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Elected consul for the year 915, Teofilatto ruled Rome alongside his wife Theodora, appointing their nominees to the papacy. Teofilatto – Theofylactus – was one of the rising warlords who treated the papacy as just one of the urban offices through which they could control a Rome already divided into armed camps, the ancient monuments such as the Colosseum or Hadrian’s mausoleum now serving as fortified strongholds. If the reality resembled gang warfare, the titles were still dazzling: Eminentissimus, Magnificus, consul and of course pope.

When the Arabs seized Minturno, a town eighty miles south of Rome, Christians panicked. Yet Teofilatto could not control Rome alone: the papacy was spiritual leader of western Christendom; Italy was strategically vital, with the Arabs and Romaioi in the south and, in the north, ever since Charlemagne, the kings of East Francia (Germany) had a big stake.

Teofilatto consolidated his power by marrying off his daughters. His wife Theodora was a ‘shameless whore who exercised power over the Roman citizenry like a man’, wrote Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, a retainer of the family’s chief enemy, Otto of Germany: his claims are often German propaganda and male chauvinism.

In 909, Teofilatto married Marozia to a rival warlord, Alberic, margrave of Spoleto, with whom she had several sons. She may have become the mistress of Pope Sergius and have had a son with him too. Her sister was also married off. But unusually Marozia started to exert her own political power in a way that alarmed Liutprand, who called the pair ‘the sister whores’ dominating the papacy in a ‘pornocracy’ – rule of prostitutes. Actually they were potentates and women were more powerful in Rome than anywhere else at the time.

In 915, Alberic, Marozia’s husband, now elected as patrician – Patricius Romanorum, one of many titles borrowed from ancient times – joined forces with Teofilatto and the pope to expel the Arabs from Minturno. In 924, when her husband was assassinated and her father died, Marozia, in her mid-thirties, assumed leadership of the faction as domina, senatrix and patricia, ruler of Rome. After an affair with Pope John X, who then tried to assert his own control, Marozia married Guido, margrave of Tuscany, great-grandson of Charlemagne, who fell in love with her beauty as much as with her power.

In 928, the couple attacked and arrested John X; imprisoned in Hadrian’s mausoleum, now fortified as Castel Sant’Angelo, the pope was later suffocated. Guido himself died soon afterwards. Meanwhile Marozia placed her son by Alberic (if not by Pope Sergius) on the papal throne as Pope John XI, aged only twenty. Her other son, Alberic II of Spoleto, now believed he should succeed his father as ruler of Rome. Marozia resisted, but a woman of power needed male help: she negotiated a marriage with Hugh of Provence, a Charlemagne scion, king of Italy, who duly arrived in Rome.

Many sons have loathed their mothers’ new husbands but few have stormed the wedding reception. Marozia’s son Alberic II launched a wedding coup and besieged the wedding party in Castel Sant’Angelo; the bridegroom abandoned the bride by shinning down a rope; Marozia herself was arrested and imprisoned in Castel Sant’Angelo, where she later died. Alberic II ruled Rome as princeps for the next twenty years, marrying his new stepsister, the daughter of King Hugh and portentously naming their son Octavian. On his deathbed in 954, Alberic persuaded his magnates to appoint Octavian as princeps and then as Pope John XII. This overpromoted teen popinjay became tyrant of Rome. His sins, even listed by the panting Liutprand, sound unremarkable except for the surprising absence of sodomy: ‘He had fornicated with the widow of Rainier, with Stephana his father’s concubine, with the widow Anna, and with his own niece, and he made the sacred palace into a whorehouse. They said that he had gone hunting publicly; that he had blinded his confessor Benedict, and thereafter Benedict had died; that he had killed John, cardinal subdeacon, after castrating him’ and ‘he toasted the devil with wine.’ But struggling to defend Rome, in 962, John XII called in the East Francian king Otto I, who marched south, accompanied by Bishop Liutprand, to protect him in return for his own coronation as Roman emperor. Unsurprisingly John fell out with the Germans but perished – characteristically – during a bout of adulterous sex.