CRESCENZI FAMILY. — A distinguished Roman house that held a leading position in the city’s affairs from the mid-10th to the early 11th century, later participating, through its branches of the Stefaniani and Ottoniani, in the affairs of Sabina and Marittima.
A placitum of 902 near St Peter’s lists among the lay judges a Teofilatto and a Crescenzio, the progenitors of the two families who then succeeded one another in dominating Rome and even the papacy. Crescenzio was one of the leading men who gathered around the senator omnium Romanorum, Teofilatto. He appears again, though the gap in years does not allow absolute certainty, in another placitum held forty years later by Prince Alberico. For many years thereafter, however, the family leaves no trace in the documents. Yet from that Crescenzio two branches must have descended: one represented by Giovanni, husband of Teofilatto’s daughter Teodora II and father in turn of another Giovanni, of Teodora III, of Crescenzio de Theodora, of Marozia II, and of Stefania; the other by Crescenzio a caballo marmoreo, father of Teodora, who became the wife of Count Benedetto of the Campagna, a follower of Alberico II.
According to Liutprando, Crescenzio a caballo marmoreo—so called from the Quirinal, where near the statue group he must have had his houses—appeared at an assembly summoned in 963 by Otto I to judge the fugitive Theophilactian pope John XII. A rivalry ensued