Sylvester III

John was bishop of Sabina, a Roman by birth, and the candidate of the faction, led by the Crescentii of the Sabina, that drove Benedict IX from the city in September 1044. He was elected on 20 January 1045 and, it was said at the time and repeated at Sutri, paid for it. He took the name Sylvester. He held the Lateran for seven weeks. In March Benedict's brothers, the counts of Tusculum, took Rome back by force, and on 10 March Benedict was restored; John went home to Sabina and resumed his bishopric, without, apparently, renouncing the papal title. That was the position when Henry III came to Italy in 1046 to find three men with claims, and the synod of Sutri on 20 December declared that John had never been pope and sentenced him to be deprived of his orders and confined to a monastery.

Nothing he did in the seven weeks is recorded. He is in the succession because three claimants deposed by an emperor made a cleaner story than one, and Sutri's verdict that he had never been pope was quietly ignored by the lists that followed. Cathedra shows no portrait of him. The only image ever circulated as his, a medallion in the series of Saint Paul's Outside the Walls, has been re-identified as the antipope Benedict X, and no other likeness, real or imagined, has been found.