BENEDICT VII, Pope. - After Benedict VI had been strangled in Castel Sant'Angelo, where Crescentius, or Cencius, son of the second Theodora, had him imprisoned, he was briefly replaced by the deacon Franco, who took the name Boniface VII. A list of popes that Sigeric, archbishop of Canterbury, brought back to England from Rome in the year 990, reports: "... Bonifatius sedit dies sexaginta et expulsus est foras" (cf. B. Pesci, L'itinerario romano di Sigerico arcivescovo di Canterbury e la lista dei papi da lui portata in Inghilterra [anno 990], in Riv. di arch. crist., 12 [1936], p. 59). In fact, the envoy of the emperor Otto II soon succeeded in restoring the authority of his lord and imposing his will through the election of B. VII. It cannot be said with certainty whether B.'s election coincided with the flight of Boniface, whereas there is no doubt that all three events — the death of Benedict VI, the intrusion of Boniface VII and the election of B. — belong to the same year, 974. From the bulls issued by the latter, his enthronement would appear to have taken place between 2 and 28 October of that year. B. was Roman by birth and, at the time of his election, bishop of Sutri; his kinship with Alberic, prince of the Romans, rests on an addition made to the chronicle of Leo of Ostia (MGH, Scriptores, VII, p. 631) which, however, does not deserve much credence. He was on excellent terms with the emperor, whom he went to visit in Ravenna during the Christmas festivities of 980 and hosted in Rome when the latter settled there, making the Eternal City the base of his campaigns in southern Italy. He was generous with favors toward the clergy of the various nations, particularly the German clergy; he had especially at heart the flourishing of monasteries, such as that of Cluny in France and that of St. Boniface on the Aventine in Rome, where he appointed as abbot the metropolitan Sergius of Damascus, whom the Arabs had driven from his see. In the Roman Synod of 981 he solemnly condemned simony, a condemnation which he attests to have communicated himself to all archbishops, bishops, abbots, kings, princes, dukes and counts (PL 137, 336-38).
B. died in Rome on 10 July 983 and was buried in the church of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.