Benedict V was pope for exactly one month. Elected in May 964 against the explicit wishes of Otto I, who had backed a rival candidate, Benedict was deposed at a synod in Rome in June of the same year — convened by Otto himself. He was stripped of his papal vestments on the spot, his staff broken before the assembly, and he was exiled to Hamburg, where he died the following year. A coin bearing both his name and that of the emperor who destroyed his pontificate is a compressed record of one of the more brutal power struggles between papacy and empire in the tenth century.
Benedict V was pope for exactly one month. Elected in May 964 against the explicit wishes of Otto I, who had backed a rival candidate, Benedict was deposed at a synod in Rome in June of the same year — convened by Otto himself. He was stripped of his papal vestments on the spot, his staff broken before the assembly, and he was exiled to Hamburg, where he died the following year. A coin bearing both his name and that of the emperor who destroyed his pontificate is a compressed record of one of the more brutal power struggles between papacy and empire in the tenth century.