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 PETER IN CHAINS

had in the meantime been freed of the ban and also of the vow he had taken nevermore to return to Rome or to resume his former dignity. Once become Pope, he felt that the pressure exerted by the nobles of Spoleto was an ignoble limitation of his powers; and he summoned King Arnulf, just previously victorious over the Normans, to come to his aid against them. Then he also crowned him Emperor. Just a few weeks after Arnulf departed, the Pope died and Lambert again set out to recover his lost greatness. The faction of Spoleto nobles avenged themselves on the dead Pope. Stephen VI, a pontiff to their liking, exhumed the body which had lain nine months in the grave, placed it in full pontifical raiment on the throne in St. Peter's, and passed judgment on it before an assembled synod. There was a formal trial. Three accusers appeared and there was also a counsel for the defense. It was decided that the pontificate had been illegal and that everything the Pope had done while in office was null and void. They tore the robes from his body, chopped off the finger with which he had imparted blessings, dragged the corpse through the city streets, and threw it into the Tiber. Some months later the people rose and seized the ghoulish Stephen while he was in Church. He was strangled to death in prison. One of his successors, Theodore II, buried the body of Formosus, which had been recovered by fisher- men, with the honours due to a Pope and proclaimed the orders he had imparted to be valid. The good name of Formosus was wholly restored when John V called a synod which condemned the trial held over his dead body and burned the records which had been kept of the proceedings. But at the same rime John proclaimed that Arnulf had not been rightly crowned Emperor. Lambert was present, but im- mediately afterward fell a victim to an assassin; and in the same year (899) Arnulf also died, leaving Germany to a child who could not retain the crown. Beranger made himself master of Italy.

While the Magyars beset the land from the North, and Saracens pressed against it from the South, noble families which had grown strong were plotting in the castles and palaces of Rome, the Campagna and the mountains, to seize the offices and riches of Rome. The wealthy house of the Counts of Tuscany in the Albanian Mountains became the masters for decades. They considered Circe to have been their original ancestress; and their women, who swayed Rome by

COUNTS