Pope Sergius IV
Pope from 1009 to 1012 · Italy · Religious Figures
Pope Sergius IV is read about 56 times a day, in 67 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 2 October 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 377 days, one point a day.
Something wrong?A medieval pope whose hold on Rome was so weak that a nobleman actually ran the city, and who may - or may not - have issued the earliest papal call for a crusade against Muslim control of Jerusalem, decades before the First Crusade.
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About this person
Sergius IV became bishop of Rome on 31 July 1009, but his reign was one of the papacy's quieter humiliations: the patrician John Crescentius held the real temporal power, leaving Sergius a figurehead in his own city. Historians still debate whether he issued a summons to expel Muslims from the Holy Land - if genuine, it would predate the crusading movement by generations, though it clearly went nowhere. He died on 12 May 1012. What stuck wasn't his political impotence or his disputed letter, but the precedent: from his time forward, it became tradition for a newly elected pope to take a new name upon assuming the office.
Religious Figures from Italy 6
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