Free The Conclave: A Sometimes Secret and Occasionally Bloody History of Papal Elections by Michael Walsh Page B

electors. It may be that, for the first time, they had not chosen someone who was a member of the Roman clergy – Leo had served as priest in a town nearly forty kilometers south of Rome. It may be that the electors chose an outsider because they could not agree on a local candidate for bishop.
    50 The Conclave
    There was still Sergius waiting in the wings, but first the usurper of Leo installed himself. He was Christopher, cardinal priest of the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso, about whom nothing significant is known before he seized the papal throne. He lasted a month. Like Leo, Christopher had been a supporter of Formosus. The fact that Christopher unseated Leo suggests that the Formosan party was falling apart, which heartened the anti-Formosans who had Sergius as their leader. Sergius had continued to think of himself as the rightful pope ever since his election in 897. In exile he had cultivated the Spoletans, and with the support of Spoleto’s troops he entered Rome, threw Christopher into jail along with Leo (and then, though the evidence is not entirely compelling, probably had them murdered), and installed himself as pope.
    Among Sergius’s first acts as pope was once more to condemn Formosus and declare all his acts unlawful – which included the ordination of bishops and, consequently, the ordination of priests who had been ordained by the now illegal bishops. It was a mad situation of vindictiveness which was brutally enforced. Perhaps the only reason Sergius managed to survive so long – over a decade, compared to the few months of his immediate predeces- sors – was the support of Theophylact.
    The name Theophylact indicates Byzantine ancestry. The head of the family was a leading member of the Roman aristocracy who by 904 had become head of the papal treasury and, soon after, commander of the militia. In 915 he was declared “senator of the Romans,” suggesting a particularly elevated status among the other noble families of the city. Theophylact lived with his wife Theodora on the via Lata. She was faithful, pious, and politically astute. They married o ff their daughter Marozia to the powerful Duke Alberic of Spoleto, though not before (a somewhat scurrilous chronicler alleged) Marozia had borne a son, the future Pope John XI, to her lover Pope Sergius III. The same chronicler even claimed, though it is highly unlikely, that as a young woman Theodora had been the mistress of Archbishop John of Ravenna. What was certainly the
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    case was that Sergius and John of Ravenna were close allies of Theophylact, and it was the influence of Theophylact as the lead- ing member of the Roman aristocracy that returned Rome to rela- tive calm – albeit a calm which entailed isolating the city as far as possible from the power politics of Italy and the wider Europe. This meant reining in the pretensions of the papacy as they had been displayed by a number of popes in the tenth century, includ- ing Formosus.
    Because of the presumed immorality of the age, and particularly because of the involvement of Theodora and her daughter in papal a ff airs, this period has been called “the pornocracy.” The great historian, Cardinal Cesare Baronio, writing a history of the Church toward the end of the sixteenth century, called it “the dark age” – partly because of the lack of documents but also because of its immorality. It is all a little unfair. The charges of immoral behavior come from a chronicler who clearly wanted to damage the reputa- tion of the Theophylact family in order to exalt the reforms in the papacy which began later in the century.
    There was another aspect of the politics of Rome which seems to have influenced the house of Theophylact and other leading Roman aristocrats. The papacy had reestablished the Western Empire in the person of Charlemagne, but by the beginning of the tenth century the imperial power had waned. Rome was the sole remnant of the Western Empire and proud of it