The chronicle is crude and meagre, but it suggests elementary and unbridled passions. "The Marquis Peter," says Benedict, "so infuriated the Romans that he was compelled to leave the city." He fortified himself in Horta and summoned the dreaded Hungarians to his aid: than which there could hardly be a graver crime in an Italian of the time. They came in large numbers and trod the life out of the Roman province. When Peter concluded that his opponents were sufficiently weakened, he returned to Rome and gathered troops about him. There must have been sombre days in the city in that year 928. One day, however, when it was observed that few of Peter's men had accompanied him to the Lateran, a band of Marozia's followers burst into the palace and laid him dead at the Pope's feet. John himself was taken from the palace and imprisoned, and he died in prison in the following year (929). Whether he was murdered or died a natural death is uncertain.[193] Such was the not unnatural termination of one of the longest Pontificates in the history of Rome, and we have no reason to suppose that, if we had fuller narratives than those I have quoted, they would redeem the character of John X. His desertion of Bologna for Ravenna, and his transfer to Rome within twenty years of the time when his party had foully treated a dead man for just such an irregularity: his alliance with the unscrupulous house of Theophylactus: his quite superfluous appearance on the battlefield: his easy distribution of royal and imperial crowns: and, above all, the maintenance of his unprincipled brother in the teeth of deadly hostility, sufficiently indicate his character. He was an accomplished adventurer. He writes a very good Latin for the period, and may well have been a charming and handsome and brave man. It is recorded that he richly decorated the Lateran Palace. But he was a child of his age, and the historian finds it easier to respect the sad and sincere reflection of the older ecclesiastical writers--that Christ then slumbered in the tossing barque of Peter--than the strained efforts of a few modern writers to convince us that the chosen Pope of an aristocracy which they depict in the darkest colours was merely the victim of calumny.