Marozia crowned her adventurous life in 932 by marrying the step-brother of her late husband--the licentious Hugh of Provence whom John had helped to put on the throne of Italy. In the preceding year she had put in the chair of Peter her son, John XI., a mere shadow of a Pope. But the disgusted Romans flew to arms, imprisoned John and Marozia, and sent the brutal Hugh flying for his life. Alberic II. then controlled the city and the Papacy for twenty years, and a series of obscure, though apparently not unworthy, men were appointed to discharge the scanty spiritual duties which Popes could or would perform in that darkest of the dark ages. Alberic bequeathed his power to his illegitimate son Octavian, and compelled the nobles and clergy to swear to make him Pope at the next vacancy. John XII., as he called himself, proved the worst Pope yet recorded: more at home in the helmet than the tiara, and more expert in the cultivation than in the suppression of vice. When his own sword proved incapable of securing his rights, he summoned Otto I., with the customary bribe of the imperial crown. Otto at length deposed him, after six years of scandalous abuse of the Papacy, and he disappears from history in a singular legend; he died, it was said, of a blow on the temples given him by the devil--possibly in the person of the injured husband--during one of his amorous adventures. Ten Popes and Anti-Popes, generally men of no distinction either in vice or virtue, succeeded each other in the next thirty years. The factions at Rome became more and more violent, and Europe sank deeper and deeper into the corruption from which Gregory VII. would endeavour to rouse it. The Iron Century closed, oddly enough, with the appearance on the Papal throne of one of the first scholars of Christian Europe, the famous Gerbert (Silvester II.), but his brief and premature Pontificate made no impression on that dark age. Under Sergius IV. the Roman faction was at length destroyed, but the counts of Tusculum now dragged the unhappy Papacy to a lower depth. Two sons of the first Count, Benedict VIII. and John XIII., successively purchased the votes of the electors, and, by their venality and violence, added fresh stains to the Papal chronicle. The third son of the Count then placed his own youthful offspring in the chair of Peter, and, under the name of Benedict IX., this youth degraded it with crimes and vices so well authenticated that even the most resolute apologist cannot challenge the indictment. Pope Victor III., a few years later, shudders to mention the "murders and robberies and nameless vices" of Benedict,[199] and his vague charges, supported by Raoul Glaber and other authorities, suggest that the Lateran Palace must have recalled to the mind of any sufficiently informed Roman some of the scenes which had been witnessed in Nero's Golden House in the lowest days of paganism. At length, after being twice expelled from Rome, he wearied