Emperors defended the Popes against the Roman people. Not
many years had passed since Otto the First had done justice upon Peter
the Prefect, far away at the Lateran palace; Otto the Second reigned in
his stead, and Benedict the Sixth was Pope. The race of Theodora hated
the domination of the Emperor, and despised a youthful sovereign whom
they had never seen. They dreamed of restoring Rome to the Eastern
Empire, and of renewing the ancient office of Exarch for themselves.
Benedict stood in their way and was doomed. They chose their antipope, a
Roman Cardinal, one Boniface, a man with neither scruple nor conscience,
and set him up in the Pontificate; and, when they had done that,
Crescenzio seized Benedict and dragged him through the low black
entrance of Sant' Angelo, and presently strangled him in his dungeon.
But neither did Boniface please those who had made him Pope; and,
within the month, lest he should die like him he had supplanted, he
stealthily escaped from Rome to the sea, and it is recorded that he
stole and carried away the sacred vessels and treasures of the Vatican,
and took them to Constantinople.

So Crescenzio first appears in the wild and confused history of that
century of dread, when men looked forward with certainty and horror to
the ending of the world in the year one thousand. And during a dozen
years after Benedict was murdered, the cauldron of faction boiled and
seethed in Rome. Then, in the year 987, when Hugh Capet took France for
himself and for his descendants through eight centuries, and when John
the Fifteenth was Pope in Rome, 'a new tyrant arose in the city which
had hitherto been trampled down and held under by the violence of the
race of Alberic,'--that is, the race of Theodora,--'and that tyrant was
Crescentius.' And Crescenzio was the kinsman of Alberic's children.

The second Otto was dead, and Otto the Third was a mere boy, when
Crescenzio, fortified in Sant' Angelo, suddenly declared himself Consul,
seized all power, and drove the Pope from Rome. This time he had no
antipope; he would have no Pope at all, and there was no Emperor either,
since the young Otto had not yet been crowned. So Crescenzio reigned
alone for awhile, with what he called a Senate at his back, and the
terror of his name to awe the Roman people. But Pope John was wiser than
the unfortunate Benedict, and a better man than Boniface, the antipope
and thief; and having escaped to the north, he won the graces of
C