The Book of Ancient Bastards: 101 of the Worst Miscreants and Misdeeds From Ancient Sumer to the Enlightenment

by Brian Thornton

  About six months into his reign, Stephen had Formosus dug up and propped up in a chair in the Vatican. Formosus was then placed on trial with Pope Stephen himself sitting as judge. Formosus (or rather his corpse) was accused of (among other things) being ambitious enough to actually want to be pope (the nerve!). No one is sure of Stephen’s reasons for putting on this, the ultimate show trial, but he did suffer from some well-documented psychosis and was almost certainly feeling pressure from his Spoleto sponsors.

  The Cadaver Synod

  Called the “Synod Horrenda” in Church Latin, this “Cadaver Synod” resulted in riots throughout Rome, which eventually cost Stephen first his papal throne and eventually his life. He was strangled in prison less than six months after condemning the dead Formosus.

  The trial lasted for weeks, during which time Stephen would frequently interrupt his own papal prosecutor in order to rant at Formosus’s moldering corpse, calling it all manner of names, accusing it of murder, blasphemy, and several other crimes with which it was not actually charged. How the corpse responded is not recorded.

  The trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The corpse was stripped of its expensive papal vestments, the first three fingers of its right hand (the three with which a pope blesses his subjects) were cut off, and the body was briefly reburied, this time in an unmarked grave in a cemetery reserved for foreigners. Within a couple of days it had been dug up yet again and tossed in the Tiber River, only to be pulled out by a monk loyal to the dead pope’s memory.

  Once again, Formosus’s reaction, if any, to this news is not recorded.

  66

  BASIL I

  “THE MACEDONIAN”

  OF BYZANTIUM

  Why Trusting Your Life to an Assassin Probably Isn’t a Good Idea

  (CA. A.D. 830–886)

  I have got rid of the fox; but in his place I have put a lion who will end by devouring us all.

  —Bardas, caesar of the Byzantine Empire

  Bardas, quoted above, as regent to Michael III, was the Byzantine emperor in everything but name and had gotten rid of one threat to his power. An unintended consequence was Basil’s elevation as Michael’s successor. Within a couple of years, Bardas’s pronouncement would prove eerily prophetic, because Basil, completely illiterate (when a signature was required, he signed by tracing it through a stencil, just Charlemagne), but strong as an ox and cunning as a sphinx, went on to assassinate Bardas, take his place, then turn on his mentor Michael, murder him as well, take his throne, establish the so-called Macedonian Dynasty of Byzantine emperors, and rule for nineteen years as Basil I.

  As high chamberlain, Basil was expected to sleep in the emperor’s bedroom (usually this was a post filled only by eunuchs, incapable of sex), which set tongues wagging about whether or not the two men, seemingly inseparable, might be having a sexual relationship (unlikely, but this is gossip we’re talking about). Regardless, he was able to poison Michael’s tiny mind against his uncle Bardas, convincing him that the older man was out to assassinate him and take the throne for himself.

  So Michael agreed to allow Basil to handle the situation. While the three of them were on a military campaign to retake the island of Crete from the Arabs, Basil made his move. As the three sat down to listen to morning reports, Basil suddenly gave Bardas a sucker punch that knocked him to the ground. Within a minute, he was dead as Basil’s guards hurried in with swords to finish him off.

  When the army returned to Constantinople, Michael proclaimed Basil as his co-emperor.

  And how did Basil repay this show of faith?

  About a year after he became co-emperor, Basil and a group of his fellow palace officials snuck into the emperor’s bedchamber and stabbed him to death (first cutting his hands off). The people didn’t seem to mind; Basil had demonstrated himself a capable (if illiterate) leader, and Michael, a hopeless incompetent and blackout drunk, was not the type of emperor over the loss of whom most taxpayers would lose much sleep.

  Basil ruled wisely and well once he actually became emperor, presiding over a period of peace and prosperity unparalleled in the long history of the Byzantine Empire. Considered one of the greatest of the empire’s rulers, he definitely showed his bastard side in clearing the way for his own ascent to ultimate power!

  Bastard Geography Lesson

  In spite of the nickname, Basil wasn’t Macedonian. He was Armenian. Like many subjects of the empire, his parents had been forcibly resettled from their native Armenia to a part of Thrace where mostly Macedonians lived. Once he got to Constantinople and in good with the emperor, the nickname stuck. In fact, the royal dynasty he founded bears the name “The Macedonian Dynasty” as a result.

  67

  BASIL II OF BYZANTIUM

  What It Takes to Earn the Title

  of “Bulgar Slayer”

  ( A.D. 958–1025)

  Basil was ugly, dirty, coarse, boorish, totally philistine and almost pathologically mean. He was, in short, profoundly un-Byzantine. . . . He cared only for the greatness and prosperity of his Empire. No wonder that in his hands it reached its apogee.”

  —John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee

  The Byzantine Empire, that Greek-speaking successor state of Rome that flourished in the eastern Mediterranean for hundreds of years after the end of Roman power in the west, saw more than its share of imperial bastards, rulers capable of great works and great cruelty, frequently all at the same time. Without question the most remarkable of these was a great military leader who sold his sister to a foreign ruler in exchange for military support, and blinded fifteen thousand captive enemy soldiers all at once, in order to break the resistance of a previously implacable foe.

  Ladies and gentlemen, meet Basil II, who ruled the empire from the time he was two until his death sixty-five years later.

  During his reign, Basil shared his throne with two regents (each of whom married his mother, the dowager empress Theophano) and with his younger brother Constantine VIII. After the death of his final regent, the general John Tzimiskes in A.D. 976, the eighteen-year-old Basil was finished sharing power (his ineffectual younger brother would prove nothing more than a figurehead). For the next forty-nine years, there was no question who called the shots in the empire: Basil.

  The learning curve as emperor was steep, and Basil made many costly mistakes early on, including a humiliating defeat by Bulgarian troops that necessitated signing away vast amounts of territory along the Danube River and the payment of a ridiculous amount of tribute. But like all intelligent leaders, the young emperor learned from his mistakes, and he was so disciplined, so single-minded, that he would allow nothing to stand in the way of his bringing the empire’s enemies (both internal and external) to heel.

  Fighting a long costly civil war with a number of his nobles in what is now Turkey, Basil eventually defeated them with the help of Vladimir I, the grand prince of Kiev. Vladimir’s price for his military support was steep: he wanted the emperor’s own sister Anna as his bride. Basil eventually sent her off to a tearful wedding to the “northern barbarian,” a ruthless move that saved his empire.

  Free at last to deal with the Bulgarians and their tsar, Samuel, who had so humiliated him years before, Basil finally defeated them in a pitched battle at Kleidon, where his army took 15,000 Bulgar captives. Basil’s revenge was devastating: He blinded the captives and sent them back to their tsar.

  To this day the Greeks refer to their greatest emperor as “Basil Bulgaroktonos”: “Basil the Bulgar Slayer.” Guess “Bulgar Blinder” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.

  Actual Bastard?

  Basil II might have literally been one of history’s great bastards. Put simply, Basil didn’t look or act much like either of his parents. Where his mother was dark-haired and dark-eyed and his scholarly, intellectual father was tall, thin, and had a long black beard, Basil was of medium height, barrel-chested, blonde, and blue-eyed. There has been much speculation that Basil was actually the product of
an adulterous union between his mother and one of the imperial palace’s mercenary Viking guardsmen (known as Varangians).

  68

  EADWIG OF ENGLAND

  Screwing His Kingdom Away

  ( A.D. 941?–959)

  Shameful to relate, people say that in his turn [Eadwig] acted wantonly with [Aethelgifu and her daughter Aelfgifu], with disgraceful caresses, without any decency on the part of either. And when at the time appointed by all the leading men of the English he was anointed and consecrated king by popular election, on that day after the kingly anointing at the holy ceremony, the lustful man suddenly jumped up and left the happy banquet and the fitting company of his nobles, for the aforesaid caresses of loose women.

  —The Life of St. Dunstan

  In A.D. 955, a teenaged pretty-boy inherited the English crown. History is filled with the stories of underaged kings hustled to the throne after the untimely death of their predecessors. What makes the case of young Eadwig remarkable is that on the very day he took the throne he got caught in the middle of a threesome with a cousin and her mother while his coronation feast was still going on in another wing of the castle!

  A direct descendant of Alfred the Great, Eadwig was so physically handsome that the common people referred to him as “All-Fair.” A child when his father Edmund I died and still in his teens when he succeeded his uncle Eadred as sovereign, Eadwig was either a foolish, horny teenager or an independent-minded rebel trying to curb the might of a very powerful clergy, or some combination of the two.

  Either way, tongues started wagging when Dunstan, the prominent abbot who supposedly caught the king in flagrante, was summarily banished, followed closely by a royal wedding between the king and the younger of his two partners.

  If Eadwig hoped to silence public opinion by marrying Aelfgifu and exiling Dunstan, he was doomed to disappointment. Within two years, his marriage had been annulled on the grounds that he and his wife were too closely related. The portion of his kingdom north of the Thames River had successfully rebelled, seceded from the kingdom, and selected Eadwig’s younger brother Edgar as its king.

  Two years later in A.D. 959 , Eadwig died under mysterious circumstances. He was not yet twenty years old.

  The Bastard Versus the Saint

  In the case of King Eadwig, everything we know about his conflict with the abbot Dunstan comes down to us from clerical chroniclers. Think it’s possible they had an axe to grind?

  So did Eadwig actually do the deed? Abbot Dunstan and another churchman supposedly discovered the king with his pants down when they were sent by the other nobles at the ceremony to bring him back to the feast he had so hastily departed.

  According to “B,” the all-but-anonymous priest who wrote about the incident in florid detail, the two clergymen “found the royal crown, which was bound with wondrous metal, gold and silver and gems, and shone with many-coloured luster, carelessly thrown down on the floor, far from [King Eadwig’s] head, and he himself repeatedly wallowing between the two [women] in an evil fashion, as if in a vile sty.” Outraged, the two men insisted the king return with them to the ceremony, eventually dragging Eadwig “from the women by force.”

  69

  POPE BENEDICT IX

  The Man Who Sold the Papacy

  (CA. A.D. 1012–ca.1056)

  That wretch, from the beginning of his pontificate to the end of his life, feasted on immorality.

  —St. Peter Damian, Liber Gomorrhianus

  Who in their right mind gives the sort of wealth and power that goes with being pope to a twenty-year-old and doesn’t expect it to go straight to the kid’s head? Who doesn’t expect someone living the medieval equivalent of a rock-star life to go a bit nuts ?

  A bunch of well-bribed Catholic church leaders, that’s who. Because in the case of medieval Pope Benedict IX, this is precisely what happened.

  The younger son of a powerful Italian nobleman, Benedict was elected pope in A.D. 1032 after his father bribed the papal electors in order to ensure it.

  Daddy’s purchase of the papacy had a profound effect on young Benedict. Cynical and capricious from the start, Benedict’s rule was quickly marked by episodes that illustrated not only his complete disregard for either tradition or propriety but his taste for wretched excess as well.

  He earned scorn by selling church offices for hefty bribes (an offense known as “simony”), hosting frequent bisexual orgies, and even going so far as to curse God and toast the Devil at every meal!

  For his part, Benedict doesn’t seem to have given a damn what his critics thought. His power base was among the members of the Roman aristocracy, and as long as they backed him, he felt free to do as he pleased. Turned out he reckoned without the powerful (and fickle) Roman mob, who rioted in A.D. 1036 and ran Il Papa right out of the Eternal City. The uprising was quickly put down and Benedict returned to power, but he never completely regained control of the city.

  By the time Benedict’s opponents within the church had succeeded in driving him from Rome a second time in A.D. 1045, Benedict had tired of being pope. So he offered to sell the papacy to his godfather and chief advisor, a well-respected priest named Johannes Gratianus (“John Gratian”) for a ridiculous sum meant to fund a proposed lifestyle change.

  Murdering Bastard

  Most of Benedict’s opponents considered their reigning head of the church something of a bogeyman, perpetrator of “many vile adulteries and murders.” Desiderius of Monte Cassino, a contemporary of Benedict IX who later reigned as Pope Victor III, wrote that Benedict committed “rapes, murders, and other unspeakable acts.” Benedict’s reign, wrote Desiderius, was “so vile, so foul, so execrable that I shudder to think of it.”

  The older man accepted and took the papal name of Gregory VI. The bribe he gave Benedict so completely bankrupted the papal treasury that for months afterward the church was unable to pay its bills. To further complicate matters, Benedict’s foes among the clergy refused to recognize Gregory’s right to the succession, electing one of their number pope as Sylvester III.

  So technically Benedict left not one but two popes (well, really a pope and a pretender, or antipope) behind in Rome. Within weeks, he’d run through his new fortune and promptly headed back to Rome, trying to get his old job back. This time his allies deserted him, and Benedict got booted from the city yet again.

  By A.D. 1047 , Henry III (the Holy Roman Emperor) had seen enough. With the support of a majority of the church’s bishops, the emperor convened a special church council that settled the question by giving all three men the boot. A year later, Benedict was charged with simony (a charge of which he was clearly guilty). When he refused to appear before the church court that indicted him, Benedict was excommunicated.

  At some point during the next decade, the ex-pope had a change of heart and presented himself at the abbey of Santa Maria di Grottaferrata, begging for God’s forgiveness. He spent the remainder of his days as a monk in that abbey, dying there in A.D. 1065.

  Repentant bastard.

  70

  WILLIAM I THE CONQUEROR

  Sounds Better Than

  “William the Bastard”

  (CA. A.D. 1028–1087)

  He was over all measure severe to the men who gainsaid his will. He was a very rigid and cruel man, so that no man durst do anything against his will. . . . He had earls in his bonds who had acted against his will; bishops he cast from their bishoprics, and abbots from their abbeys; and thanes he kept in prison; and at last he spared not his own brother.

  —The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

  The man who conquered England in order to press a weak claim to its throne was born a literal bastard in Normandy (northern France) around A.D. 1028 to Robert I, Duke of Normandy, and a woman named Herleva. Before his death in A.D. 1087, he proved one of the most ruthless bastards of the Middle Ages, taking an independent kingdom and turning it into a personal fiefdom. In more high-fallutin’ language: a conqueror.

  William hosted his cousin Ed
ward the Confessor (later king of England) while the latter was in exile, and claimed after the Confessor’s death that he had promised to make William his heir. When Harold Godwinson was selected to be king instead, William invaded England, famously defeating the English at the Battle of Hastings in A.D. 1066. With Harold killed in the battle (arrow in the eye), there was no one to stand in William’s way, and he was crowned king on Christmas Eve of that year.

  What followed were six years of consolidating power through replacing high-level Anglo-Saxon church and government leaders with his own family members and drinking buddies, and putting down rebellion after rebellion through a series of bloody campaigns and fierce reprisals. A telling indicator of William’s success in grabbing the levers of power in England and holding on with both hands: when he was crowned king, the landowning aristocracy in the kingdom (called thegns) numbered around 4,000, all of them Anglo-Saxons. By the year he died, that number had been reduced to two.

  William doesn’t seem to have been all that interested in actually living in England once he’d conquered it. Instead, he used the kingdom both to reward followers with grants of land and titles and as a giant piggy bank to fund his far-more-important-to-him wars against the king of France, his neighbors in Flanders and Anjou, and (of course) his own rebellious son, Robert Curthose, who went on to succeed him as duke of Normandy on his death.

  Grown morbidly obese in his later years, William sustained life-threatening injuries in a fall from a horse while (go figure) campaigning in France in A.D. 1087. Lingering near death for several weeks, he had time to both regret and confess his sins, reportedly saying at one point: “I am stained with the rivers of blood that I have spilled.”