The general causes of this deterioration are easily assigned. In that age of violent character, uncontrolled by culture, a multiplication of small princedoms was sure to lead to bloody rivalries. To this the dissolution of the Empire of Charlemagne and the feebleness of his descendants had led, especially in Italy, where the weakness of a sacerdocracy--that is to say, its liability, if not obligation, to use temporal resources for religious rather than military and civic purposes--soon became apparent. The Papacy had the further weakness that, being nominally independent yet unable to defend itself, it was ever on the watch for another Pippin--a monarch who would protect it and not govern it--and it dangled its tawdry imperial crown before the eyes of the kings of Italy, France, and Germany, to say nothing of the smaller princes of Italy. Hence arose the factions which rent a degraded Rome. We must remember, too, that this was a fresh period of invasion and devastation: the waves of Saracen advance lapped the walls of Rome from the south and the fierce Hungarians reached it from the north.
These general causes of decay are substantial, yet we must not be too easily contented with them. Some day a subtler or more candid science will tell the whole story of the making of the Middle Ages. I need note only that the disorder existed in Rome, and often burst its bonds, long before the time of Stephen VI. Even under Hadrian I. we saw relatives and friends of the Pope promoted to high office, yet in the end betraying characters of revolting brutality. We remember also a certain legate of Nicholas I., Bishop Arsenius, who handled anathemas with such consummate ease. This man's nephew abducted the daughter of Pope Hadrian II., and, when he was pursued, murdered her and the Pope's wife. There was some taint in the blood--or the brain--of this new Roman aristocracy which gathered round the Lateran. Under John VIII., the strongest successor of Nicholas, they broke into appalling disorders. "Their swinish lust," says one of the most conservative and most reticent of recent writers on the Popes, speaking of the leading Papal officials of the time, "was only second to their cruelty and avarice."[178] Hadrian II. had the widow of one of these officials whipped naked through the streets of Rome, and had another official blinded. Under Stephen VI. and Sergius III. these corrupt Roman families come into clearer light, and the domination of Theodora and Marozia is merely one episode in this lamentable development, which has been recorded more fully because of the piquancy of this feminine ascendancy in a nominal theocracy.