Pope Bl. Victor III

Desiderius, the renowned abbot of Monte Cassino, presided over that monastery's cultural and architectural golden age before reluctantly succeeding Gregory VII as Victor III. A Lombard noble from Benevento, he had long mediated between the papacy and the Normans. His election was contested and his reign brief and troubled: the antipope Clement III held parts of Rome, and Victor spent much of his pontificate at Monte Cassino, dying there in 1087. Though he held a synod renewing condemnations of lay investiture, he is remembered less as a forceful reformer than as a great monastic patron who steadied the reform party between two towering pontiffs.