Criminal History, 185
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Actor John Goodman as Pope Sergius II.
In Rome, ‘through the wrong behaviour of several popes’, the official imperial annals reported in 824, the Roman state had ‘fallen into great confusion’ after the accession of Charles I, St Pope Leo III had mercilessly condemned hundreds of people to death in 815, a year before he died. His successor Stephen IV appeared in Reims the following year with a forged ‘crown of Constantine’ The death of his successor Paschalis I, a hated, harsh pope, was met with such tumult in 824 that the planned burial in St Peter’s had to be cancelled and the body initially left unburied (this pope was nevertheless also canonised, but his feast was abolished in 1963). The election of his successor Eugene II (824-827) was followed by months of unrest, as the nobility and clergy had put forward two competing candidates. After that, at least the elections of the next two Holy Fathers went smoothly: Valentine (August-September 827) and Gregory IV (827-844).
Pope Sergius II or ‘As good as we can’
Pope Gregory’s death was again followed by violent actions. Even before the nobility could raise their man, the people had seized the papal palace and placed the deacon John in the coveted chair; a good fortune that he only enjoyed for a short time, apparently just one day. Then the nobility swept him out of the Lateran, crushed the opposition and made an old, gout-ridden archpriest pontifex maximus. Sergius II (844-847), who had his rival imprisoned in a monastery (nothing more is known about his fate), was a representative of the upper classes and supposedly the fifth pope from the House of Colonna, which the Holy Spirit seemed to favour. Imperial authorisation, required according to the Constitutio Romana of 824, was dispensed with in a hurry.
Thus the exasperated Lothair I sent his son Louis, shortly before enthroned as viceroy of Italy in Pavia, and Archbishop Drogo of Metz, the ‘natural’ son of Charlemagne and half-brother of Louis the Pious, with a Frankish army against Rome. It raged through the Papal States as mercilessly as if it were waging war. It was intended to be a punitive expedition. But the old pope knew how to tame the young king, almost to humiliate him, perhaps helped by a coincidence: the horror of a knight in the royal retinue who fell into convulsions on the steps in front of St Peter’s. After a week-long synodal enquiry, Sergius’ election was at least confirmed. However, he had to recognise that the pope-designate could only be consecrated by order of the emperor and in the presence of his envoys; he had to swear an oath of allegiance to Lothair and crown and anoint the young Louis as ‘King of the Lombards’.
But Sergius did not want to put up with everything: if the unity of the empire, and the unity of the West was at stake. If one of the three ruling brothers broke the ‘unity united in faith in the Trinity’ or one of them ‘preferred to follow the author of discord’, then the Pope threatened ‘we will endeavour to chastise him as best we can, with God’s help and according to the principles of canon law’.
Sergius II reigned for only three years. The simony was as obvious as the nepotism. Pope’s brother Benedict became Bishop of Albano: an unscrupulous man, greedy for power and money, who presumably took the reins out of the hands of Sergius, who, although ill, was extremely strong-willed and energetic, who obtained the position of an imperial envoy in Rome through bribery and knocked down bishop’s chairs for top prices, as well as other church offices; probably everything—‘as good as we can’ .
Such news from Roman clerical circles is probably intended to exonerate the Pope himself. In any case: In August 846 around seventy-five Saracen ships arrived at the mouth of the Tiber, when allegedly 11,000 men with 500 horses attacked Rome on the right bank of the Tiber, completely robbed St Peter’s Church outside the Aurelian Wall as well as St Paul’s Basilica, and everything that had not fled was destroyed, St Paul’s Basilica outside the Aurelian Wall and dragged into captivity everything that had not fled, ‘even the monks, men and women’ (Annales Xantenses). Contemporaries saw this as providential retribution for the rampant corruption in Rome. Of course, the divine punishment was by no means accepted without action. On the contrary, they resisted it, throwing Frankish troops against the invaders, militias from Spoleto, the Campagna, and fleets from Naples and Amalfi. And when some of the raiders perished on their stormy journey home along with their booty, it was easy to recognise the punishing hand of the Lord.