Benedict VIII

Theophylact was a layman, the son of Gregory, count of Tusculum, when his family took Rome from the Crescentii in May 1012 and had him ordained and consecrated within days, on 18 May. The Crescentii elected a Gregory of their own, who went to complain to Henry II; Henry took away his insignia and recognized Benedict, and the alliance held. Benedict crowned Henry and Cunigunde emperor and empress in Saint Peter's on 14 February 1014, and at the coronation Mass, at the emperor's request, the Creed was sung with the Filioque, the addition Leo III had refused in 810.

He fought. In 1016 a Saracen fleet from Spain sacked Luni on the Ligurian coast, and Benedict raised Pisa and Genoa against it and drove it off. In 1017 he backed the Lombard revolt in Apulia against the Byzantines, with the first Norman mercenaries in Italy in its ranks, and was beaten at Cannae in 1018. In 1020 he went to Bamberg to ask Henry's help, consecrated the new cathedral, and came back with a confirmation of the papal territories and a promise of a campaign, which in 1022 recovered nothing. At Pavia that August pope and emperor held a synod whose canons forbade priests to marry and declared the children of clerics serfs of the church; Odilo of Cluny sat with them. Benedict died on 9 April 1024 and was buried in Saint Peter's. His brother Romanus, the consul of the Romans, succeeded him within days, and their nephew would be Benedict IX. He was the ablest of the Tusculans and the only one the reformers could bear to praise.