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From The Lives of the Popes from the Time of our Saviour Jesus Christ to the Accession of Gregory VII. Written Originally in Latin by B. Platina, Native of Cremona, and translated into English (from an anonymous translation, first printed in 1685 by Sir Paul Rycaut), Edited by William Benham, Volume I, London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, [1888, undated in text]; pp. 274-275.

The Lives of the Popes,
BY
B. Platina

Volume I.


[274]

LEO  IX.

A.D. 1048-1054.

LEO the Ninth, a German, A.D. 1048, was made Pope after this manner. The Romans having sent ambassadors to the Emperor to entreat him to send to them a good Pope, he immediately nominated to them Baunon, Bishop of Toul, a good man and of great integrity; who, taking his journey towards Rome in his pontifical habit, was met by the Abbot of Clugny and Hildebrand, a monk, born at Soana, who persuaded him to lay by his pontifical habit, and to enter Rome, for that Henry had no power from God to create a Pope, but it belonged of right to the clergy and people of Rome. With these words Leo was so moved (and because as he came along he had heard a voice saying, “Ego cogito pacis cogitationes, non afflictionis”) that he laid by his habit and entered Rome as a private man, accusing himself that he had chosen to obey the Emperor rather than God. The Roman clergy then, by the persuasion of Hildebrand, elected Baunon Pope, and so much the more readily, because he had professed the right of electing Popes ought not to be in the Emperor, but in the clergy. And yet the vices of several Popes were (as we have said) so great, that it seemed to be done by the judgment of God, that this power should be taken from the clergy, that they might amend their flagitious lives and sinful inclinations, and that the Church of Christ might not suffer ruin in the hands of such evil prelates. Thus Baunon, having got the papacy, and having changed his name to Leo IX., he immediately created Hildebrand a cardinal-deacon, and gave him the government of St Paul’s Church; so that it seemed as if they had divided the pontifical charge between them, one ruling the church of St Peter, the other that of St Paul. In the meantime Drogo, chieftain of the Normans in Apulia, dying, his brother, Gisulphus, succeeded him and possessed himself by force of the city of Beneventum, which was the Pope’s by surrender; for when the 274 Emperor Henry having built a church at Bamberg to the honour of St George, and had a great mind it should be made a cathedral, Benedict VIII. consented, upon the condition the said church should pay yearly, as a kind of tribute, a hundred marks of silver and a white horse with his caparisons; which yearly payment Leo IX. remitted to the church of Bamberg, receiving of the Emperor in lieu thereof the city of Beneventum. Leo, therefore, strengthened with the justice of his title and the Emperor’s forces, marches against Gisulphus with an undisciplined army, and is by him defeated and taken prisoner, but was soon remitted to Rome with an honourable retinue. It is storied that in his time, Robert Guiscard bringing an army out of France into Italy, and driving the Greeks and Saracens before him, possessed himself of Apulia, where he chanced to find a statue, with these words engraven on a brass circle round the head, “The first day of May at sunrising I shall have a golden head,” which words, being well considered by a certain Saracen who was Robert’s prisoner, a skilful magician, he marked how far the shadow of the statue extended, and on the first day of May at sunrise, having dug up the place, he found a great treasure, with which he bought his liberty of Robert. But to return to Leo, who was certainly a man of great devotion, innocence, benignity, and religion, particularly so eminent for hospitality, that his palace was always free for pilgrims and poor people; nay, once when he found a poor leper at his door, he with pity ordered him to be taken in and laid in his own bed; but in the morning when the door-keeper opened the door, the leper being not to be found, it was thought that it was Christ himself that lay there as a poor man. In matters relating to the faith, he used great diligence and industry, for in a council holden at Vercelli he condemned Berengarius for a heretic, and by his monitories put the Emperor of Constantinople upon repairing the holy sepulchre at Jerusalem, which had been spoiled by the barbarians. At this same time lived Theobald, a noble Frenchman, famous for his holy life at Vicenza; and Vincentius, Bishop of Liege, a person remarkable for learning and piety, wrote many things skilfully and acutely concerning the quadrature of the circle to Hermannus, a man of an excellent wit. Leo died when he had been Pope five years, two months, and six days.

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Previous Pope: 156. Damasus2 VI. 157. Leo IX. Next Pope: 158. Victor II.

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