of eighteen married to the Byzantine princess Theophano. Thereupon the Romans, who had supported the election of another pope, and were in no awe of the new emperor, rose to arms under the command of Crescenzio, a rich and powerful noble. They not only seized Benedict VI. by force, but strangled him in the castle of St Angelo. The national and imperial parties then elected several popes who were either exiled or persecuted, and one of them was said to be murdered. In 985 John XV. was elected (985-96). During this turmoil, Giovanni Crescenzio. the national party, composed of nobles and people, led by Giovanni Crescenzio, son of the other Crescenzio mentioned above, had taken complete possession of the government. This Crescenzio assumed the title of patrician, and sought to imitate Alberic, although far his inferior in capacity. Fortunately for him, the reigning pope was a detested tyrant, and the emperor a child entirely guided by his mother. But the new emperor Otto III. was backed by a powerful party, and on coming to Rome in 996 was able, although only aged fifteen, to quell the rebellion, oust Crescenzio from public life, and elect as successor to John XV. his own cousin, Pope Gregory V. (996-99). But this first German pope surrounded himself with compatriots, and by raising them to lofty posts even in the tribunals excited a revolt that drove him from the throne (29th September 999). Crescenzio, being master of the castle of St Angelo, resumed the title of patrician or consul of the Romans, expelled the German judges, reconstituted the government, prepared his troops for defence, and created a new pope. But the following year Otto III. came to Rome, and his party opened the gates to him. Although deserted by nearly all his adherents, Crescenzio held the castle valiantly against its besiegers. At last, on the 29th of April 998, he was forced to make terms, and the imperialists, violating their pledges, first put him to torture and then hurled him from the battlements. Gregory V. dying shortly after these events, Sylvester II., another native of southern France, who had been tutor to the emperor Otto III., was raised to the papacy (999-1003).
Thus Otto III. was enabled to establish his mastery of Rome. But, as the son of a Greek mother, trained amid Greek Otto III. influences, his fantastic and contradictory nature seemed only to grasp the void. He wished to reconstitute a Romano-Byzantine empire with Rome for his capital. His discourse always turned on the ancient republic, on consuls and senate, on the might and grandeur of the Roman people; and his edicts were addressed to the senate and the people. The senate is now constantly mentioned, and its heads bear the title of consuls. The emperor also gave renewed honour to the title of patrician, surrounded himself with officials bearing Greek and Roman designations, and raised the prestige of the prefect, who, having now almost the functions of an imperial vicar, bore the eagle and the sword as his insignia. Nevertheless Otto III. was thoroughly German, and during his reign all Germanic institutions made progress in Rome. This was particularly the case with feudalism, and Sylvester II. was the first pope to treat it with favour. Many families of real feudal barons now arose. The Crescenzii held sway in the Sabine hills, and Praeneste and Tusculum were great centres of feudalism in the 11th century. The system of feudal benefices was recognized by the church, which made grants of lands, cities and provinces in the feudal manner. The bishops, like feudal barons, became actual counts. And, in consequence of these changes, when the emperor, as head of the feudal system, seeks to impose his will upon the church (which has also become feudal) and control the papal elections, he is met by the great question of the investitures, a question destined to disturb the whole world. Meanwhile the Roman barons were growing more and more powerful, and were neither submissive nor faithful to the emperor. On the contrary, they resented his attitude as a master of Rome, and, when he subjected Tivoli to the Holy See, attacked both him and the pope with so much vigour as to put both to flight (16th February 1001). Thereupon Rome again became a republic, headed by Gregory of Tusculum, a man of a powerful family claiming descent from Alberic.
By the emperor's death in January 1002 the race of the Ottos became extinct, the papacy began to decline, as at the end of the Carolingian period, and the nobles, divided into an imperial and a national party, were again predominant. They reserved to themselves the office of patrician, and, electing popes from their own ranks, obtained enlarged privileges and power. At the time when Ardoin, marquis of Ivrea, profiting by the extinction of the Ottos and the anarchy of Germany, was stirring Italy in the vain hope of constituting a national The second Giovanni Crescenzio. kingdom, the Roman Republic was being consolidated under another Giovanni Crescenzio, of the national faction. He was now elected patrician; one of his kinsmen was invested with the office of prefect, and the new pope John XVIII. (1003-9) was one of his creatures. Although the power of Henry of Bavaria was then gaining ascendancy in Germany, and giving strength to the imperialist nobles, Crescenzio still remained supreme ruler of the city and the Campagna. Surrounded by his judges, the senators and his kinsman the prefect, he continued to dispense justice in his own palace until his death in 1012, after ten years' rule. And, Pope Sergius IV. having died the same year, the counts of Tusculum compassed the election of Benedict VIII. (1012-24), one of their own kin. This pope expelled the Crescenzii, changed the prefect and reserved the title of patrician for Henry II., whom he consecrated emperor on the 14th February 1014. A second Alberic, bearing the title of “eminentissimus consul et dux,” was now at the head of the republic and dispensed placita in the palace of his great ancestor, from whom the counts of Tusculum were also descended.
The new emperor endeavoured to re-establish order in Rome, and strengthen his own authority together with that of the Henry II. pope. But the nobles had in all things the upper hand. They were regularly organized under leaders, held meetings, asserted their right to nominate both pope and emperor, and in fact often succeeded in so doing. Even Henry II. himself was obliged to secure their votes before his coronation. The terms senate and senator now recur still more frequently in history. Nevertheless, Benedict VIII. succeeded in placing his own brother, Romano, at the head of the republic with the title of “consul, dux and senator,” thus making him leader of the nobles, who met at his bidding, and chief of the militia and the tribunals. The prefect still retained his authority, and the emperor was by right supreme judge. But, a violent revolt breaking out, the emperor only stayed to suppress it and then went to Germany in disgust. The pope, aided by his brother, conducted the government with energy; he awed the party of Crescenzio, and waged war against the Saracens in the south. But he died in 1024, and in the same year Henry II. was succeeded by Conrad II. There was now beheld a repetition of the same strange event that had followed the death of Alberic, and with no less fatal consequences. Benedict's brother Romano, head of the republic, and still retaining office, was, although a layman, elected pope. He took the name of John XIX. (1024-33), and in 1027 conferred the imperial crown on Conrad the Salic, who, abolishing the Lothairian edict of 824, decreed that throughout Rome and its territory justice should be henceforth administered solely by the Justinian code. Thus, notwithstanding the spread of feudalism and Germanic procedure, the Roman law triumphed through the irresistible force of the national character, which was already manifested in many other ways.
Meanwhile John XIX. was succeeded by his nephew, Benedict IX. (1033-45), a lad of twelve, who placed his own brother at the head of the republic. Thus church and state assumed the aspect of hereditary possessions in the powerful house of the counts of Tusculum. But the vices and excesses of Benedict were so monstrous that the papacy sank to the lowest depth of corruption; there followed a series of tumults
