Page:Cambridge Medieval History Volume 3.pdf/498

Rh common grave whence it was torn by the populace and cast into the Tiber. But what is to be said of the Popes of the tenth century? Sergius III (904-911) was well known to be the lover of Marozia, one of the daughters of Theophylact, and had a son by her, whom later she made first a cardinal and then Pope under the name of John XI (931-936). The warlike Pope, John X (914-928), owed the tiara to Theophylact and Theodora, Marozia's mother. In 955 came the turn of John Octavian, a grandson of Marozia, a youth of sixteen, son of Alberic, "Senator of the Romans," and himself "Senator of the Romans" since the death of his father in 954. He was raised to the Chair of Peter under the name of John XII (955-964) and completed the debasement of the Papacy by his debauched life and the orgies of which the Lateran palace soon became the scene.

This personal degradation of the Popes, which lasted for nearly a century and a half, had the most untoward results upon the ecclesiastical hierarchy. The progress made in breaking down the resistance of national priesthoods, or that of such a man as Hincmar, through the prestige enjoyed by Nicholas I, could not be maintained by his successors in their very different position. Suffice it to recall here the violence which in 991 and 993 Arnulf, Bishop of Orleans, and later the prelates assembled in the synod of Chelles, thought fit to use in repelling the interference of Pope John XV, to whom they denied all right of intervention in the matter of the deposition of the Archbishop of Rheims, and even any title to impugn the decisions arrived at by a provincial council.

On the other hand, the Bishops, left to their own resources, were no better able than the Sovereign Pontiff to maintain themselves in the dominant position which they had gradually acquired in the course of the ninth century. They fell anew into dependence upon the king, or upon the feudal lords who were nearer at hand and even greater tyrants. In the tenth century and in the beginning of the eleventh the Episcopate as a whole is in the hands of the feudal nobility, for whom bishoprics are hardly more than fiefs in which it is allowable to traffic, while many of the Bishops themselves, though contrasted with some striking exceptions, are merely lords with whom everything gives way to temporal interests, and whose importance in certain countries, notably in Germany, is to be computed by the part they play as the rulers of principalities or as the vassals and counsellors of kings.

The Church itself thus appears as the victim of the same anarchy in which lay society is weltering: all evil appetites range unchecked, and, more than ever, such of the clergy as still retain some concern for religion and for the salvation of the souls committed to their charge