ifice of papal assumption was to be built upon them
by popes who were fired with a true zeal to reform the world, and who,
not doubting their authenticity, found in them an instrument ready to
their hands.

[Sidenote: The decay of the papacy.]

The weakness of the papacy in the tenth century was indeed such that no
theory could give it respect in Europe. The weakness of the Church was
heralded by that of the Empire. The Carling house expired in contempt
almost as great as that which had fallen on the Merwings. In Gaul the
Norman had won fair provinces on the coast; and the house of the Counts
of Paris came in the tenth century to rule over the Franks. There the
Church remained strong as the State decayed, and it was the great
archbishopric of Rheims which gave the crown to the line of Hugh the
Great. In Germany the dynasty of the Carlings became extinct. In Rome
the power over the city fell into the hands of the local nobility; and
the period was made infamous by the lives of Theodora and Marozia, who
were the paramours of popes. The tale of the age of disgrace which
marks the greater part of the tenth century is of no importance in the
history of the Church. A succession of {197} popes, whom their
contemporaries certainly did not believe to be infallible, followed
each other in rapid procession. John X. alone (914-28) has any claim
to greatness; but he, like the others, was deeply stained with the
vices, political if not moral, of his age. It was not until the Saxon
Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the
Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in
Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and
he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new
life of Gaul and Germany inspired.

The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had
founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The
revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto,
was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the
force of religious ideas.

[Sidenote: The religious revival of the Empire under the Saxons.]

One great characteristic of the revived Empire in German hands was the
important part played in its policy by missions, and, it must be added,
missionary wars. It was said of Charles the Great by his eulogists
that he converted Saxons and Vandals and Frisians by the Word