John IX

John was born at Tivoli, the son of Rampoald, became a Benedictine monk, and was ordained priest by Formosus, which put him in the Formosan party as it fought for its life. On Theodore II's death in December 897 the other side elected Sergius, bishop of Caere, and held the Lateran; John was elected against him in January 898 and won because the emperor Lambert, who had changed sides, backed him with troops. Sergius was excommunicated and driven out. He would be back in 904 as Sergius III to undo everything that follows.

John held two synods in 898, at Rome and then at Ravenna in Lambert's presence with seventy-four bishops, and they settled the accounts of two years. The Cadaver Synod was condemned and its acts burned, the trial of the dead forbidden for the future, Formosus's ordinations upheld, and the clergy who had been made to recant them absolved; Boniface VI's election by tumult was declared null; and, to prevent the next riot, the pope was in future to be elected by the bishops and clergy with the assent of the senate and people and consecrated in the presence of imperial envoys, the rule of 824 revived for a Spoletan emperor. Lambert was recognized as emperor and Arnulf's coronation annulled as extorted by force.

In 899, at the request of Mojmir II, John sent an archbishop and two bishops to Moravia to consecrate a metropolitan and three suffragans, giving the Slavs of Moravia a hierarchy of their own; the Bavarian bishops, who had jailed Methodius thirty years before, protested furiously in 900. John died in January of that year and was buried in Saint Peter's.