The weakness of the papacy in the tenth century was indeed such that no theory could give it respect in Europe. The weakness of the Church was heralded by that of the Empire. The Carling house expired in contempt almost as great as that which had fallen on the Merwings. In Gaul the Norman had won fair provinces on the coast; and the house of the Counts of Paris came in the tenth century to rule over the Franks. There the Church remained strong as the State decayed, and it was the great archbishopric of Rheims which gave the crown to the line of Hugh the Great. In Germany the dynasty of the Carlings became extinct. In Rome the power over the city fell into the hands of the local nobility; and the period was made infamous by the lives of Theodora and Marozia, who were the paramours of popes. The tale of the age of disgrace which marks the greater part of the tenth century is of no importance in the history of the Church. A succession of {197} popes, whom their contemporaries certainly did not believe to be infallible, followed each other in rapid procession. John X. alone (914-28) has any claim to greatness; but he, like the others, was deeply stained with the vices, political if not moral, of his age. It was not until the Saxon Otto came to Italy like a knight-errant to redress the wrongs of the Northern princes, and was crowned at Rome in 962, that the Church in Italy began to revive from its ashes. He deposed and set up popes; and he gave to the papacy something of the bracing ideals which the new life of Gaul and Germany inspired. The moral weakness of the papacy, the political weakness of Italy, had founded the Empire anew, as it had been founded anew in 800. The revival of the Empire under Charles the Great, and again under Otto, was not due to political considerations only; it was due also to the force of religious ideas. [Sidenote: The religious revival of the Empire under the Saxons.]