The manifold corruptions of the tenth century and the first part of the eleventh produced a clergy that had almost forfeited its spiritual character. Religion was a cloak for immorality, for licentious self-indulgence, and for corruption and venality which can scarcely be equalled in the entire history of the Christian Church. It was a matter of common notoriety that France and Germany were addicted, almost equal to Italy, to a shameless traffic in ecclesiastical offices and preferments. The most startling picture of the condition of the clergy comes from the pen of Desiderius, Abbot of Monte Cassino, who later became Pope Victor III.: The Italian priesthood, and among them most conspicuously the Roman pontiffs, are in the habit of defying all law and all authority; thus utterly confounding together things sacred and profane. During all this time the Italian priesthood, and none more conspicuously than the Roman pontiffs, set at naught all ecclesiastical law and authority. The people sold their suffrages for money to the highest bidder; the clergy, moved and seduced by avarice and ambition, bought and sold the sacred rights of ordination, and carried on a gigantic traffic with the gifts of the Holy Ghost. Few prelates remained untainted with the vile pollution of simony; few, very few, kept the commandments of God, or served him with upright hearts; following their chiefs to do evil, the great sacerdotal herd rushed headlong down the precipice into the quagmire of licentiousness and profligacy: priests and deacons, whose duty it was to serve God with clean hands, and with chaste bodies to administer the sacraments of the Lord, took to themselves wives after the manner of the laity; they left families behind them, and bequeathed their ill-gotten wealth to their children; yea, even bishops, in contempt of all shame and decency, dwelt with their wives under the same roof--a nefarious and execrable custom, prevailing, alas! most commonly in that city where the laws, thus shamefully set at naught, first issued from the sacred lips of the Prince of the Apostles and his holy successors.[423:1]