Stephen IX

Frederick of Lorraine, who reigned as Pope Stephen IX, belonged to the ducal house of Ardennes–Verdun, among the leading princely families of Lotharingia in the Holy Roman Empire. He was a younger son of Gothelo I, duke of Upper and Lower Lorraine; his brother Godfrey, later called Godfrey the Bearded, became a dominant figure in Lotharingian and Italian politics. Raised for the church rather than for secular rule, Frederick held a canonry and the archdeaconry of the cathedral of Saint-Lambert at Liège. In the early 1050s he entered the service of Pope Leo IX, himself a Lotharingian prelate, and was made chancellor and librarian of the Roman Church, a post that put him at the centre of papal administration and diplomacy.

In 1054 Frederick was one of the three papal legates, together with Cardinal Humbert of Silva Candida and Archbishop Peter of Amalfi, whom Leo IX sent to Constantinople. That embassy ended in the mutual excommunications customarily taken as the date of the East-West Schism. After Leo’s death, and while Godfrey was in revolt against Emperor Henry III, Frederick left the Lateran and, around the mid-1050s, took the Benedictine habit at Monte Cassino. In 1057 Pope Victor II, visiting the abbey after the death of Abbot Richer, secured Frederick’s election as abbot and named him cardinal-priest of San Crisogono. When Victor II died at Arezzo in July 1057, the Roman clergy, acting quickly while the imperial throne was held by the child Henry IV under the regency of Empress Agnes, elected Frederick pope in early August 1057. He took the name Stephen.

His pontificate lasted only about eight months but belonged fully to the eleventh-century papal reform. He continued the campaign against simony and clerical marriage, relied on the circle around Hildebrand (the future Gregory VII) and Humbert, and sought to turn his family’s military strength against the Normans then overrunning southern Italy. He sent Hildebrand to the German court and himself went to Florence, where Godfrey and Beatrice of Tuscany held power, to concert a campaign. He remained closely tied to Monte Cassino, at first retaining the abbacy before arrangements were made for its governance.

In Florence he fell mortally ill. Before dying on 29 March 1058 he is reported to have bound the cardinals by oath not to elect a successor until Hildebrand had returned from Germany. He was buried in the church of Santa Reparata in Florence. The oath was not kept. A faction of the Roman nobility soon put forward John Mincius as Benedict X, while the reformers later rallied to Gerard of Burgundy, who became Pope Nicholas II. Stephen’s brief reign thus linked the Lotharingian popes of the 1050s with the more independent reform papacy that followed.