294 FOURTH PERIOD. A. D. 590-1049.
murdered (974), and elected an Italian anti-pope, Boniface VII., who had soon to flee to Constantinople, but returned after some years, murdered another imperial pope, John XIV. (983), and maintained himself on the blood-stained throne by a lavish distribution of stolen money till he died, probably by violence (985).1
During the minority of Otho III., the imperialists, headed by Alberic, Count of Tusculum, and the popular Roman party under the lead of the younger Crescentius (perhaps a grandson of the infamous Theodora), contended from their fortified places for the mastery of Rome and the papacy. Bloodshed was a daily amusement. Issuing from their forts, the two parties gave battle to each other whenever they met on the street. They set up rival popes, and mutilated their corpses with insane fury. The contending parties were related. Marozia's son, Alberic, had probably inherited Tusculum (which is about fifteen miles from Rome).2 After the death of Alberic of Tusculum, Crescen tius acquired the government under the title of Consul, and in dulged the Romans with a short dream of republican freedom in opposition to the hated rule of the foreign barbarians. He con trolled pope John XV.
GREGORY V.
Otho III., on his way to Rome, elected his worthy chaplain and cousin Bruno, who was consecrated as Gregory V. (996) and then anointed Otho III. emperor. He is the first pope of Ger man blood.3 Crescentius was treated with great leniency, but after the departure of the German army he stirred up a rebellion,
1 Gerbert (afterwards pope Sylvester II.) called this Bonifacius a "Malefactor" (Malifacius ) and " horrendum monstrum, cunctos mortales nequitia superans, etiam prior is pontificis sanguine cruentus." Gregorovius, III. 410.
2 The Tusculan family claimed descent from Julius Caesar and Octavian. See Gregorovius, IV. 10, and Giesebrecht II. 174; also the genealogical table of Hofler at the close of Vol. I.
3 Baronius, however, says that Stephen VIII. (939-942) was a German, and for this reason opposed by the Romans. Bruno was only twenty-four years old when elected. Hofler (I. 94 sqq.) gives him a very high character.
I 05. THE SECOND DEGRADATION OF THE PAPACY. 295
expelled the German pope and elevated Philagathus, a Calabrian Greek, under the name of John XVI. to the chair of St. Peter. Gregory V. convened a large synod at Pavia, which unanimously pronounced the anathema against Crescentius and his pope. The emperor hastened to Rome with an army, stormed the castle of St. Angelo (the mole of Hadrian), and beheaded Crescentius as a traitor, while John XVI. by order of Gregory V. was, according to the savage practice of that age, fearfully mutilated, and paraded through the streets on an ass, with his face turned to the tail and with a wine-bladder on his head.
SYLVESTER II.
After the sudden and probably violent death of Gregory V. (999), the emperor elected, with the assent of the clergy and the people, his friend and preceptor, Gerbcrt, archbishop of Rheims, and then of Ravenna, to the papal throne. Gerbert was the first French pope, a man of rare learning and ability, and moral in tegrity. He abandoned the liberal views he had expressed at the Council at Rheims,1 and the legend says that he sold his soul to the devil for the papal tiara. He assumed the significant name of Sylvester II., intending to aid the youthful emperor (whose mother was a Greek princess) in the realization of his Utopian dream to establish a Grseco-Latin empire with old Rome for its capital, and to rule from it the Christian world, as Constantino the Great had done during the pontificate of Sylvester I. But Otho died in his twenty-second year, of Italian fever or of poison (1002).2 .
Sylvester II. followed his imperial pupil a year after (1003). His learning, acquired in part from the Arabs in Spain, appeared
1 See preceding section, p. 290.
2 According to several Italian writers he was poisoned by Stephania, under the disguise of a loving mistress, in revenge of the murder of Crescentius, her husband. Muratori and Mil man accept the story, hut it is not mentioned by Ditmar (Chron. IV. 30), and discredited by Leo, Gfrorer, and Greenwood. Otho had restored to the son of Stephania all his father's property, and made him prefect of Rome. The same remorseless Stephania is said to have adminis tered subtle poison to pope Sylvester II.