Pope Stephen III
Stephen III was elected after a layman seized the papacy by force, and spent four years trying to make sure it could not happen again. His predecessor had died in 767 and a local duke installed his own brother, a man who was not even a cleric, having him run through every grade of ordination in a single day. The Lombard king's men removed him a year later, blinded him and a rival claimant, and a synod met in the Lateran in 769 to decide what had happened and what should follow. It ruled that only cardinal priests and deacons could be elected, and that laymen could take no part in the choosing - the first attempt to close the papal election to the Roman nobility, and one that would have to be made again three centuries later. The politics of his reign were the ones that made the papacy a temporal power. Rome sat between a Lombard kingdom that wanted it and a Frankish one that had twice been invited to prevent that. The territories the Franks handed over in 756 were the beginning of a papal state that would last until 1870. Stephen wrote to the Frankish kings in 770 in extraordinary terms to forbid a marriage alliance with the Lombard house, calling it a diabolical union with a treacherous and stinking people; the marriage went ahead and was repudiated within a year. He died in 772, and within two years the Frankish king who had just become sole ruler on his brother's death in 771 destroyed the Lombard kingdom, took its iron crown, and confirmed the donation that made his successors the guarantors of the papal territories. That relationship - a pope who needed a protector and a king who needed a legitimiser - is what produced the imperial coronation in Rome on Christmas Day 800, and it is the reason the office Stephen held became a state as well as a see.
- Lived: 720 CE – 772 CE
- Nationality: Papal
- Roles: head_of_state, religious_leader
