Valentine

Valentine was a Roman from the via Lata quarter, the son of a man named Leontius, drawn into the Lateran clergy by Paschal I, who made him deacon and then archdeacon, the second office in the Roman church. When Eugene II died in August 827 the clergy, the nobility, and the people went to the Lateran together and chose him by acclamation, an election the Liber Pontificalis dwells on because for once every party wanted the same man. He was taken to Saint Peter's and consecrated; he governed for about forty days; and he died in September, before the imperial commissioners of 824 had time to have any say at all.

He is the only pope named Valentine and, by the conventional count, the hundredth pope. His pontificate is the shortest of the ninth century until the chaos after Formosus, when two men would come and go faster. What it shows is the electoral machine of Rome working smoothly for once, in the narrow gap between one crisis and the next. He was buried in Saint Peter's.