, and soon afterward Marozia, with her second husband, Guy, Margrave of Tuscany,
⁶
had the pope himself deposed and imprisoned in the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he was soon afterward smothered to death with pillows.

THE REASON FOR
Marozia’s actions was not only to eliminate a rival; it was also to leave the papal throne vacant for her son. Unfortunately, the boy was still only about eighteen, so she put in two elderly puppets as stopgaps before having him installed as John XI in the early spring of 931. By that time she had disposed of Guy in favor of a far more promising prize: Hugh of Provence, who had recently been elected king of Italy and had been duly anointed by the unfortunate John X. True, Hugh had a perfectly good wife already, but she now conveniently died, just in time to allow the marriage to take place. More of an obstacle was the fact that Guy had been Hugh’s half brother, which made the projected marriage incestuous; Hugh simply declared Guy and his half brother, Lambert, Margrave of Tuscany, bastards—one can imagine what their mother thought about that—and, when Lambert raised his voice in protest, had him blinded and thrown into prison, where he died shortly afterward. Few couples presenting themselves for marriage had so much blood on their hands. Unsurprisingly, their wedding ceremony in 932 was not even celebrated in church, but in the Castel Sant’Angelo. On the other hand, it was performed by the pope himself—the first and last instance in history of a pope officiating at the marriage of his mother. Once the knot was tied, the couple seemed to carry all before them; nothing, as far as could be seen, now stood between them and the imperial throne of the West.

But Marozia had miscalculated. She had forgotten another of her sons. Alberic, the pope’s half brother, had, with each of his mother’s subsequent marriages, found himself pushed further into the background. He had seen Hugh’s way of dealing with unwanted relatives and had received an unmistakable warning during a feast in Castel Sant’Angelo when his new stepfather had struck him across the face. His only hope was to act while there was still time. The Romans had no love for Hugh, whose cruelty and general boorishness were already notorious; besides, they were always ready for an uprising. In December 932 a mob stormed the castle. Hugh managed to escape through a window; Marozia and her son the pope found themselves in prison cells. Of the formidable senatrix of Rome nothing more is heard; John XI seems to have been later released, though he was kept under what amounted to house arrest in the Lateran, where, according to Bishop Liudprand, Alberic treated him as his personal slave.

Alberic was now undisputed master of Rome, which he was to rule for the next twenty years, on the whole wisely and well, successfully resisting by various means—including a diplomatic marriage to Hugh’s daughter—repeated attempts by Hugh to return to power. He effectively appointed the next five popes, three of whom treated him with the respect that he demanded. The first exception was Stephen VIII, who after two years of obedience seems in some way to have fallen foul of his master. What actually occurred is uncertain, but there is little doubt that the pope was brutally mutilated and died of his injuries. The last of the five was Octavian, Alberic’s bastard son, still in his teens. Stricken by a mortal fever in the summer of 954, aged barely forty, Alberic had himself carried to the altar above the tomb of St. Peter, where he gathered the leading Romans around his deathbed and made them swear on the bones of the Apostle that on the death of the reigning pope, Agapetus II, they would elect Octavian supreme pontiff. It was his last action. On August 31 he died.

It says much for Alberic’s authority—if little for their wisdom—that the Romans agreed. Octavian, of course, immediately succeeded his father as temporal ruler of Rome; on the death of Agapetus in December 955 he changed his name to John
⁷
—and was duly elected pope. The choice could not have been more calamitous. Not only was the young Holy Father supremely uninterested in matters spiritual; he was to mark the apogee of the papal pornocracy. No one has put it better than Gibbon:

we read, with some surprise, that the worthy grandson of Marozia lived in public adultery with the matrons of Rome; that the Lateran Palace was turned into a school for prostitution; and that his rapes of virgins and widows had deterred the female pilgrims from visiting the shrine of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by his successor.

Not for nothing was John XII the grandson of Marozia, one of the most shameless debauchees of her age. He allowed the city—indeed he encouraged it—to slide into chaos, using its wealth as well as that of the Papal States to gratify his own passion for gambling and for every kind of sexual license. Rome’s political position began to deteriorate fast; moreover, a dangerous new enemy was threatening, in the person of Hugh of Provence’s nephew the Margrave Berengar of Ivrea. Berengar had been the uncrowned but effective king of Italy since Hugh’s return to Arles in 945 and had been making trouble ever since; in 959 he had seized the Duchy of Spoleto and had now begun to ravage the papal territories to the north of Rome. By the autumn of 960 John had no alternative but to appeal to the German King Otto of Saxony—offering him, in return for his help, the imperial crown.

OTTO ASKED NOTHING
better. All his life he had been guided by a single dream—to resurrect the empire of Charlemagne. As an earnest of this intention he had even arranged his German coronation in Charlemagne’s beautiful circular church at Aachen. He had welded Germany together as a single state; outside Augsburg in 955 he had inflicted an overwhelming defeat on the Huns, after five hundred years still the scourge of Europe; his name was known and respected across the continent. On receipt of the pope’s appeal he crossed the Alps at the head of a sizable army, reaching the Holy City in January 962, and on Candlemas Day, February 2, he and his queen, Adelaide of Burgundy, with their official sword bearer standing guard immediately behind them, knelt before the young reprobate thirty years their junior and were crowned in St. Peter’s, the pope swearing on his side to give no support to Berengar. So it was that one of the most contemptible of all the pontiffs restored the Holy Roman Empire of Charlemagne, which was to last for a further nine and a half centuries.

Otto left Rome two weeks later, after treating John to several patronizing homilies urging him to reform his scandalous ways. Ever since the day of his coronation he had insisted on addressing the pope as a refractory schoolboy, and relations between the two had fast deteriorated; even so, he cannot have expected John to enter into negotiations with Berengar’s son Adalbert as soon as his back was turned. Why John did so passes comprehension, and at the outset Otto himself seems to have been incredulous. When the report was brought to him, he was busy besieging Berengar in the Apennines; his first reaction was to send a mission of inquiry to Rome. The mission returned with juicy details about the pope’s innumerable mistresses, fat and thin, rich and poor: the one whom he had made governor of cities and loaded with church treasure; another who had been his father’s paramour before him, whom he had made pregnant and who had died of a hemorrhage; of the pope’s indiscriminate seizure of female pilgrims. “The palace of the Lateran,” they reported, “which had once sheltered saints, was now a harlot’s brothel.”

Even now the emperor tended toward an indulgent view. “He is only a boy,” he is reported as saying, “and will soon alter if good men set him an example.” Deciding to give John one more chance, he dispatched another envoy, more high-powered than his predecessors: Liudprand, Bishop of Cremona.

Liudprand, as he himself reported,
⁸
was received by the pope with all honor, but he soon saw clearly enough with what scorn and indifference John was prepared to treat the emperor. Since he had given absolutely no satisfaction on any of the contested issues, there was clearly no point in remaining in Rome, and the bishop set off back to his master. Even before his arrival, however, Otto had learned that Adalbert had arrived in Rome and was preparing in his turn to receive the imperial crown. It was by now July, and the German soldiers were expiring in the heat. Otto waited till September; then he marched on Rome.

It was all over quite quickly. John made a brief show of resistance, which fooled nobody; then, as Otto approached, he scooped up whatever portable treasure remained and fled with Adalbert to Tivoli. The emperor entered Rome unopposed. Three days later he summoned a synod—Liudprand lists almost a hundred of the churchmen present—and addressed it in person. He began with an expression of regret that the Holy Father had not seen fit to be present and then called for evidence against him.

Thereupon the cardinal priest Peter got up and testified that he had seen the Pope celebrate mass without himself communicating. John, Bishop of Narni, and John cardinal deacon then declared that they had seen the Pope ordain a deacon in a stable and at an improper season. Benedict cardinal deacon with his fellow deacons and priests said that they knew the Pope had been paid for ordaining bishops and that in the city of Todi he had appointed a bishop for ten years. On the question of his sacrilege, they said, no inquiries were necessary; knowledge of it was a matter of eyesight, not of hearsay. As regards his adultery, though they had no visual information, they knew for certain that he had carnal acquaintance with Rainer’s widow, with Stephana his father’s concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece; and that he had turned the holy palace into a brothel and resort for harlots. He had gone hunting publicly; he had blinded his spiritual father Benedict, who had died of his injuries; he had caused the death of cardinal subdeacon John by castrating him; he had set houses on fire and appeared in public equipped with sword, helmet and cuirass. To all this they testified; while everyone, clergy and laity alike, loudly accused him of drinking wine for the love of the devil. At dice, they said, he asked the aid of Jupiter, Venus, and the other demons; he did not celebrate matins nor observe the canonical hours, nor fortify himself with the sign of the cross.
⁹

Otto then addressed a letter to the pope, rehearsing the charges and “earnestly begging” him to return and clear himself. “If,” he added, “you perchance fear the violence of a rash multitude, we declare under oath that no action is contemplated contrary to the sanction of the holy canons.” But John’s reply was all too typical of him. In what was clearly a studied insult, it completely ignored the emperor’s presence in Rome, while its grammar alone was enough to indicate that he had drafted it himself: