Dr. Thomas Madden

One of the popes is almost captured by Muslim attackers in Rome.

So it's a very difficult time.

The quality of life throughout Europe goes down, and the popes now increasingly just become the rulers of the city of Rome.

And that means they're fought over by various families during that period.

And so you have a number of popes who essentially are just, you know, they're kind of like mafioso bosses who end up getting control.

Some of them, you have a couple in the 10th century, one who actually was responsible for the death of his predecessor.

You have one infamous case at the end of the 10th century where you have a pope who basically decided he didn't want to be pope anymore and sold the office and left town.

Um, and then a reformer came in and then his other job didn't work out.

So he came back and claimed to be Pope still.

Um, so, uh, there's, there's, um, there's a lot of that.

Um, there's also a period, uh, known as the pornography where you basically have the, which pornography means rule by prostitutes.

Um, it's, they're not, it's not really prostitutes, but there's a couple of noble women who basically, um,

control a series of about three popes, either because they're lovers or because it's their sons.

So it definitely has some really bad periods there.

But they tend to be mostly constrained to that period of the 10th century.

and the early 11th century.

And that's what leads to the 11th century reform movements, where you get real reform popes who really reformed the whole church, starting with Leo IX and Gregory VII.

You have to get some non-Italians in there for a while.

Get some good German popes in there.

That's true, yeah.