A party in favour of the Western Emperors is the least to be distinguished in the midst of these troubles; we rather have to remark a tendency, weak at first, towards the Greek emperors, but which disposition became much more evident towards the close of this century. From the year 907, Rome behaved with complaisance to Leo VI. called the Philosopher, whose fourth marriage had been censured by the patriarch of Constantinople. The power of the clergy was, at this period, more formidable at a distance from Rome than in the capital of Christendom. William of Aquitaine, in founding the abbey of Cluni, about the year 910, declared, that these monks should never be subject to him, to his relatives, or descendants, nor to any earthly power.¹¹⁰ In Northern and Western Europe the monks inherited, without being inherited of, and the edifice of their formidable opulence rapidly a rose. They made not such a hasty progress in the Roman State, where, under ephemeral popes, the elective chiefs of a species of republic, the intrigues attached to such a system occupied every mind. In the midst of these political movements, three female patricians arose, provided with all the resources of influence with which rank, talents and beauty could arm ambition. Theodora, the mother of the other two, seduced the nobles, calmed faction, subjected to her authority the Church itself, and finally softened public manners by corrupting them. ¹¹⁰ Concilior. vol. 9. p. 565—Bibl. Clun. —Fleury’s Eccles. Hist. b. 54, n. 45. One of her lovers, at first bishop of Bologna, she raised to the archbishopric of Ravenna, and, subsequently, to the sovereign pontificate, which he filled under the name of John X. from 914 to 928. We cannot make a favorable report of the holiness of this pontiff, but in his character, as head of a state, he merits fewer reproaches. He did not dispute the rights of other sovereigns; he acknowledged that it belonged to kings alone to invest bishops¹¹¹ he reconciled the princes whose rivalries destroyed Italy: on placing the imperial crown on the head of Berengarius, he endeavoured to ally him with the Greek Emperor against the Saracens, their common enemies: he himself marched against these Mahometans, fought them with more bravery than belongs to the office of a pope, and drove them from the neighbourhood of Rome. ¹¹¹ Concil. Gall. vol. 3, p. 565.