Toto (died 29 July 768) was the self-styled duke of Nepi, the leading magnate of Etruria,[1] who staged a coup d'état in Rome in 767.[2] He became Duke of Rome for a year until his death. The principal sources documenting his takeover are the vita of Pope Stephen III in the Liber Pontificalis and a surviving deposition of the primicerius Christopher from 769, preserved in a ninth-century manuscript of Verona, the Depositio Christophori.[3]
^Toto's lands were adjacent to those of the family of Pope Hadrian I. Hadrian was thus a military aristocrat legitimately elected, not a "rowdy, rustic thug like Toto", cf. Thomas F. X. Noble (1984), The Republic of St. Peter: The Birth of the Papal State, 680–825 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN0-8122-7917-4), 197.
^Noble, 113 and n76. The basic outline of events below is derived from Peter Llewellyn (1971), Rome in the Dark Ages (London: Faber and Faber, ISBN0-571-08972-0), 221–24.