Page:Vactican as a World Power.djvu/114

 PETER IN CHAINS

III) on the Papal throne. Then she took King Hugh as her third husband; but her wish that she might receive the Imperial Crown from her Papal son was not granted. The marriage with Hugh took place at San Angelo's in 932 and became the scene of a rebellion. Her other son Alberich, named for his father, drove off the alien Hugh and imprisoned his mother and the Pope in San Angelo. Then for twenty-two years he kept Rome and a timorous series of four Popes under his thumb, while the kingdom was passing (945) from Hugh to Beranger of Ivrea, the nephew of the Spoletan noble of the same name. Alberich proved his liking for a religious Church by showing favour to the new monastic movement which had come to Italy from France, but his last act was to bequeath to the Papacy the worst legacy he could have left it. When he died in 954 he made the Roman nobles swear that they would elect his son Pope. His name was Octavian a name given to express the hopes which had been placed on the national movement; and this the seventeen-year-old magnate was also expected to serve after his election to the Holy See. He was the first Pope to change his name, calling himself John XII.

This roisterer was in all truth a caricature of the hero whom his father had imagined would carry out his boldly conceived but romantic and insufficiently buttressed policy. Not even the desire to serve the strong national purpose remained. This boy, who paraded about in the mantle of the Pope, was utterly unsuited even to that task. Ber- anger, who had secured for himself and his son Adalbert the kingly crown in 950, sought to cement his power and royal dignity by marry- ing his son to the widow of Lothar, son of King Hugh. When this lovely young woman Adelheid of Burgundy refused to enter the union, she was maltreated and kept under strict arrest. But she escaped and called on Otto I, the German King, for aid. This great Saxon was already the master of a flourishing and firmly established realm. For a long time he had carefully followed developments in Italy, being all the more deeply interested because an ambition to extend his rule over the world and to gain the Imperial crown had borne his thoughts southward. Therefore he marched to Italy in 951, ac- cepted the homage of the nobles at Pavia, and himself (he was until then a widower) married Adelheid with brilliant ceremoniousness. The Imperial crown was still held back by reason of Alberich's re-

OTTO