Saint Adrian III

Adrian was a Roman, the son of Benedict, and was consecrated on 17 May 884, two days after Marinus died, without any reference to Charles the Fat. Almost nothing is recorded of him except two acts of severity and a journey. He had George of the Aventine, a papal official who had been condemned with Formosus in 876, blinded; and he had a noblewoman named Maria, the widow of a high official, whipped naked through the streets of Rome. What either had done is not stated. The fragments of chronicle that report the punishments treat them as the pope's answer to the murder of John VIII, in which George's circle may have had a hand, and as a warning to the factions that had fought over the last three elections.

What happened next was the empire's collapse. Charles the Fat, ruling every Carolingian kingdom at once and none of them well, summoned the pope to a diet at Worms in 885 to settle the succession and the Italian question. Adrian set out over the Apennines in the summer and died in September at San Cesario on the Panaro, near Modena, before he reached the Po. He was buried at the abbey of Nonantola, where the monks kept his feast, and the cult that grew there was confirmed by Leo XIII in 1891. He is a saint by the memory of Nonantola rather than of Rome, which had known him only as a hard judge.