The history of the papacy during this period represents it in its deepest shame and degradation. But after this state of matters was put an end to by the founding of the Holy Roman Empire of German nationalities, it sprang up again from its deep debasement, and reached the highest point of power and influence. With the German empire, to which it owed its salvation, it now carried on a life and death conflict; for it seemed that it was possible to escape enslavement under the temporal power of the emperor only by putting the emperor under its spiritual power. In the conflict with the Hohenstaufens the struggle reached its climax. The papacy won a complete victory, but soon found that it could as little dispense with as endure the presence of a powerful empire. For as the destruction of the Carolingian empire had left it at the mercy of the factions of Italian nobles at the time when this period opens, so its victory over the German empire brought the papacy under the still more degrading bondage of French politics, as is seen in the beginning of the next period. It had during this transition time its most powerful props and advisers in the orders of Clugny and Camaldoli (§ 98, 1). It had a standing army in the mendicant orders, and the crusaders, besides the enthusiasm, which greatly strengthened the papal institution, did the further service of occupying and engrossing the attention of the princes. § 96.1. =The Romish Pornocracy and the Emperor Otto I., † A.D. 973.=--Among the wild struggles of the Italian nobles which broke out after the Emperor Arnulf’s departure (§ 82, 8), the party of the Margrave Adalbert of Tuscany gained the upperhand. His mistress Theodora, a well born and beautiful, ambitious and voluptuous Roman, wife of a Roman senator, as well as her like-minded daughters Marozia and Theodora, filled for half a century the chair of St. Peter with their paramours, sons and grandsons. These constituted the base and corrupt line of popes known as the pornocracy. =Sergius III.=, A.D. 904-911, Marozia’s paramour, starts this disgraceful series. After the short pontificates of the two immediately following popes, Theodora, because Ravenna was inconveniently distant for the gratification of her lust, called John, the archbishop of that place, to the papal chair under the title of =John X.=, A.D. 914-928. By means of a successful crusade which he led in person, he destroyed the remnant of Saracen robbers in Garigliano (§ 81, 2), and crowned the Lombard king Bernard I., A.D. 916-924, as emperor. But when he attempted to break off his disgraceful relations with the woman who had advanced him, Marozia had him cast into prison and smothered with a pillow. The two following popes on whom she bestowed the tiara enjoyed it only a short time, for in A.D. 931 she raised her own son to the papal throne in the twentieth year of his age. His father was Pope Sergius, and