CRESCENZI, FAMIGLIA. – An eminent Roman family that held the leading position from the middle of the tenth century to the beginning of the eleventh in the affairs of the city, subsequently participating, through its branches of the Stefaniani and the Ottaviani, also in those of the Sabina and the Marittima.
In a placitum held in 902 at S. Pietro, a Teofilatto and a Crescenzio appear together among the lay judges, the founders of the two families that would later succeed one another in predominance over Rome and over the papacy itself. And Crescenzio was among the leading men who formed a retinue around the senator omnium Romanorum, Teofilatto. He reappears, although the difference in years precludes absolute certainty, in another placitum, held by the princeps Alberico forty years later. Then, for many years, the family leaves no trace in the documents. But from that Crescenzio two branches must have descended: one represented by Giovanni, husband of Teofilatto’s daughter, Teodora II, and himself the father 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 Teodoranda, who was the wife of the count of the Campagna, Benedetto, a follower of Alberico II.
According to Liutprand, Crescenzio a caballo marmoreo, that is, of the Quirinal, where he must have had his residence near the statuary group, appears in an assembly convened in 963 by Ottone I to judge the fugitive Theophylactian pontiff, Giovanni XII. A rivalry that had arisen with the more powerful family had led the C. to side with the imperial party. The family increased its power; in 965 it succeeded in installing one of its own as pope, GIOVANNI, who became Giovanni XIII; with the support of the duke of Naples, Giovanni III, widower of Teodora III, he suppressed the revolt of the new count of the Campagna, Roffredo di Veroli, and of the city prefect, Pietro, while he was able to enlarge his possessions through the favor of his pontiff, who granted his sister Stefania the city and county of Palestrina and her son, Benedetto, the county of Sabina. When Giovanni XIII died in 972 and shortly afterward Ottone I also died, CRESCENZIO de Theodora, having placed himself at the head of the popular party, had Benedetto VI, who had meanwhile been elected pope, strangled, replacing him in 974 with one of his creatures, Bonifacio VII. But when the latter fled (980) before the anger of Ottone II and was succeeded by Benedetto VII, Crescenzio de Theodora was not swept away in the ruin he had caused; rather, he reached a reconciliation with Benedetto VII and perhaps also with Ottone II, until in 984 he ended his days as a monk at S. Alessio on the Aventine.
The C. attained their greatest power in Rome with GIOVANNI known as Nomentano, perhaps from the location of his family’s principal possessions, son of Crescenzio de Theodora. Taking advantage of the regency of Teofano, mother of Ottone III, the Nomentano favored the return of Bonifacio VII from Constantinople, making himself an accomplice in the deposition and murder of Giovanni XIV (984), and proclaimed himself patrician. After Bonifacio VII’s death, the Nomentano obtained from Teofano and Giovanni XV the county of Terracina for his brother Crescenzio. After the empress’s death, however, the Nomentano returned to an anti-German policy. At Ottone III’s first arrival in 996, he was stripped of his dignity and reduced to the condition of a private citizen. He nevertheless resumed the struggle after Ottone’s departure and had Giovanni Filagato made pontiff, Giovanni XVI (v.); but Ottone III, having returned to Rome, had the antipope deposed ignominiously, besieged the Nomentano in Castel S. Angelo, and, after capturing him, had him beheaded on the battlements of the castle (29 Apr. 998).
The fortunes of the C. revived after the death of Ottone III, when in 1006 GIOVANNI C., son of the Nomentano, became patrician. Even more than his predecessors, he turned to enlarging his family’s possessions, especially in the Sabina, at Farfa’s expense. Unlike his father, however, during the ten years of his patriciate he succeeded in maintaining good relations with the pontiffs Giovanni XVIII and Sergio IV and with the Empire, then ruled by Enrico II. Nevertheless, beneath the unquestionable signs of obeisance, the autonomist tendency persisted, as shown by the obstacles placed in the way of the Emperor’s Roman coronation and by the contacts established with King Arduino; Giovanni C. was nevertheless able to die peacefully, between May and June 1012. With him the C.’s primacy in Rome came to an end; the surviving branches of the Stefaniani and the Ottaviani continued for some time to oppose the growing power of Farfa and the Tuscolani. But in 1022 the Stefaniani were forced to submit to an alliance with their more powerful rivals, while the Ottaviani continued the struggle against the Tuscolani and the Stefaniani, a struggle that in 1044 was to bring them to have one of their own, Silvestro III, as pope. In the second half of the eleventh century the family was in open decline; at the beginning of the twelfth century, amid the Roman struggles provoked with the Corsi in support of the antipope Maginolfo against Pasquale II, the C. made their final, modest reappearance in the city’s increasingly turbulent affairs, in which primacy had by then passed to the families of the Frangipane and the Pierleoni.