Sergius IV

Peter was a Roman, the son of a shoemaker of the Pina district, and his nickname, Bucca Porci, Pig's Snout, followed him into the Liber Pontificalis. He was bishop of Albano when John Crescentius made him pope on 31 July 1009, and he took the name Sergius. Later writers explained the change by saying no man could be pope under Peter's name and built the custom of changing names on it; in fact John II had done it in 533 and John XII in 955, and Peter of Pavia in 983.

His three years are thin. He fed the poor of Rome through a famine, an act his epitaph, which survives in the Lateran, made the center of his memory. He confirmed privileges for monasteries in Italy and Germany. In 1009 the news came that the caliph al-Hakim had destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and a bull in Sergius's name calling for a fleet to avenge it survives; it was forged at Moissac in the 1090s, when the First Crusade needed precedents.

He died on 12 May 1012, within a week of John Crescentius, in the weeks when the counts of Tusculum were taking the city from the Crescentii. The coincidence made later writers suspect that both had been killed; there is no proof of it. He was buried in the Lateran. His death ended the Crescentian papacy: the Tusculans installed Benedict VIII within six days, and the Crescentii's own candidate, a Gregory, fled to Henry II in Germany and was sent away.