As in previous ages, nevertheless, the disorders of the papacy itself greatly hampered its advance. In the period from John XVIII to Leo IX (1003-1048) six popes were deposed, two murdered, and one mutilated; prolonged contests for the chair were frequent; and in the main it was disposed of by factions of the Roman and Italian nobility. For a time the counts of Tuscany made it hereditary in their family; and once a Roman courtesan of the higher order decided the election, by help of the general worthlessness of the Roman electoral populace, who, having neither commerce nor industry, were fed by papal doles as of old they had been by the emperors. In the tenth century, the papacy had reached its nadir. The general expectation, based on the Apocalypse and other Christian tradition, that the world would end with the year 1000, seems to have turned the thoughts of the more serious away from worldly questions; while the more reckless types, lawless at best in that age, exhibited something of the wild licence seen at times in cities stricken by pestilence, and ships about to sink. When the dreaded year was passed, riot was even quickened; but in the eleventh century a moral instinct began slowly to assert itself. The elections to the papacy had become so scandalous and ruinous--three pretenders claiming the chair at once--that the clergy themselves conceded to the emperor Henry III, in the year 1047, the right to appoint popes; and he used his power four times with judgment and success. Naturally, however, the reform strengthened the papacy rather than the emperor. Pope Nicholas II, acting on the advice of his powerful secretary, the monk Hildebrand, who was to be one of his successors, decreed (1059) that the election of all bishops should lie with the local "chapters" and the pope; and that the election of the pope should in future be made by the seven cardinal bishops of the Roman district, with the assent first of the cardinal priests and deacons of the Roman churches, and next of the laity; the choice to be ratified by Henry IV, then a minor, or by such of his successors as should obtain the same privilege. Yet, on the death of Nicholas, Hildebrand procured the election and consecration of Alexander II, without waiting for any ratification; and when he himself became pope as Gregory VII (1073) he was on the alert for his famous struggle with Henry over the claim of the temporal power to appoint bishops. Standing on the forged decretals, with an almost maniacal belief in his divine rights, he claimed as pope not only the sole power to confirm bishops, but the power to take or give the possessions of all men as he would; and he threatened deposition to any king who dared to gainsay him. It was in the course of the struggle with Henry, by the use of the now common weapon of excommunication, that he reduced the emperor to his historic act of self-abasement (1077) at Canossa.