Foundations of the Anglican Church VIII

Counts of Tusculum Family Tree

during the pornacracy of the 10th

and 11th centuries showing members
of the family who held the papacy.

In 735 Gregory III  sent the pallium to Egbert, thus raising the See of York to Metropolitan status—in recognition of the leadership the Bishops of York had exercised in the days of the first Christian communities in Roman Britain.  The Bishop of York had been one of the English bishops present at the synod of Arles in 314. 
In 747 the English bishops held a synod at the instance of Pope Zacharias and a second synod held forty years later was presided over by two papal legates.  That same year Pope Adrian elevated the See of Lichfield to Archiepiscopal status at the request of King Offa of Mercia.  Leo III, in 803, reduced Lichfield to the status of an ordinary diocese, leaving Canterbury and York as the only metropolitan sees. 
Alfred the Great, the King who drove out the Danish invaders and united the diverse Saxon kingdoms at the end of the ninth century had a strong devotion to the Church in his realm and supported the distribution of the Regula Pastoralis of Pope Saint Gregory the Great to his bishops for the formation of their clergy.  Alfred also restored the payment of the Peter’s Pence.  Nevertheless, I think it is important to distinguish between the King’s support of the Church and his support of the papacy itself.  Alfred’s prime interest was in the reform of the Church in his kingdom, most notably in the restoration of the monasteries after the Danish invasion and in improving the education and morals of the clergy which he saw as vital to the educational and cultural improvements of his kingdom.
Despite the corruption of the papacy at this time several Archbishops of Canterbury, most notably Wulfhelm, Aelfsige,  and St.Dunstan made the journey to Rome to receive it personally.  The other Archbishops did not make the journey but had the pallium sent to them.     Pope Formosus had sent the pallium to Archbishop Plegmund (archbishop 890-923) and when Sergius III annulled the ordinations and appointments of Formosus, Plegmund had to make the journey to Rome to beg its new grant. Sergius III was the pope whose mistress was Marozia during the so called pornocracy and Sergius was the father of John XI by Marozia.  Plegmund was not the only Archbishop of Cantrbury to be exposed to the moral sludge of the papal court.  Saint Dunstan journeyed to Rome in 960 and received the pallium from John XII—perhaps the most immoral man to have ever sat in the Chair of Peter.  John XII was the grandson of the aforementioned Marozia by her first husband, Alberic of Spoleto.  Luitprand of Cremona, the historian, alleges that John had turned the papal palace “into a whorehouse.”  John was to meet his end at the hands of a jealous husband—one of scores whom he had cuckolded.  In addition to his sexual proclivities, John was given to hunting, gambling, and drinking bouts while at the same time ignoring his sacred duties as Pope.  One can only wonder what men like Dunstan thought when they came to the papal court though it does permit us to see that the English were able to have a deep and lasting devotion to Saint Peter while distinguishing the Prince of the Apostles from his unholy successors.    
In 1015 the Danish Prince Canute invaded England and held the crown from 1016 until his death in 1035.  In 1018 he would succeed to the throne of Denmark and 1028 take the crown of Norwary thus building for himself quite an empire.   He was a most fervent convert to Christianity and advanced the cause of the Church in all his realms.  In 1026 he made a pilgrimage to the Rome of John XIX.  He was crowned there as King of the English, Danes, Norwegians and “some of the Swedes.”  The purpose of his trip, other than to receive the papal blessing on his empire, was to negotiate with the Emperor about safe passage for English pilgrims going to Rome and to negotiate with the Pope about lowering the fees for which the English Archbishops had to pay to receive the pallium.  By the third decade of the eleventh century there was reform in the air in Rome—the Emperors Otto were doing their best to clean up the cesspool of the Roman pornacracy, but the Pope at the time of Canute’s visit was not a reform Pope but a member of that notorious family of the Counts of Tusculum.  John does not seem to have led a particularly scandalous life though he was far from pious but Canute would not have been one to scruple at the sexual idiosyncrasies of his peers, however, as he himself lived in open concubinage with several women while married to Emma of Normandy. 

The Reform of Papal Elections--part I

Santa Maria in Cosmedin, one of

the seven ancient diaconal Churches

that served as a food distribution

station for Rome's poor in the ealry

and central Middle Ages

Let’s take a look at papal elections as the eleventh century reforms in this procedure are essential to the Gregorian Reform.  You may recall from a wide number of previous entries that one of the chief problems facing the Church in the ninth and tenth centuries was the unstable manner the Romans had of selecting a bishop for themselves.  The process had degenerated into mob violence with the various factions of the Roman mob controlled by any one of several Roman families, most notably the Theophylact clan who were Dukes of Spoleto and Counts of Tusculum and the Crescentii—an ancient Roman family.  For the most part it didn’t matter which family won out in the struggle—the papacy and the Church suffered either way.  The great Roman families all wanted control of the papacy in order to control the vast wealth that had come to the Roman Church and the political power—since the Pope was (usually) not only the spiritual leader of the Roman Diocese but the temporal ruler of much of central Italy. 
     Ever since the earliest days of the Church, not only at Rome but throughout Christendom, bishops were elected by the clergy and faithful of their diocese and then confirmed by the bishops of the surrounding Churches who gathered to consecrate the new bishop through the laying-on-of-hands and the invocation of the Holy Spirit.  As the centuries went on this process often degenerated into mob activity.  One of the most famous examples was the election of a bishop in Milan in 374 when competing factions—one Arian, the other orthodox, were fighting in the streets and the civil magistrate sent to put down the disturbance, a catechumen named Ambrose, ended up being chosen despite the fact that not only was he not a priest but he was not even yet baptized.  It was, of course, a great choice—Saint Ambrose is one of the great bishops of the Church.  Most of the time, and especially in Rome, the outcome was not so fortunate.  Part of this was that the electoral process was out of control.  The clergy numbered in the hundreds and the faithful of the Roman Church was nothing more than a mob. Changes had to be made.
    By the early Middle Ages, the seventh or eighth centuries, in Rome the election devolved on the priests in charge of the principle churches of the city as well as the seven deacons attached to the papal household, and the deacons who headed up the seven diaconal churches.  These diaconal churches were not parish churches, or even primarily worship sites; they were  centers where relief was given to the poor—like Catholic Charities centers today.  One of their most important functions was distribution of grain to the poor—grain from the vast papal estates in Sicily and southern Italy was brought to Rome for poor-relief.  In addition to the principle priests and deacons—there were many more priests and deacons in the city other than these ones who had greater responsibility—the bishops of Rome’s seven suburbican (adjoining) sees formed part of the electoral process.  It fell to them to ordain the new pope if he were not a priest and to consecrate him a bishop if and when he was.  It was very rare in the early Middle Ages for the new pope to be a bishop as there were canons which forbad a bishop to move from one diocese to another—even to Rome and the papacy.  A bishop was considered “married” to the Church of which he was bishop and being consecrated a bishop was a life-long commitment.  This helped avoid some of the ambitious ladder-climbing that too often mars the hierarchy today.  Sometimes, but in those early years, not often, this canon was overlooked.  Election of the Roman bishop by the city’s principal priests, deacons, and the suburbican bishops was not sufficient however.  Before the candidate could be consecrated and enthroned, he had to be presented to the faithful for their acclamation.  This is where the mob violence often came in.   
There had been an attempt in the fifth century to replace the popular election process by having a pope appoint his successor.  Anastasius II who reigned from 496-498 prohibited this practice and insisted that the pope, like other bishops, had to be elected by the clergy and people.  In the seventh an d eighth centuries The Emperors at Constantinople claimed the right to confirm the papal election but this practice fell into disuse after Zachary I in 741.  Emperors also claimed the right to depose popes and while a number were forced to resign,  by the end of the eighth century the actual power of the Byzantine Emperors to enforce their decrees in central or Northern Italy was nil.  (Southern Italy was a different story and remained under Greek control into the tenth century.)  As the Constantinople emperors lost control of Italy and Rome, it created a power vacuum that the Roman mobs filled.  We saw what happened at the end of the ninth and into the early tenth centuries when the papacy went through what was probably its absolute low-point with the “pornacracy” of the Theophylact family controlling the papacy through the machinations of the mother-daughter team of papal mistresses, mothers, grandmothers of Theodora and Marozia. 
     Stephen III was the pope (768-772) who first used the term “cardinal” to describe the priests and deacons who appointment to the principal churches gave them voice in selecting the new pope.  It came from the Latin, cardo, for hinge or pivot—the idea being that the priests of the principal churches and the deacons in charge of the seven diaconal charity stations were the operational pieces of the administrative machinery of the Roman Church that held it together. From the fifth century onwards, Rome had seen a surplus of churches being built as monastic foundations were made inside the city, as prominent citizens decided to build family churches for their special events—especially for burial, and as various civic organizations built churches in which their members could gather for prayers.  Wealthy individuals whose petitions had been answered through the invocation of a particular martyr or saint often built a church as a thank-offering to their heavenly patron.  In the same way, the number of clergy was growing fast as the elaborate papal ceremonial developed and as these various new churches needed clergy to carry on the services.  Many of these clergy came to Rome from all over Europe and had no history with the Roman Church.  Morevover, it became impractical to allow a clergy numbering in the hundreds, between priests and deacons, to have a voice in selecting the papal candidate to present to the faithful for acclamation.   (The lesser clergy—subdeacons, acolytes, exorcists, lectors, etc. never had a voice in the selection process.)  Thus by designating certain churches, the older and more important, as cardinal churches and their clergy as cardinal priests or cardinal deacons to whom the right of nomination was reserved a more manageable system was devised.  But it would still be almost three centuries before the right was exclusively theirs.  It still resided with the Roman faithful—or as we have seen, the Roman mob—to accept the candidate offered.   Further changes were still needed if Rome was to have decent popes. 

A Good Pope Goes Bad

The Papal Throne in the Pope's

Cathedral, the Basilica of Saint John

Lateran--at the time of Gregory VI

the popes lived in a palace adjoining

the Lateran Basilica.

While Romuald was reforming monasteries and Peter Damian was going after gay clergy, the eleventh-century papacy was having its ups and downs.  We saw (July 17) that Sylvester II, Otto III’s candidate for pope who reigned from 999 until 1003 was a reform pope who brought stability to the papacy after a long period of immoral and/or incompetent popes.  (History shows us that some bad men were, in fact, good popes and some bad popes were good men even as some bad men have been among our best presidents and some exceptionally good men among our worst.)  The period immediately after Sylvester saw the papacy fall again into the control of the Roman mob which, in turn, was driven by the Crescentii family. (Crescentii is the plural of Crescentius in case you see that name somewhere.)  Some of these, such as Sergius IV, was a good man, but all of them—John XVII, John XVIII, Sergius IV—were  controlled, good and bad alike, by the Crescentii.  The Ottonians—the reform party—were able to regain control of the papacy with Benedict VIII (reigned 1012-1024) who was a good man but who was part of the Theophylact clan—those wonderful people who had brought you the pornacracy  (see entries of January 15, and June 9, 6, 18), the so-called “Rule of Whores” when a Roman mother-daughter team slept their way into control of the papacy in the tenth century.  (The Theophylacts were political rivals of the Crescentii.) Despite his shady relatives, Benedict was a capable pope and enjoyed the confidence and patronage of the last of the Ottonian Emperors, Saint Henry II.  He was succeeded, in turn, by his brother as John XIX.   OK—, while Benedict may have been a good man this isn’t a good sign as it indicates a family control of the papacy, and again by a family that had controlled the papacy before and had exploited it for the sake of family wealth and power.  Moreover, John was a far more mediocre pope than his brother, Benedict, had been.  And it gets worse.  John is succeeded by another family member—his nineteen year old nephew, Benedict IX. 
      Benedict was a pretty dissolute character—but hey, he is at that age where hormones are raging.  Nineteen-year-old popes are not a good idea. In the Liber Gomorrhianus Peter Damian called him a “demon in the mask of a priest.”  He did not let his being an active homosexual get in the way of the occasional heterosexual adultery or rape and allegedly was responsible for more than one murder.  But then boys will be boys. 
      Fortunately, Benedict IX did not want to be pope—at least not at that time in his life.  (He would become a problem, like a bad penny he kept turning up in the papal chair—three terms but we will save that story for later.  At this point he wanted out, but he had no money.  He may not have wanted to be pope but frankly he needed the job.  Along came his godfather with a solution that appeared to be a win/win scenario—win/win for Benedict, for the godfather, and for the Church.  Unfortunately they overlooked two details—one was Benedict’s character and the other was the godfather’s naiveté.  
      The godfather was a priest by the name of John Gratian.  You have to be careful because there is more than one Gratian in the history of the Church and several of these Gratians are named John.  This one was the Archpriest of the Church of Saint John at the Latin Gate.  That church still stands today.  Gratian was a canon lawyer and a pious man but he lacked some discretion.  He suggested that if Benedict resigned the papacy in his (Gratian’s) favor, he (Gratian) would make sure that the young man would have sufficient means for a life of comfort and ease.  (He didn’t say debauchery, but if you have money debauchery is cheap.)  Thus Gratian became Gregory VI.  The new pope did not want power, he wanted to reform the Church.   
   The reform party was delighted with this deal—the papacy was now in the hands of a reform minded pope and both Peter Damian and the monk Hildebrand, the future Gregory VII for whom the Gregorian Reform is named, were ecstatic.  But there was a problem and the problem is that technically Gratian had bought the papacy from Benedict and thus was guilty of simony.    Many of the clergy resented—or actually actively opposed Gregory’s reform program, especially regarding celibacy and forbidding the clergy to engage in the political strife that was responsible for all the fighting over the papacy that had almost destroyed the Church over the last two centuries.  They were quick to bring charges of simony against their bishops.  Complicating this was the fact that Benedict soon came to regret having given up the papacy and tried to reassume it. Complicating it even further, there was a third claimant to the papal throne, one Sylvester, who had been the Crescentii family candidate chosen for the papacy at a time when the Roman mob had forced the young Benedict to flee Rome, and thus, according to some, forfeited the papacy.  It was a mess—three popes and two of them no good whatsoever.  The Emperor Henry III came down to Italy and convoked a synod at Sutri that recognized Gregory as the authentic pope and declared Benedict and Sylvester to have no legitimate claims to the papacy.  That same synod, though it acknowledged Gregory as legitimate pope, also told him that because he had bought the papacy he did not in fact have the moral authority to govern the Church and that he should resign.  A good man, he did.   Henry’s candidate for the job, now that it was open, was a German by the name of Suidger of Morsleben and Hornburg and he was elected Clement II.  It’s good to have an emperor for your campaign manager—it more or less guarantees success.  Especially if the Emperor has an army sitting by watching.  Clement  too was an ardent reformer and continued Gregory VI’s program of Reform with the power of  the Emperor to back him up.  Gregory went into exile in Germany where he died.  He was accompanied in exile by his chief supporter, the monk Hildebrand.  Remember him.  He is the key player in this reform. 
      What we see here is that a good pope is not necessarily a good man and a bad pope is not necessarily a bad man.  We also see that sometimes in history good popes have come to power in sinful ways—either through naiveté or an ends-justifies-the-means desire to do good for the Church.  Of course we also see that some popes have led very immoral lives and that does not mean that they are not true popes.  We see too that one of the key needs that the Church had in the central Middle Ages was to free the papacy from mob control and we see that in an effort to do this the papacy  actually became beholden to the Emperor.  In fact, the papacy ended up in the gift of the Emperors who had the  power, if not the authority, to name popes or force them to resign.  And we see that a man, even a good man, may be pope but still lacks the actual moral authority to give the Church the leadership it needs.  Popes may be, under certain restricted circumstances, infallible but they are never about the ability to make some very crucial errors in judgment, much less are they ever unable to sin.  Beneath the robes and triple crown is a very ordinary man.   Wisdom, much less sainthood, does not go automatically with the papal office. 

The Pornocracy--shady ladies and promiscuous popes

When it is mentioned—ever so rarely—in a “Church History” class, it is referred to as the “saeculum obscuram” –the dark century, but I have always preferred the title “the pornacracy”—the “rule of whores.” I have heard that this term is attributed to Luitprand of Cremona, a bishop and court historian to the emperor Otto I, and indeed it might be. Luitprand had a vicious tongue and a streak of self—righteousness that makes his being the alleged coiner of this term plausible, but I have also heard that the term originated with sixteenth century Lutheran historians, anxious to discredit the papacy. That theory actually makes less sense, for while in the heat of the Reformation polemics were the menu du jour, Lutheran scholars were meticulous in the exactness of their work, Admiuttedly Martin Luther himself reportedly had a flair for vulgar language but it was pretty much limited to the table banter with his friends. The great Reformer, while he might have been able to “swear like a sailor,” could also write stirring prose (his sermos and German translation of the Bible) and powerful hymns. The Greek roots of the word pornacracy being porne (whore, harlot) and kratein (to rule) might indicate its sixteenth-century roots where the Renaissance had revived a knowledge of Greek but, while Greek was all but unknown in the 10th century, Luitprand had served as Imperial ambassador on at least one occasion at the Court of Constantinople and would certainly had some knowledge of the language. After all “prostitute,” “harlot, “whore” is one of the first words men try to remember when learning a language, if only so one can tell jokes. In any event, I suppose I could plow through his works and see if indeed he used the term, but frankly I am too lazy.
Well, enough of those trivialities. Who cares who coined the term; it’s a great attention grabber. Where to begin? This is always the problem because history is this great interlocking puzzle where part of the story is always part of a previous story and there is rarely a clear place where one can nicely cut into the cake. Behind the pornacracy is the fascinating (if ghoulish) story of the “Cadaver Synod” but we will go there some other time. Let’s begin with a young lady by the name of Marozia and who had been born in 890. By the time she was fifteen she was the mistress of Pope Sergius III (reigned 904-911). Today that would be called “child abuse” but in the ninth century it was not uncommon for people to be married at fourteen or fifteen. Nevertheless, given the probable age difference (we don’t know the year of Sergius’ birth but he would most likely have been at least in his thirties as pope and given his death in 911 may have been even in his fifties or sixties) it is a bit creepy. But then Sergius was a particularly creepy man with three distinctive marks
1. The only pope known to have murdered his predecessor (plus a rival claimant to the throne of Peter)
2. The only pope whose bastard son himself became pope (John XI)
3. And the first pope to wear—or at least the first to be depicted wearing—the papal tiara.

We will talk more about Marozia in a future posting. As I said this was the “rule of harlots” not the rule of “a harlot.” So let’s meet whore #2. Presenting, Theodora, wife of Theophylact, count of Tusculum and mother of …guess who? None other than whore# 1, yes, Marozia. Theodora is the mistress of Pope John X (reigns 914-928), successor but two to her daughter Marozia’s old flame, Sergius III. So what we have here is a Mother-Daughter prostitution ring in the Lateran Palace. (The popes didn’t live in the Vatican at the time, but in the palace adjoining the Lateran Basilica.)
Well, you might think, what is the poor count of Tusculum to do? How can one resist the power of the pope if he want your wife or your daughter. Poor Theophylact, how can a count resist the Ruler of Rome? Well, that’s the irony. These popes—indeed all the popes in this particular period—were zero’s when it came to power. If anything, they owed their power to Theophylact who was the de facto ruler of Rome. in fact, ol’ John X was only a deacon in Bologna when Theodora “noticed” him—i.e. took a fancy to him—and persuaded her husband to make her boy-toy first bishop of Bologna and then Archbishop of Ravenna from which it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to the papacy.
There obviously is something going on here besides sex. What is it? Well, I will come back to the saga of Theophylact clan, our sort of "Desperate Housewives of the Dark Ages" and we will find out more. Meanwhile, just as a teaser—Marozia holds the rare distinction of being the mistress of one pope, mother of a second, and grandmother of a third. I am sure she made Theodora and Theophylact proud.

Today's image is Theodora by Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant. The only problem is that this is the wrong Theodora--this is Justinian's wife and we will do some posting on her too--she is a fascinating character. But in the meantime, this picture works both Theodoras had their shady-lady pasts.