John XV

John was a Roman, the son of a priest named Leo, and cardinal priest of San Vitale when Boniface VII died in July 985. He was elected in August under Crescentius II, called Nomentanus, who governed Rome as patrician for the next thirteen years and kept the pope on an allowance. Contemporaries disliked him: German chroniclers called him grasping for his relatives, and the Roman clergy resented what he gave them. He was nevertheless, for eleven years, the pope Europe dealt with, and three things he did lasted. In January 993, at a synod in the Lateran, he declared Ulrich of Augsburg a saint, the first canonization pronounced by a pope on record. In 991 his legate made peace between Aethelred of England and Richard of Normandy. And in the same year, when a synod at Saint-Basle deposed Arnulf of Reims for treason and elected Gerbert of Aurillac in his place without asking Rome, John refused to accept it, sent the abbot Leo of Sant'Alessio as legate, and at Mouzon in 995 had Gerbert suspended, insisting that only the pope could depose an archbishop.

In 995 Crescentius's pressure drove John out of Rome to Sutri, and he appealed to the young king Otto III to come and free him. Otto set out in the spring of 996; Crescentius, hearing it, made his peace, and John returned to the Lateran, where he died of fever in March, before the king reached the city. He was buried in Saint Peter's. Otto arrived to find the see vacant and filled it with his cousin.