Clement II

At the synod of Sutri in December 1046, Henry III of Germany swept away three rival claimants to the papacy and asked the Romans to elect his own chancellor's colleague, Suidger of Bamberg. The Romans obliged. On Christmas Day the new pope consecrated himself in Saint Peter's and then, in the same ceremony, set the imperial crown on the head of the king who had made him.

The gesture defined him. Clement II was a genuine reformer, and the Roman synod he held in January 1047 issued the first serious papal legislation against simony, the buying and selling of church office, that Rome had produced in generations. It threatened penance on anyone knowingly ordained by a simoniac. But he was also unmistakably a German bishop on loan, keeping Bamberg alongside Rome, travelling in the emperor's train through southern Italy, and owing his throne to a layman's decision.

He was carried back over the Alps and buried in his own cathedral at Bamberg, where he still lies, alone among popes in German ground. Benedict IX returned to seize Rome for eight months before the emperor's next nominee could reach it.