For at least a generation in the early tenth century, according to Liudprand of Cremona, the bishop of Rome was to be found in the bedchamber of the House of Theophylact. In his Antapodosis, composed c. 958–62, Liudprand reports that Theodora and Marozia, Theophylact’s wife and daughter, were the lovers respectively of Pope John X and of his predecessor Pope Sergius III. Sexual and political intrigue came to a head in 928, when John X was murdered by Marozia, soon to be succeeded in office by her son with Sergius (Pope John XI).1 This lubricious account has divided its modern readers. Some, for sure, have been scandalised, memorably branding the early tenth-century Roman Church a ‘pornocracy’.2 Others, more sanguine, have been inclined to dismiss Liudprand as a malicious gossip.3 The suggestion advanced here is that Liudprand’s account of the Roman Church, whether true or false, was designed to make a wider point about careerism in the higher clergy; it forms part of a learned and animated discussion of episcopal office and the terms of its legitimate tenure sustained throughout the Antapodosis. Liudprand, often understood as a chronicler of clerical decadence in the ‘pre-Reform era’, was rather, I suggest, a witness and a participant at a key juncture in the definition of what it meant to be a bishop, and not least, bishop of Rome.
