he Saracens, and
the world was astonished and edified by the appearance of this warlike
pontiff at the head of his troops. By the love of Theodora, as was said,
he had maintained himself in the papacy for fourteen years; by the
intrigues and hatred of her daughter Marozia he was overthrown. She
surprised him in the Lateran Palace; killed his brother Peter before his
face; threw him into prison, where he soon died, smothered, as was
asserted, with a pillow. After a short interval Marozia made her own son
pope as John XI., A.D. 931. Many affirmed that Pope Sergius was his
father, but she herself inclined to attribute him to her husband
Alberic, whose brother Guido she subsequently married. Another of her
sons, Alberic, so called from his supposed father, jealous of his
brother John, cast him and their mother Marozia into prison. After a
time Alberic's son was elected pope, A.D. 956; he assumed the title of
John XII., the amorous Marozia thus having given a son and a grandson to
the papacy. John was only nineteen years old when he thus became the
head of Christendom. His reign was characterized by the most shocking
immoralities, so that the Emperor Otho I. was compelled by the German
clergy to interfere. A synod was summoned for his trial in the Church of
St. Peter, before which it appeared that John had received bribes for
the consecration of bishops, that he had ordained one who was but ten
years old, and had performed that ceremony over another in a stable; he
was charged with incest with one of his father's concubines, and with so
many adulteries that the Lateran Palace had become a brothel; he put out
the eyes of one ecclesiastic and castrated another, both dying in
consequence of their injuries; he was given to drunkenness, gambling,
and the invocation of Jupiter and Venus. When cited to appear before the
council, he sent word that "he had gone out hunting;" and to the fathers
who remonstrated with him, he threateningly remarked "that Judas, as
well as the other disciples, received from his master the power of
binding and loosing, but that as soon as he proved a traitor to the
common cause, the only power he retained was that of binding his own
neck." Hereupon he was deposed, and Leo VIII. elected in his stead,
A.D. 963; but subsequently getting the upper hand, he seized his
antagonists, cut off the hand of one, the nose, finger, tongue of
others. His life was eventually brought to an end by the vengeance of a
man who