Sergius III

Sergius was a Roman noble, son of Benedict, ordained deacon by Stephen VI and a leader of the party that had put Formosus's corpse on trial. Elected pope by that party in December 897 against John IX, he was driven out by Lambert's troops and spent seven years in exile, counting them, ever after, as years of his own reign. He came back in January 904 with the soldiers of Theophylact, master of the militia and the richest man in Rome, deposed the antipope Christopher, and was consecrated on 29 January. Leo V and Christopher died in prison soon afterward, and contemporaries assumed he had them killed.

His reign was the anti-Formosan reaction made permanent. He reaffirmed the Cadaver Synod's verdict, declared Formosus's ordinations void, required clergy ordained by him to be reordained, and set up an epitaph in Saint Peter's praising Stephen VI; the treatises of Auxilius and the anonymous Invective against Rome were written against him. He rebuilt the Lateran basilica, in ruins since the earthquake of 897, and his portrait went into its apse. In Constantinople he approved the fourth marriage of the emperor Leo VI, which the patriarch Nicholas Mystikos had refused, and the patriarch was deposed for it; the quarrel outlasted both.

He died on 14 April 911 and was buried in the Lateran he had rebuilt. His reign began the rule of Theophylact's house over the papacy, and the century it opened is named for the darkness he brought to it.