John XIX

Romanus was consul and senator of the Romans, the lay head of the Tusculan regime, and when his brother Benedict VIII died in April 1024 he had himself ordained and consecrated pope within a day, paying, the monk Rodulfus Glaber says, for the votes. He kept the family's course. He crowned Conrad II, the first Salian emperor, in Saint Peter's on 26 March 1027, with King Canute of England and Denmark and King Rudolf of Burgundy in the congregation, and Canute went home with a promise that English pilgrims would pay lower tolls on the road to Rome. The same year a Byzantine embassy from Basil II offered money if the pope would recognize the patriarch of Constantinople as universal bishop in the East, and John, Glaber says, was inclined to take it until the monks of the West, William of Volpiano at their head, wrote to tell him what he was selling.

He was not without judgment. He upheld Cluny's exemption against the bishop of Mâcon, and he heard music: Guido, a Benedictine of Arezzo, brought him an antiphoner with the chants written on a staff of lines, and the pope, Guido wrote afterward, learned to sing a verse he had never heard before he rose from the page. John died in October 1032; a Roman story has him killed in a rising, and the sources say nothing. His nephew Theophylact, about twenty, was made pope by the boy's father, and the Iron Century found its last and worst.