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of the French Pope at Paterno on the Soracte, yearning for his German homeland. Sylvester lived out another year in the Lateran amidst his parchments and his astronomical globes, while the Crescentians took advantage of the fact that the Imperial power slumbered and once more gained control of the city. In the North the Margrave Arduin of Ivrea proclaimed himself the new king and raised the stand- ard of Italian unity and independence. John Crescentius, son of the man who had been beheaded, ruled the city between 10021012; and three impotent Popes, whose elections he brought about, did his bidding.

After his death the faction of Tuscan Counts who recognized the German kingship was again victorious. As soon as they came to power in 1012, they raised a member of their house to the Roman See as Benedict VIII. His pontificate is a memorable one for Germany and affords opportunity to consider the quiet, deep ferment which had long since been active in the universal Church.

St. Benedict had placed the virtus Romana under the sign of the Cross. The communities of monks which followed his Rule had proved of immeasurable beneficence to the Western world. But from the tragic circle inside which all things human move these communi- ties, so wisely planned and so exemplary of pure nobility of living, did not escape. Virtue led of itself to power and riches, and of them- selves this power and riches destroyed virtue. In addition there were external disasters the all-unsettling collapse of the Empire, the im- potence and moral rottenness of the Papacy. But at no time have all the eternal lamps of the Church gone out in unison; and now the last of them still burned and its fire sufficed to kindle all the rest anew.

This happened when during 910 the monk Berno turned the Villa Clunicum, given to him as a present by his protector the Duke of Burgundy, into a monastery. Here one of the most majestic dramas of history took its inception. It was a rising of the Church against the Church a revolution of the Gospel against the world which had invaded its domain. Here also the fiery watchword was, of course, freedom; but what distinguished this religious upheaval from other oc- currences bearing the same name was the manner in which "freedom" was understood. The monastery was to live according to its own

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