John XIV

Peter Canepanova was bishop of Pavia and Otto II's chancellor for Italy, a Lombard administrator rather than a Roman cleric, and when Benedict VII died in July 983 the emperor, who was in Rome, chose him. He was consecrated in December as John XIV, and later writers explained the new name by saying that no man should be called Peter in Peter's chair. On 7 December 983 Otto II died in Rome of malaria, aged twenty-eight, and was buried in Saint Peter's, the only emperor who lies there; his heir was three years old. The pope had no protector, and Rome knew it.

John XIV's own reign, four months before the arrest, left a few privileges. His change of name is the interesting thing. John II had done it in 533 because he was called Mercurius, John XII because he was a prince named Octavian; Peter of Pavia was the third, and Peter of Albano, who became Sergius IV in 1009, the fourth, and from those two Peters grew the story that a pope may not bear the first pope's name. The custom of a new name at election, universal since the eleventh century, has no rule behind it and began as an accident of the Iron Century. He was buried in Saint Peter's, near the emperor who had made him.