Absolute Monarchs

by John Julius Norwich

  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:

  Bishop John to all the Bishops. We hear that you wish to make another Pope. If you do, I excommunicate you by almighty God, and you have no power to ordain no one, or celebrate mass.

  The emperor and synod’s reply was heavy with irony, but it made its point clearly enough:

  We always thought, or rather believed, that two negatives made an affirmative, if your authority did not weaken that of the ancient authors.… If—which Heaven forbid—under any pretense you refrain from coming and defending yourself … then we shall disregard your excommunication, and rather turn it upon yourself, as we have justly the power to do.

  The imperial envoys arrived at Tivoli only to find that the pope had gone hunting and was nowhere to be found. Not bothering to wait, they returned at once to Rome, where on December 1, 963, the synod assembled for the third time and the emperor asked the bishops to consider their verdict. It did not take them long:

  “We request your imperial majesty that this monster—whom no virtue redeems from vice—be driven from the holy Roman Church; and that another be appointed in his place, who by the example of his goodly conversation may prove himself both ruler and benefactor, living rightly himself and setting us an example of like conduct.…”

  At that all cried with one voice: “We elect as our shepherd Leo, the venerable chief notary of the holy Roman Church.… He shall be the supreme and universal Pope, and we hereby condemn the apostate John because of his vicious life.” The whole assembly repeated these words three times, and then with the emperor’s consent escorted the aforesaid Leo to the Lateran Palace … and later at due season elevated him to the supreme priesthood.

  But the Romans refused to accept him. The problem was that Leo was, as everyone knew, not the free choice of the bishops but the emperor’s nominee. John may have been a monster, but he was Rome’s monster; for better or for worse the Romans had elected him, and they were not prepared to see him overthrown by a German barbarian. Their first revolt was little more than a disturbance and was easily put down by the imperial troops. But Otto could not stay in Rome forever. His feudal levies were committed to serve him for a strictly limited period, and he still had to deal with Berengar and Adalbert. And so, in January 964, he left—and John returned.

  His revenge was terrible. Tongues were torn out, hands, fingers, and noses hacked off. All the synod’s decrees were declared null and void; a new one called on February 26 excommunicated the luckless Leo, who fled in terror to the emperor’s side. But Otto’s mind was elsewhere. By that time he had successfully dealt with Berengar, but Adalbert was still at large and it was no time to abandon the struggle against him. Not till early May was the emperor able to lead his army back to Rome, and he was still on the way when news was brought to him that John was dead—though whether of a stroke brought on by his exertions on behalf of a lady with whom he was at that time in bed or of injuries received from her furious husband, opinion was divided. He was twenty-seven years old.

  1. In those days an archimandrite was the head of a monastery, the equivalent of an abbot in the West. Later the title would be applied to the head of a group of monasteries—Mount Athos, for example, or Meteora—and later still to a senior administrative official ranking just below a bishop: an archdeacon, perhaps?

  2. The murders were in fact the work of Anastasius’s cousin Eleutherius after a failed attempt to elope with the daughter. This second excommunication was soon lifted, and we know that Anastasius attended the Eighth Ecumenical Council at Constantinople in 869–870, when he attempted unsuccessfully to arrange a marriage between Ermengard, the daughter of the Western Emperor Louis II, and the son of the Byzantine Emperor Basil I.

  3. More accurately, his second successor; but the intervening Pope Boniface VI, who had been twice unfrocked for immorality, died of gout after just a fortnight.

  4. It is only fair to add that it was later miraculously recovered by a hermit, rehabilitated, and reinterred in its former tomb.

  5. Was she, one can’t help wondering, the origin of Pope Joan?

  6. Alberic I had been murdered in Orta between 924 and 926.

  7. He was only the second pope to do so. John II had been the first, in 533. As his real name had been Mercury, he had little choice. John XII in fact continued to use his former name as temporal ruler of Rome.

  8. His immensely entertaining Chronicle of Otto’s Reign includes a full account of his mission, though, like all of his writings, it should be taken with more than a pinch of salt.

  9. Liudprand, Chronicle of Otto’s Reign, chap. 11.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Schism

  (964–1054)

  The mutual hostility which had been steadily increasing between the German emperor and the people of Rome was in no way diminished by the death of John XII. In the emperor’s eyes Leo VIII continued as rightful pope, but the Romans would have none of him. Instead of recalling Leo to Rome, they sent envoys to the emperor in Rieti, informing him that after the libertine John they felt the need of a devout reformer; they therefore requested leave to elect a learned and morally irreproachable deacon named Benedict. Otto, of course, angrily refused; having bee
n personally responsible for Leo’s elevation he could hardly have done otherwise, and he was determined to uphold his principle: that no pope could be elected or consecrated without his consent. But in refusing he must have known that he was throwing down a deliberate challenge, and the Romans had no hesitation in taking it up. Benedict V was duly elected and enthroned, and it was only when Otto marched back to Rome with Leo in 964 and laid siege to the city that they surrendered him. A synod, presided over jointly by Otto and Leo, condemned Benedict, who humbly refused to defend himself, quietly submitting while he was formally stripped of his robes and insignia—Liudprand claims that he removed them himself—and his pastoral staff (or possibly his scepter) was broken over his head. The emperor, who seems to have been impressed despite himself, allowed him to keep his rank of deacon and exiled him to Hamburg, where two years later he died.1

  By that time Leo VIII was already in his grave. His successor, John XIII, who had been elected with the consent of only two bishops whom Otto had sent to represent him and who made no secret of the fact that he was content to do the emperor’s bidding, was predictably detested in Rome and after only two months was overthrown in a palace revolution and imprisoned in a castle in Campania. He soon escaped; and the Romans, hearing that the incandescent Otto was once more on his way, hastily welcomed him back; if they hoped, however, by doing so to avert the emperor’s wrath, they were disappointed. Of those responsible for John’s overthrow, the most fortunate were banished to Germany; the remainder were executed or blinded. Peter, the city prefect, was hanged by the hair from the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, now on the Capitol but then in front of the Lateran Palace; he was then subjected to the age-old humiliation of being mounted backward on a donkey and paraded naked through the streets.

  After this the Romans had no more fight left in them. Otto spent the next six years in Italy—he was to return to Germany only a few months before his death—consolidating his position and leaving the Romans in no doubt that he considered the pope as little more than his chaplain. At Christmas 967 he ordered Pope John to crown his twelve-year-old son, Otto II, as co-emperor, and five years later to officiate at the marriage of young Otto with the Byzantine princess Theophano.2 Just before he died in May 973 he arranged for the election of John’s successor, a virtually unknown priest who became Benedict VI, but with Otto’s iron hand no longer at the helm and young Otto II fully occupied with his own problems in Germany, Benedict could not hope to survive. Another coup, led this time by the increasingly powerful Roman family of the Crescentii, overthrew him and imprisoned him in Castel Sant’Angelo, replacing him with an obscure deacon named Franco Ferrucci who took the name Boniface VII. Boniface gave immediate proof of his piety and holiness by having Benedict strangled, but a swift counterrevolution obliged him to flee for his life to Byzantine territory in South Italy, with as much of the papal treasury as he could lay his hands on.

  Once again the papal throne was vacant, and this time the choice fell on the high-minded Bishop of Sutri, who deliberately took the name of Benedict VII as a mark of respect to his unfortunate predecessor. He not only refused to recognize Boniface, he excommunicated him. But the antipope3 was far from finished; somehow, during the summer of 980, he even managed to return to Rome and reestablish himself in the Vatican. Only in the following March were Benedict and Otto II together able to expel him for the second time. It seems, however, to have been a more definitive expulsion, since this second flight took him not to Byzantine South Italy but to Constantinople itself.

  An additional reason for this choice of refuge may well have been that by now there was heavy fighting in the South, where, after long periods of anarchy and confusion—Bari and Taranto, to take just two examples, had spent thirty and forty years, respectively, under Arab domination—the Byzantines had regained their hold toward the end of the ninth century. Otto I had unfortunately seen his son’s marriage to Theophano as grounds for claiming the “restitution,” as part of her dowry, of all Byzantine lands in Italy, and war had been the inevitable result. In 981 Otto II marched into Apulia, determined to settle the situation once and for all. This time the result was disaster. The Byzantines quickly arranged a temporary alliance with the Saracens, who soon afterward cut the imperial army to pieces near Stilo in Calabria. Luckily for Otto, he was a strong swimmer. He swam to a passing ship, managed somehow to conceal his identity, and later, as the vessel passed Rossano, jumped overboard again and struck out for the shore. He survived, but never recovered from the humiliation and died of malaria in Rome in September 983, aged twenty-eight. One of his last acts was to replace Pope Benedict—who had predeceased him by two months—with his chancellor for Italy, Peter Campanora, Bishop of Pavia. As John XIV—he modestly declined to use his own name—the first task of the new pope was to bury the emperor in St. Peter’s, the only one ever to be interred there.

  Perhaps because Otto seems to have acted unilaterally and without any consultation—there is no evidence of a regular papal election—Pope John was left friendless on his death, deprived even of the support of the Empress Theophano, who had to hurry back to Germany to defend the interests of her three-year-old son, Otto III. In consequence he had little hope of survival when the odious antipope Boniface returned unexpectedly to Rome from Constantinople, liberally financed by the Emperor Basil II (the Bulgar Slayer). John was seized, badly beaten, and, as usual, consigned to Castel Sant’Angelo, where he died four months later of either starvation or poisoning. But Boniface had gone too far. Even for the Romans, to have murdered two popes was too much. He survived on the throne for eleven months—having blinded a cardinal deacon whom he suspected of acting against him—and then, on July 20, 985, suddenly died. Was he assassinated? There is no firm evidence, but his subsequent fate certainly suggests it. Stripped of its vestments, his body was dragged naked through the streets and exposed beneath the statue of Marcus Aurelius. There, left to the mercy of the mob, the remains of the Antipope Boniface were trampled on and subjected to nameless indignities—and serve him right.

  THE NEW POPE, John XV, had been the preferred candidate both of the Curia and of John Crescentius, by now the virtual ruler of Rome. (Theophano being away in Germany with her infant son, the empire had had no say in the matter.) He was, it must be said, a considerable improvement on Boniface; he was nevertheless greedy, rapacious, and shamelessly nepotistic, and before long had made himself deeply unpopular with Church and people alike. Though quite forceful in his relations with foreign rulers and bishops—he was, incidentally, the first pope to perform a ritual canonization—in Rome he was content to be a puppet of John Crescentius, who in return could offer him a measure of protection; but Crescentius died in 988, and his brother Crescentius II, on succeeding him, seized power in the Papal State and kept the pope a virtual prisoner—so that when, in 991, a synod of French bishops complained that he had refused their envoys access to the Holy Father, Leo the papal chancellor was obliged to admit that his master was being held “in such tribulation and oppression” that he could give them no satisfactory answer. Four years later, in March 995, persecuted by Crescentius and detested by his clergy, John escaped from Rome and took refuge in Sutri; and that summer he sent envoys to young Otto III—now fifteen—with an appeal for help. Otto responded immediately, and the prospect of an imperial army once again on the march was enough to compel the Romans to make their peace. The pope was invited back to Rome and reinstalled with full honors in the Lateran, but long before the army reached the city he succumbed to a violent attack of fever. A few days later he was dead.

  Otto, meanwhile, continued to Rome. He was an extraordinary child. Succeeding to the imperial throne at the age of three, he grew up combining the traditional ambitions of his line with a romantic mysticism clearly inherited from his mother, forever dreaming of a great Byzantinesque theocracy that would embrace Germans and Greeks, Italians and Slavs alike, with God at its head and himself and the pope—in that order—His twin viceroys. The pursuit of thi
s dream made him even more preoccupied with affairs in Italy than his father had been before him. Once in Rome and crowned on Ascension Day 996 by his cousin Gregory V—the first German pope, twenty-five years old, whom he had prudently nominated en route—he built himself a magnificent new palace on the Aventine Hill, where he lived in a curious combination of splendor and asceticism, surrounded by a court rigid with Byzantine ceremonial, eating in majestic solitude off gold plate, but occasionally shedding his purple dalmatic for a pilgrim’s cloak and trudging barefoot to some distant shrine.

  Ascetic or not, however, Otto soon found the Roman summer too much for him and in June left in search of a cooler climate; three months later, when he was safely back in Germany, the Romans, led by Crescentius, deposed Pope Gregory and threw him out of the city. The pope sought refuge in Spoleto, from which he made two armed attempts to return; both failed. He then moved on to Pavia, where at a synod in February 997 he excommunicated Crescentius, who responded by declaring the papal throne vacant and setting upon it a Calabrian Greek named John Philagathos, who took the title John XVI.

  Despite his origins, Philagathos had already achieved remarkable success in the Roman Church. Ten years before, Theophano had first appointed him tutor to Otto III and then Archbishop of Piacenza; the see had been raised from a simple bishopric especially for him. In 994 he had been sent as a special envoy to Constantinople to find a Byzantine bride for young Otto, but had returned empty-handed. He was visiting Rome, ostensibly as a pilgrim, when he was approached by Crescentius and allowed himself to be installed as pope. His acceptance of Crescentius’s offer remains hard to understand. He was fully aware that a canonically crowned pope was very much alive, together with an emperor who had chosen him, was related to him, and could be trusted to support him. He could be looked on as nothing but an antipope and a creature of Crescentius; how could he possibly have expected to maintain himself on the throne?