She smiled at the thought. Reaching inside her archbishop’s robes, she clasped the wooden medallion of St. Catherine that hung around her neck. She had worn it constantly ever since the day Joan had given it to her over fifty years ago.
Tomorrow she would have the manuscript bound in fine leather embossed with gold and placed in the archives of the cathedral library. Somewhere, at least, there would remain a record of Joan the Pope, who, though a woman, was nevertheless a good and faithful Vicar of Christ. Someday her story would be found and told again.
The debt is repaid, Arnalda thought. Requiesce in pace, Johanna Papissa.
Author’s Note
Was There a Pope Joan?
“Partout où vous voyez une légende, vous pouvez être sûr, en allant au fond des choses, que vous trouverez une histoire.”
“Whenever you see a legend, you can be sure, if you go to the very bottom of things, that you will find history.”
—VALLET DE VIRIVILLE
POPE Joan is one of the most fascinating, extraordinary characters in Western history—and one of the least well known. Most people have never heard of Joan the Pope, and those who have regard her story as legend.
Yet for hundreds of years—up to the middle of the seventeenth century—Joan’s papacy was universally known and accepted as truth. In the seventeenth century, the Catholic Church, under increasing attack from rising Protestantism, began a concerted effort to destroy the embarrassing historical records on Joan. Hundreds of manuscripts and books were seized by the Vatican. Joan’s virtual disappearance from modern consciousness attests to the effectiveness of these measures.
Today the Catholic Church offers two principal arguments against Joan’s papacy: the absence of any reference to her in contemporary documents, and the lack of a sufficient period of time for her papacy to have taken place between the end of the reign of her predecessor, Leo IV, and the beginning of the reign of her successor, Benedict III.
These arguments are not, however, conclusive. It is scarcely surprising that Joan does not appear in contemporary records, given the time and energy the Church has, by its own admission, devoted to expunging her from them. The fact that she lived in the ninth century, the darkest of the dark ages, would have made the job of obliterating her papacy easy. The ninth century was a time of widespread illiteracy, marked by an extraordinary dearth of record keeping. Today, scholarly research into the period relies on scattered, incomplete, contradictory, and unreliable documents. There are no court records, land surveys, farming accounts, or diaries of daily life. Except for one questionable history, the Liber pontificalis (which scholars have called a “propagandist document”), there is no continuous record of the ninth-century Popes—who they were, when they reigned, what they did. Apart from the Liber pontificalis, scarcely a mention can be found of Joan’s successor, Pope Benedict III—and he was not the target of an extermination campaign.
One ancient copy of the Liber pontificalis with a record of Joan’s papacy still exists. The entry on Joan is obviously a later interpolation, clumsily pieced into the main body of the text. However, this does not necessarily render the account untrue; a subsequent annalist, convinced by the testimony of less politically suspect chroniclers, may have felt morally obliged to correct the official record. Blondel, the Protestant historian who examined the text in 1647, concluded that the entry on Joan was written in the fourteenth century. He based his opinion on variations in style and handwriting—subjective judgments at best. Important questions about this document remain. When was the passage in question written? And by whom? A reexamination of this text using modern methods of dating—which has never been attempted—might yield some interesting answers.
Joan’s absence from contemporary church records is only to be expected. The Roman clergymen of the day, appalled by the great deception visited upon them, would have gone to great lengths to bury all written report of the embarrassing episode. Indeed, they would have felt it their duty to do so. Hincmar, Joan’s contemporary, frequently suppressed information damaging to the Church in his letters and chronicles. Even the great theologian Alcuin was not above tampering with the truth; in one of his letters he admits destroying a report on Pope Leo III’s adultery and simony.
As witnesses for the denial, then, Joan’s contemporaries are deeply suspect. This is especially true of the Roman prelates, who had strong personal motives for suppressing the truth. On the rare occasions when a papacy was declared invalid—as Joan’s would have been when her female identity was discovered—all of the deposed Pope’s appointments immediately became null and void. All the cardinals, bishops, deacons, and priests ordained by that Pope were stripped of their titles and positions. No great surprise, then, that records kept or copied by these very men make no mention of Joan.
In modern history, the eighteen-minute gap in the Nixon tapes is a telling demonstration of the way embarrassing or incriminating evidence can be made to disappear. The sealing of JFK assassination records, which will not be revealed in their entirety until 2017, is another example. These attempts to control the historical record were accomplished in a time of widespread literacy and audio-visual media. How much easier this would have been in the ninth century, a time before printed books, when 95 percent of the population could not read or write, and all that was required was to “lose” or to alter a few handwritten manuscripts!
It is only after the distancing effect of time that the truth, kept alive by unquenchable popular report, gradually begins to emerge. And, indeed, there is no shortage of documentation for Joan’s papacy in later centuries. Frederick Spanheim, the learned German historian who conducted an extensive study of the matter, cites no fewer than five hundred ancient manuscripts containing accounts of Joan’s papacy, including those of such acclaimed authors as Petrarch and Boccaccio.
Today, the church position on Joan is that she was an invention of Protestant reformers eager to expose papist corruption. Yet Joan’s story first appeared hundreds of years before Martin Luther was born. Most of her chroniclers were Catholics, often highly placed in the church hierarchy. Joan’s story was accepted even in official histories dedicated to Popes. Her statue stood undisputed alongside those of the other Popes in the Cathedral of Siena until 1601, when, by command of Pope Clement VIII, it suddenly “metamorphosed” into a bust of Pope Zacharias. In 1276, after ordering a thorough search of the papal records, Pope John XX changed his title to John XXI in official recognition of Joan’s reign as Pope John VIII. Joan’s story was included in the official church guidebook to Rome used by pilgrims for over three hundred years.
Another striking piece of historical evidence is found in the well-documented 1413 trial of Jan Hus for heresy. Hus was condemned for preaching the heretical doctrine that the Pope is fallible. In his defense Hus cited, during the trial, many examples of Popes who had sinned and committed crimes against the Church. To each of these charges his judges, all churchmen, replied in minute detail, denying Hus’s accusations and labeling them blasphemy. Only one of Hus’s statements went unchallenged: “Many times have the Popes fallen into sin and error, for instance when Joan was elected Pope, who was a woman.” Not one of the twenty-eight cardinals, four patriarchs, thirty metropolitans, two hundred and six bishops, and four hundred and forty theologians present charged Hus with lying or blaspheming in this statement.
As for the Church’s second argument against Joan, that there was not sufficient time between the papacies of Leo IV and Benedict III for her to have reigned—this too is questionable. The Liber pontificalis is notoriously inaccurate with regard to the times of papal accessions and deaths; many of the dates cited are known to be wholly invented. Given the strong motivation of a contemporary chronicler to conceal Joan’s papacy, it would be no great surprise if the date of Leo’s death was moved forward from 853 to 855—through the time of Joan’s reported two-year reign—in order to make it appear that Pope Leo was immediately succeeded by Pope Benedict III.*1
History pr
ovides many other examples of such deliberate falsification of records. The Bourbonists dated the reign of Louis XVIII from the day of his brother’s death and simply omitted the reign of Napoleon. They could not, however, eradicate Napoleon from the historical records because his reign was so well recorded in innumerable chronicles, diaries, letters, and other documents. In the ninth century, by contrast, the job of obliterating Joan from the historical record would have been far easier.
There is also circumstantial evidence difficult to explain if there was never a female Pope. One example is the so-called chair exam, part of the medieval papal consecration ceremony for almost six hundred years. Each newly elected Pope after Joan sat on the sella stercoraria (literally, “dung seat”), pierced in the middle like a toilet, where his genitals were examined to give proof of his manhood. Afterward the examiner (usually a deacon) solemnly informed the gathered people, “Mas nobis dominus est”—“Our Lord Pope is a man.” Only then was the Pope handed the keys of St. Peter. This ceremony continued until the sixteenth century. Even Alexander Borgia was compelled to submit to the ordeal, though at the time of his election his wife had borne him four sons, whom he acknowledged with pride!
The Catholic Church does not deny the existence of the pierced seat, for it survives in Rome to this day. Nor does anyone deny the fact that it was used for centuries in the ceremony of papal consecration. But many argue that the chair was used merely because of its handsome and impressive appearance; the fact that it had a hole in it is, they say, quite irrelevant.
Figure 1. The sella stercoraria.
This argument seems doubtful. The chair had obviously once served as a toilet, or possibly an obstetric chair. (See figure 1.) Is it likely that an object with such crude associations would be used as a papal throne without some very good reason? And if the chair exam is a fiction, how does one explain the innumerable jests and songs referring to it that were rife among the Roman populace for centuries? Granted, these were ignorant and superstitious times, but medieval Rome was a close-knit community: the people lived within yards of the papal palace; many of their fathers, brothers, sons, and cousins were prelates who attended papal consecrations and who would have known the truth about the sella stercoraria. There even exists an eyewitness account of the chair exam. In 1404, the Welshman Adam of Usk journeyed to Rome and remained there for two years, keeping close record of his observations in his chronicle. His detailed description of Pope Innocent VII’s coronation includes the chair exam.
Another interesting piece of circumstantial evidence is the “shunned street.” The Patriarchium, the Pope’s residence and episcopal cathedral (now St. John Lateran) is located on the opposite side of Rome from St. Peter’s Basilica; papal processions therefore frequently traveled between them. A quick perusal of any map of Rome will show that the Via Sacra (now the Via S. Giovanni) is by far the shortest and most direct route between these two locations—and so in fact it was used for centuries (hence the name Via Sacra, or “sacred road.”) This is the street on which Joan reportedly gave birth to her stillborn child. Soon afterward, papal processions deliberately began to turn aside from the Via Sacra, “in abhorrence of that event.”
The Church argues that the detour was made simply because the street was too narrow for processions to pass along until the sixteenth century, when it was widened by Pope Sixtus V. But this explanation is patently not true. In 1486, John Burcardt, Bishop of Horta and papal master of ceremonies under five Popes —a position which gave him intimate knowledge of the papal court—described in his journal what transpired when a papal procession broke from custom and traversed the Via Sacra:
On going as in returning, [the Pope] came by way of the Coliseum and that straight road where … John Anglicus gave birth to a child…. For that reason … the Popes, in their cavalcades, never pass through that street; the Pope was therefore blamed by the Archbishop of Florence, the Bishop of Massano, and Hugo de Bencii the Apostolic Subdeacon …
A hundred years before the street was widened, this papal procession passed down the Via Sacra with no difficulty. Burcardt’s account also makes it plain that Joan’s papacy was accepted at the time by the highest officials of the papal court.
Given the obscurity and confusion of the times, it is impossible to determine with certainty whether Joan existed or not. Historians are divided on the subject of Joan’s historicity. After the publication of my novel, several scholarly studies were released, either for the first time, or in newly available English translations.
1. Peter Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald (official journal of Catholic dioceses), came out with a book entitled The She-Pope. After an extensive review of historical manuscripts, folklore records, and Roman artifacts/statuary, Stanford concludes, “Weighing all the evidence, I am convinced that Pope Joan was an historical figure.”
2. Alain Boureau, whose entry on the subject, La Papesse Jeanne, was written in French and published in 1988, saw an English translation of his work in 2001. (Too late for me! When doing my research, I had to plod through the somewhat ponderous tome in French.) Boureau makes a strong argument against Joan’s historical existence, some of which is compelling—though note he did not directly examine ancient and original handwritten manuscripts, like Joan Morris (cited below).
3. Emmanuel Rhoides, a Greek scholar of the nineteenth century, devoted much of his life to the defense of Pope Joan—for which he was excommunicated. His novel, written in Greek and translated into English by Lawrence Durrell, has long been available on bookshelves (though it credits Durrell as writer, not translator). Rhoides’s novel is not useful in determining Joan’s historicity. But his scholarly work, titled Pope Joan: An Historical Romance is. When researching my novel, I could only access this work through special library collections. But it has been newly released in an edition by Charles Collette Hastings, now widely available.
4. Joan Morris, who received her graduate degree in liturgical research at the University of Notre Dame, is the only person since the seventeenth century to conduct an extensive, direct examination of original, handwritten, ninth-century pontificals. Her scholarly study titled Pope John VIII: Alias Pope Joan was published in 1985—and her argument in favor of Joan’s existence is well-documented and persuasive. Unfortunately, this work is available only through rare book sources, university libraries, and other special collections.
THE truth of what happened in A.D. 855 may never be fully known. This is why I have chosen to write a novel and not a historical study. Though based on the facts of Joan’s life as they have been reported, the book is nevertheless a work of fiction. Little is known about Joan’s early life, except that she was born in Ingelheim of an English father and that she was once a monk at the monastery of Fulda. I have necessarily had to fill in some missing pieces of her story.
However, the major events of Joan’s adult life as described in Pope Joan are all accurate. The Battle of Fontenoy took place as described on June 25, 841. The Saracens did sack St. Peter’s in the year 847 and were later defeated at sea in 849; there was a fire in the Borgo in 848 and a flood of the Tiber in 854. Intinction gained popularity as a regular method of communion in Frankland during the ninth century. Blue cheese is believed to have been discovered in this part of Europe in the ninth century, by accident, very much in the way described.
Anastasius was in fact excommunicated by Pope Leo IV; later, after his restitution as papal librarian for Pope Nicholas, he is widely credited as the author of the contemporary lives in Liber pontificalis. The murders of Theodorus and Leo in the papal palace actually happened, as did the trial pitting the magister militum Daniel against the papal superista. Pope Sergius’s gluttony and gout are matters of historical record as is his rebuilding of the Orphanotrophium. Anastasius, Arsenius, Gottschalk, Raban Maur, Lothar, Benedict, and Popes Gregory, Sergius, and Leo are all real historic figures. The details of the ninth-century setting have been meticulously researched.
In this new edition, information
on ninth-century clothing, food, and medical treatment is even more accurate, thanks in part to readers who wrote to suggest helpful corrections.
Among the most useful reader-generated suggestions:
1. Substitution of honey for sugar as a ninth-century sweetener. Sugar was not readily available in ninth-century Western Europe. But it was not unknown, sugar cane having been cultivated for centuries in Persia (where it was called “the reed that gives honey without bees”). From there Arab traders carried it to Africa, Sicily, and the Mediterranean.
Trade in these dark times had slowed to a trickle, but it did exist. Contemporary chronicles describe two gifts from Caliph Harun-al-Rashid of Baghdad to Charlemagne: a marvelous mechanical water clock and … an elephant! If an elephant could make it to the Frankish empire, then sugar certainly did.
But history-buff readers are correct in pointing out that sugar was a rarity, reserved—and used only seldomly—for the tables of the great. Honey was the common sweetener of the ninth century, a fact reflected in this new edition.
2. Removal of horns from ninth-century Viking helmets. Many readers wrote to say that Viking helmets did not have horns. So I reviewed the literature on this subject. References to horned helmets go back as far as Plutarch, who wrote that Viking ancestors wore helmets “made to resemble the heads of horned beasts.” Archeological digs have unearthed horned helmets, mostly from Denmark. There is even one ninth-century depiction of a Viking wearing a horned helmet on the Oseberg Tapestry from Norway.
Pope Joan Page 49