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Rh could intervene and professed himself a Byzantine vassal. Help was long in coming when a warrior Pope stepped in to consolidate and enlarge the Christian league.

Rome had undergone strange vicissitudes since the death of Emperor Lambert, but they had had a clear outcome, the victory of the land-owning barbarised aristocracy over the bureaucratic priestly elements of the Curia. After the death of Benedict IV (903) the revolutions of a year brought to the papal throne its old claimant, the fierce anti-Formosan Sergius III (904-11), over two imprisoned and perhaps murdered predecessors. Sergius owed his victory to "Frankish" help, possibly that of Adalbert the Rich of Tuscany, but he was also the ally of the strongest Roman faction. Theophylact, vesterarius of the Sacred Palace and Senator of the Romans, was the founder of a dynasty. He was chief of the Roman nobles; to his wife, the Senatrix Theodora, tradition attributed both the influence of an Empress Ageltrude and, without real ground, the vices of a Messalina; his daughter Marozia was only too probably the mistress of Pope Sergius and by him the mother of a future Pontiff, John XI, and finally married the new Marquess of Spoleto, the adventurer Alberic. The power of these and of other great ladies, which is a characteristic of the tenth century, and sometimes their vices, too, won for them the hatred of opposing factions whose virulent report of them has fixed the name of the "Pornocracy" on the debased papal government of that unhallowed day. Two inconspicuous successors of Sergius III were followed, doubtless through Theophylact's and Theodora's choice, by the elevation of the Archbishop of Ravenna to the papal see as John X (914-28). This much-hated pontiff, who like Formosus had been translated to the indignation of the strict canonists, was no mere instrument in his maker's hands. He at once took the lead in the war with the Saracens. The Byzantine regent Zoë was sending a new strategos, the patrician Nicholas Picingli, with reinforcements to Bari. From the south Picingli marched in 915 up to Campania, adding the troops of Atenolf's successor at Capua, Landolf I, and of Guaimar of Salerno to his army. Even the rulers of the sea-ports, Gaeta and Naples, appeared in his camp decorated with Byzantine titles. From the north came Pope John and his Romans accompanied by the Spoletan levies under Marquess Alberic. A Byzantine fleet occupied the mouth of the Garigliano, and after a three months' blockade the starving Saracens burst out to be hunted down by the victors among the mountains.

This decisive victory began an era of revival in Southern Italy. Though Calabria and even Apulia remained open to Saracen raids, which recommenced when the Fātimite Caliph Mahdī conquered Sicily in 917; though from c. 922 onwards Hungarian bands now and again worked their way south; a comparative security was restored. The deserted champaign could be slowly repopulated, the monasteries could claim once more their ravaged possessions and, as the century wore on, be