whenever they met on the street. They set up rival popes, and mutilated their corpses with insane
fury. The contending parties were related. Marozia’s son, Alberic, had probably inherited Tusculum
(which is about fifteen miles from Rome).^289 After the death of Alberic of Tusculum, Crescentius
acquired the government under the title of Consul, and indulged the Romans with a short dream of
republican freedom in opposition to the hated rule of the foreign barbarians. He controlled pope
John XV.
Gregory V.
Otho III., on his way to Rome, elected his worthy chaplain and cousin Bruno, who was
consecrated as Gregory V. (996) and then anointed Otho III. emperor. He is the first pope of German
blood.^290 Crescentius was treated with great leniency, but after the departure of the German army
he stirred up a rebellion, expelled the German pope and elevated Philagathus, a Calabrian Greek,
under the name of John XVI. to the chair of St. Peter. Gregory V. convened a large synod at Pavia,
which unanimously pronounced the anathema against Crescentius and his pope. The emperor
hastened to Rome with an army, stormed the castle of St. Angelo (the mole of Hadrian), and
beheaded Crescentius as a traitor, while John XVI. by order of Gregory V. was, according to the
savage practice of that age, fearfully mutilated, and paraded through the streets on an ass, with his
face turned to the tail and with a wine-bladder on his head.
Sylvester II.
After the sudden and probably violent death of Gregory V. (999), the emperor elected, with
the assent of the clergy and the people, his friend and preceptor, Gerbert, archbishop of Rheims,
and then of Ravenna, to the papal throne. Gerbert was the first French pope, a man of rare learning
and ability, and moral integrity. He abandoned the liberal views he had expressed at the Council
at Rheims,^291 and the legend says that he sold his soul to the devil for the papal tiara. He assumed
the significant name of Sylvester II., intending to aid the youthful emperor (whose mother was a
Greek princess) in the realization of his utopian dream to establish a Graeco-Latin empire with old
Rome for its capital, and to rule from it the Christian world, as Constantine the Great had done
during the pontificate of Sylvester I. But Otho died in his twenty-second year, of Italian fever or
of poison (1002).^292
Sylvester II. followed his imperial pupil a year after (1003). His learning, acquired in part
from the Arabs in Spain, appeared a marvel to his ignorant age, and suggested a connection with
magic. He sent to St. Stephen of Hungary the royal crown, and, in a pastoral letter to Europe where
(^289) The Tusculan family claimed descent from Julius Caesar and Octavian. See Gregorovius, IV. 10, and Giesebrecht II.
174; also the genealogical table of Höfler at the close of Vol. I.
(^290) Baronius, however, says that Stephen VIII. (939-942) was a German, and for this reason opposed by the Romans.
Bruno was only twenty-four years old when elected. Höfler (I. 94 sqq.) gives him a very high character.
(^291) See preceding section, p. 290.
(^292) According to several Italian writers he was poisoned by Stephania, under the disguise of a loving mistress, in revenge
of the murder of Crescentius, her husband. Muratori and Milman accept the story, but it is not mentioned by Ditmar (Chron.
IV. 30), and discredited by Leo, Gfrörer, and Greenwood. Otho had restored to the son of Stephania all his father’s property,
and made him prefect of Rome. The same remorseless Stephania is said to have admininistered subtle poison to pope Sylvester
II.