John XIII

John was a Roman of the Theophylact line, son of a bishop named John and a Theodora who was probably Marozia's niece, and bishop of Narni when Otto's envoys, after Leo VIII's death, had him elected and consecrated on 1 October 965. The Romans took him for what he was, the emperor's man, and in December the prefect Peter and the nobility seized him, held him in Castel Sant'Angelo, and sent him to a castle in Campania. He escaped to Capua, called on Otto, and in November 966 came back behind a German army. The reprisals were the worst Rome had seen: the twelve leaders of the militia were hanged, the prefect Peter was hung by the hair from the equestrian statue then thought to be Constantine's, flogged, and paraded on an ass, and the consuls were exiled to Germany. Otto stayed in Italy for six years, and John governed in his shadow.

He was useful to Otto in other ways. In 968 he raised Magdeburg to an archbishopric with suffragans among the Slavs, the metropolis of the mission east of the Elbe that Agapetus had promised and Alberic had blocked. He made Capua and Benevento archbishoprics, binding the Lombard south to Rome as the Byzantines lost it. He died on 6 September 972 and was buried in Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, whose monks he had favored; the Romans, who had nicknamed him the White Hen, did not mourn him. Otto I died eight months later, and the city rose again within a year.