Stephen VII

Stephen was a Roman, the son of Teudemund, and cardinal priest of Sant'Anastasia when Marozia chose him to follow Leo VI in December 928. Like Leo he was a placeholder: her son John, whom she meant to make pope, was about eighteen, and the Roman clergy would not yet accept a pope of that age. Stephen held the see for a little over two years. What survives from them is a group of privileges for monasteries, in Italy and in France, of the kind Cluny and its allies were collecting from every pope, and the confirmation of the rights of several bishoprics; nothing in them is his own voice. Whether he ever left the Lateran is not known.

He died in February 931 and was buried in Saint Peter's. John X, the pope Marozia had deposed, was already dead in his prison; Leo VI, her first substitute, had died within months; and with Stephen gone she had what she had waited for. Her son was consecrated as John XI within weeks. Stephen VII's reign matters as an interval, and its length, which was greater than either of the reigns on each side of it, says something about the Roman clergy: even in Marozia's Rome there were things that took time, and a pope of eighteen was one of them.