A Book of the Riviera

by S. Baring-Gould

About this same Hugh of Provence, one of the biggest scoundrels who ever breathed, it will be as well to say something.

Hugh was the son of Theobald, Count of Provence, and of Bertha, daughter of Lothair, King of Burgundy. The House of Provence had acquired great possessions during the reign of Louis III., King of Arles and Emperor (d. 915), the uncle of Hugh. But Hugh was not content. He raised pretensions to the kingdom of Italy, then held by Rudolf, King of Transjuran Burgundy. Hugh was seconded by his half-brothers Guido and Lambert, Dukes of Tuscany and Spoleto, and by his sister, Ermengarde, widow of the Marquess of Ivrea. Pope John X., Lambert, Archbishop of Milan, and nearly all the Lombard nobles, supported his claim, and he disembarked at Pisa in 926, and was crowned at Pavia. The crafty Hugh, fully estimating the influence of the clergy in the politics of Italy, affected the most profound zeal for religion, and flattered the clergy. John X., in Rome, was in a difficult position. Rome at the time was ruled by the infamous Marozia. John had been the favourite of Marozia’s equally infamous mother Theodora. He had, in fact, been her paramour, and it was she who had advanced him from one bishopric to another, and had finally placed the tiara on his head. On the death of his mistress, John found himself engaged in a fierce contest for the mastery of Rome with Marozia and her lover, or husband, the Marquess Alberic, by whom she had a son of the same name, and another, by Pope Sergius it was rumoured, whom she afterwards elevated to the Papacy.

John managed to drive the Marquess out of Rome, and he was assassinated in 925; whereupon Marozia married Guido, Duke of Tuscany, half-brother of Hugh of Provence. The Pope hoped, notwithstanding this connexion, by offering the prize of the Imperial crown, to secure Hugh’s protection against his domestic tyrants. But he was disappointed. Marozia seized on the Pope, the former lover of her mother. His brother Peter was killed before his face, and John was thrown into prison, where, some months after, he died, either of anguish or, as was rumoured, smothered with a pillow.

Marozia did not venture at once to place her son on the Papal throne. A Leo VI. was Pope for some months, and a Stephen VII. for two years and one month. The son was still a mere boy, too young for the shameless woman to advance him to the Chair of S. Peter. But on the death of Stephen, Marozia again ruled alone in Rome; Guido, her husband, was dead, and she made her son Pope under the title of John XI.

But Marozia was not satisfied with having been the wife, first of a Marquess, then of a Duke; the mistress of Pope Sergius, the mother of Pope John XI. She sent to offer her hand to Hugh of Provence, the new King of Italy. Hugh was not scrupulous in his amours, but there was an impediment in the way. She had been the wife of his half-brother. But the youthful Pope, the son of the wretched woman, was ready with a dispensation, and the marriage was celebrated in Rome.

Hugh set to work now to strike down, one after another, the nobles who had supported him, and had shaken down the throne of Rudolf, acting with unexampled perfidy and ingratitude. He did not even spare his half-brother, Lambert, who had succeeded Guido in the Duchy of Tuscany, for he plucked out his eyes.

His high-handed and merciless conduct alarmed those who had not yet suffered. One day, Alberic, the son of Marozia, was commanded by King Hugh to serve him with water, at supper, so as to wash his hands. Performing his office awkwardly or reluctantly, the youth spilled the water, whereupon the King struck him in the face. Alberic was furious; he went forth and placed himself at the head of a conspiracy against his stepfather. The bells of Rome rang out, the people rushed into the streets, besieged the Castle of S. Angelo, and took it. Hugh had to fly and form a court at Pavia.

It was in 936 that King Hugh marched into Provence to dislodge the Moors from the Grand Fraxinet, when a general conspiracy broke out in Northern Italy, headed by Berengar, Marquess of Ivrea. Hugh had despoiled his half-brother, Lambert, of the Duchy of Tuscany, and had given it to his own full brother Boso; but after awhile, becoming jealous of his power, he had dispossessed Boso. Berengar, Marquess of Ivrea, had married Willa, the daughter of Boso. Berengar had been at the court of Hugh, when that King had made a plan to seize and blind him. But he received timely warning from Lothair, King Hugh’s son, and had fled. Finding discontent rife, he placed himself at the head of the Italian princes and nobles.

After his abandonment of the Mountains of the Moors, and having come to terms with the Saracens, Hugh hastened into Italy, only to find that his cause was lost. Amidst general execration, he was forced to retire into Provence in 946, and there he died three years later, in the odour of sanctity.