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Biography

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Pope Victor III, born Dauferio (also rendered Dauferius) in Benevento in southern Italy during the eleventh century, belonged to a noble Lombard family associated with the princely house of that city. After the death of his father he was pressed toward a secular marriage, but he abandoned that path, lived for a time as a hermit, and entered the Benedictine monastery of Santa Sofia in Benevento. He later sojourned at other religious houses before joining the abbey of Monte Cassino in the mid-eleventh century, where he took the name Desiderius. The traditional accounts of his youth are hagiographical in tone, but his later career as monk, abbot, and cardinal is firmly attested in contemporary and near-contemporary sources.

In 1058 the monks of Monte Cassino elected him abbot, an office he held for nearly three decades. His abbacy marked a high point in the monastery’s medieval history. He rebuilt the abbey church on a magnificent scale; the new basilica was consecrated in 1071 in the presence of Pope Alexander II and a large assembly of bishops and secular princes. Desiderius assembled a substantial library, encouraged the copying and illumination of manuscripts, and employed craftsmen in mosaic, metalwork, and architecture, often drawing on Byzantine as well as Western models. In 1059 Pope Nicholas II created him cardinal-priest of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. He became one of the leading figures of the eleventh-century papal reform, a close collaborator of Pope Gregory VII, though his own temperament was often more conciliatory than Gregory’s in the struggle with King Henry IV of Germany over investiture and imperial claims in Italy.

After Gregory VII died in exile in 1085, the Roman see remained contested because of the imperial antipope Clement III (Wibert of Ravenna). On 24 May 1086 the reform cardinals elected Desiderius pope; he took the name Victor III but immediately sought to refuse the office and withdrew from Rome. Only under continued pressure from the Gregorian party did he accept consecration, which took place on 9 May 1087. His pontificate was short and insecure. He was never able to hold Rome firmly against the antipope’s supporters.

In August 1087 he presided over a synod at Benevento that renewed the excommunication of Clement III, restated the prohibition of lay investiture, and gave papal encouragement to a Pisan-led maritime expedition against the North African port of Mahdia. Illness then forced him to leave the city. He returned to Monte Cassino and died there on 16 September 1087, and was buried in the abbey church he had restored. He was succeeded by Urban II. A Benedictine monk and one of the great monastic patrons of art and learning in eleventh-century Italy, he is venerated as Blessed Victor III. Pope Leo XIII confirmed his cult in 1887; his feast is kept on 16 September.

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