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154 raid which lacerated Italy from Friuli to Campania enabled him to re-enter the city. Tradition charged on him an alliance with the raiders. In any case he was slaughtered by the Romans in 928 and his brother the Pope was thrust into prison to die or be murdered without much delay. Marozia now was supreme: "Rome was subdued by might under a woman's hand," says the wrathful local chronicler. Two Popes, so shadowy that they were forgotten in a few years, wore the tiara in turn till in 931 she raised her own son, probably by Sergius III, to the pontificate as John XI. But Marozia was weakened by the death of Guido and looked around her for a potent consort. She found one in Guido's half-brother, Hugh of Italy, then a widower. King Hugh may have been baffled in his original scheme of becoming Emperor by the fall of John X; he had also been drawn off by the Hungarians and a revolt at Pavia. Now, however, he was so firm on his throne as to secure the election of his boy son Lothar II as co-regent. His contract with Marozia is the ugliest episode of the time. He feared his half-brother Marquess Lambert of Tuscany, himself a descendant of Lothar I and a possible rival; and he could not marry his half-brother Guido's widow. Therefore he seized and blinded Lambert, and announced that his two half-brothers were not true sons of Bertha. With the way thus cleared he entered Rome in 932 and married Marozia. But the senatrix and her husband miscalculated and did no more than garrison the castle of Sant' Angelo. Before Hugh was crowned the Romans rose against the hated Burgundian foreigner. Their leader was Marozia's own son Alberic, whom she had borne to Alberic of Spoleto, a youth who knew Hugh's treatment of inconvenient relatives. Sant' Angelo was besieged and taken, and although Hugh made his escape Marozia and John XI were imprisoned. Of Marozia no more is said.

The rule of Alberic marks the open and complete triumph of the Roman landed aristocracy over the bureaucratic clerical government of the Papacy. His state resembled the city monarchies of Naples or Gaeta. On him as "prince and senator of all the Romans" was conferred, it seems by popular election, the exercise of the Pope's secular power in Rome and its duchy. Though the act was revolutionary and ultra vires, no denial of the Pope's sovereignty was made. It was enough that John XI and his four successors were docile instruments of the prince. Perhaps Alberic dreamed of further change, of reviving a miniature Western Empire, for he tried to win a Byzantine bride, and, even when baffled, surnamed his son Octavian. "His face was bright like his father's and he had old-time worth. For he was exceedingly terrible, and his yoke was heavy on the Romans and on the holy Apostolic See ." His stern domination seems to have been a blessing to Rome and its duchy, which he secured, while King Hugh about 938 seized on Ravenna and the Pentapolis which had indeed been ruled by the