Stephen VIII

Stephen was a Roman, cardinal priest of Santi Silvestro e Martino ai Monti, and Alberic II had him consecrated on 14 July 939, the day after Leo VII was buried. He continued Leo's policy: Odo of Cluny remained in Rome, privileges went out to reformed monasteries, and the pope stayed out of the prince's affairs. His one intervention abroad was decisive. In France the young Carolingian Louis IV, whom Hugh the Great and the other magnates had recalled from England in 936 and then abandoned, was on the point of losing his throne; in 942 Stephen sent a legate, Damasus, with letters threatening the rebels with excommunication if they did not return to their allegiance, and the Frankish annalist Flodoard credits the threat with the peace that followed. It was the first time in a generation that a pope had commanded anything north of the Alps and been obeyed.

He died in October 942 and was buried in Saint Peter's. His reign is the middle of Alberic's twenty-two years, when the prince held the city so firmly that the papacy could conduct a foreign policy of sorts, provided it was not an Italian one. The pope who saved a king of France could not have named a bishop for Rome's own suburbs without asking the man in the palace on the Aventine.