Antipope Adalbert

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Adalbert or Albert (Italian: Alberto) was an Italian cardinal and suburbicarian bishop of Santa Rufina elected as antipope in January 1101 by the imperial party in Rome following the arrest and imprisonment of Antipope Theodoric.

Encouraged by the Emperor Henry IV, the followers of the late Antipope Clement III, who had elected Theodoric, gathered in the Basilica of SS. XII Apostoli to elect Albert in opposition to Pope Paschal II.

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Again there was a mock election in St. Peter's. But no sooner did word of what was there being done spread abroad than the whole city was in an uproar, and the crowd rushed to the Basilica. In great alarm the assembly hastily broke up; but while Albert, the newly elected Antipope, who was the Bishop of Sabina, contrived to make his escape to the Basilica of St. Marcellus, many of his party were seized and were roughly handled. A sum of money quickly bought Pope Albert from his patron. He was stripped of the pallium that he had just assumed, put on a horse behind its rider, and taken before the rightful Pope — Pope Paschal II — at the Lateran. After a short incarceration in a tower, he too was sent to a Monastery and ended his days as a Monk at St. Lawrence's at Aversa.^[1]

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^ The Lives of the Popes in the Middle Ages — The Popes of the Gregorian Renaissance, St Leo IX to Honorius II — 1049 – 1130 — Vol. VIII — 1099 – 1130 — pg. 14.