Famous Phonies

by Brianna DuMont

  Someone call the fashion police!

  A few people used the story of the female pope to attack the current pope, but even then, no Catholics questioned her existence.

  If a Girl Could Do It . . .

  Even before the Protestant Revolution, people used the story of Pope Joan to criticize the Catholic Church. Here are two of the more famous critics:

  Giovanni Boccaccio: an Italian humanist. Yes, Boccaccio was certainly human, but that’s not what a humanist is. Instead of focusing on religious stuff, humanists focused on the humanities: logic, grammar, history, and so on. Boccaccio is best known for the Decameron, a series of poems and tales, but he also wrote about Pope Joan. He put her among his “most famous women in history” book, De Claris Mulieribus (published in 1374). For Boccaccio, it wasn’t a question of whether Pope Joan actually existed. She clearly did. It was more of a question of the Church allowing bad leaders to take charge all the time. To Boccaccio, they needed some serious help. As for her death, he doesn’t mention it. He says a bunch of cardinals (not birds, but priests) put her behind bars for the rest of her life so she could think about what she did—that wicked woman.

  John Hus: a Bohemian reformer. Hus really didn’t like the pope, but there weren’t a lot of options for changing religions in medieval Europe. So, instead, he wrote a bunch of angry letters stating things like the Church was perfectly capable of functioning without a pope. Look at all the times when a false pope was on the throne, like that woman, Joan. This didn’t exactly make him popular with the pope, who had John burned at the stake in 1415.

  She’s even mentioned in a medieval guidebook from 1375 so interested travelers could visit the site of her stoning near the Colosseum, and probably search for bloodstained souvenirs. After the sixteenth century, Catholics everywhere decided the story was fake and denied it like mad. So, what gives?

  One word: Protestants.

  Collateral Damage

  In 1517, Martin Luther, a soon-to-be fugitive, tacked to a church door ninety-five reasons why he felt the Catholic Church’s rules stunk and ways to make them stink a little less. Long story short, the Church didn’t appreciate his suggestions and excommunicated him.

  excommunicated:

  They kicked him out for good.

  Luther didn’t go down easy. Or alone. He brought lots of unhappy Catholics with him, and this split led to a new sect of Christianity: Protestantism. It wasn’t an easy or happy split. In fact, it was even more bitter than when Yoko Ono split up the Beatles and it led to hundreds of years of name calling and bloody wars.

  After the Church split into Catholics and Protestants, Pope Joan wasn’t the black sheep of the family anymore, or even just some embarrassing rumor. She became a sheep in both sides’ cross-hairs.

  Protestants were positively giddy to come across the old story of a female pope. To them, it showed why the papacy had to go—it had become a sad joke. In the eyes of the Protestants, Pope Joan proved that Catholics were so corrupt that they had thrown all their traditions down the toilet, which in sixteenth-century Europe was usually a hole in the ground (cesspit) or a box with a lid for fancy folks.

  To really drive the point home, Protestants turned Pope Joan into a sorceress, a necromancer, a demon, and a pawn of the Devil. There was no way a woman could be that smart! She must have signed her soul to the Devil in exchange for a brain. And the Catholics were too corrupt to see it happening or to stop it.

  To be fair, this happened with male popes who were brighter than the average candle, too. Pope Sylvester II (pope from 999 to 1003) was also accused of signing away his soul to the devil, so it didn’t always pay to be smarter than everyone else in medieval Europe. Suddenly you got accused of inking blockbuster deals with the devil.

  With all this hostility, there was only one thing the Catholic Church could do—play Peter and thrice deny. In 1562, an Augustinian friar set out to disprove all the Pope Joan stories. Soon, the whole Church backtracked, saying this story about a popess was nothing more than Protestant drivel. Then they tried to wipe out all traces of her. This included getting rid of any statues of her, like the one in the Siena Cathedral in Italy. Pope Clement VIII had it re-carved into a different pope in 1600—and he made sure it was a male one.

  Aristotle Was Here!

  Graffiti is very common today, but it isn’t a modern invention. People love to scribble their mark on the world. There’s graffiti from ancient times making fun of Julius Caesar, and there’s graffiti from medieval times in manuscripts. One manuscript has graffiti in the margins that states: “The Pope was a woman.” Now, clearly this sounds like something a sassy Protestant would scribble in a Catholic book, but when scientists tested the ink, they found it was older than Protestantism. Only a Catholic could have done it. So much for denial!

  Protestants didn’t let the matter go that quietly, however. During the Protestant Reformation, Pope Joan had hundreds of pamphlets written about her. It was an all-out smear campaign. Just because there’s a lot of stuff written about her, though, doesn’t mean she was real. It means people liked the idea of her.

  Protestant Reformation:

  It started with Martin Luther in 1517 and ended in 1648 after a long, bloody war called The Thirty Years’ War—no points for imagination. By the time the war was over, people had forgotten what they were fighting about.

  The only thing the Catholics could do was feign ignorance—who, us? And this leads to the big question: Why did they create a story about a woman pope in the first place?

  Scared of a Girl

  Back in the thirteenth century, when Jean de Mailly and Martinus Polonus lived, women started to want new things for themselves. Not shoes or purses, but positions of power in the Church. They could be just as religious as men, they insisted, so why couldn’t they be leaders, too? Why couldn’t they hear confessions and touch religious vessels? Women wanted to be priests and they wanted a chance at an education. It was a mini-renaissance in the thirteenth century, and it scared the mitre caps right off the men in charge.

  This was also the time when a lot of cross-dressing happened. Women dressed as men so they could learn. The male priests didn’t like this, but there was one thing they didn’t like even more.

  Large numbers of women were forming their own religious communities and they weren’t consulting any men first. These independent women were called beguines, and they didn’t need a man telling them what to do.

  How about a sparkly pair of shoes instead?

  To priests, this was even worse than the large number of women trying to get into the man-approved convents! Eventually, in 1312, the Council of Vienna outlawed the beguines and married them all off instead.

  This political background explains one of the most popular theories about the source of the Pope Joan story. At a time when women were gaining more religious authority, some think that it was invented as a cautionary tale to help keep women in check. Look what happens when women try to be priests—they give birth, which is kind of a deal breaker. According to priests, you can’t be thinking about God if you’re having a baby.

  beguines:

  Religious women who weren’t nuns. They formed a girls only clubhouse and made up all their own rules about worshiping and religion, and generally annoyed/scared priests.

  Another theory involves politics of a different kind. Some think the story of Pope Joan started because the Dominican authors wanted the popes at the time to stop acting like spoiled brats and start behaving themselves. (Obviously, those popes took power away from the Dominican priests ASAP.)

  By pointing out that a woman was allowed to hold the highest position in the Catholic Church, the priest showed that mistakes happen even at the highest level. If a woman could become pope, so could a wicked man. (Hint, hint, he seemed to be saying. There might be a wicked man on the papal throne right now.)

  Even if that wasn’t the source of the Pope Joan story, it was used that way. In 1332, a Franciscan friar, William of Ockham, went to
a lot of trouble connecting the dots between Pope Joan and the current corrupt pope. The point of his exercise: if God allowed a false pope to be in charge once, he could do it again.

  In either case, both possibilities highlight what men thought about women at the time, and it wasn’t very nice.

  Knocking on Wood

  Whether or not Pope Joan’s story was true (doubtful), superstitions surrounding it stuck with people. Some Italian families liked the story of a popess so much that they had their tarot card decks include Pope Joan as the trump card.

  Trump that!

  Popes in the fifteenth century always took a detour around the road where Pope Joan supposedly gave birth, although it wasn’t certain if she existed and therefore had a child. Even the street was named after her, Vicus Papissa. One pope, Innocent VIII, got in trouble for refusing to avoid the intersection. Popes don’t avoid it now, but that may be because the street was widened in the seventeenth century and their processions can actually fit down it today.

  Another tradition stated that the prospective pope had to sit on a throne with a hole in it before becoming pope. A lowly deacon felt around, made sure the new guy had the goods, and declared to the world that the pope was indeed a man (just in case a cross-dressing woman ever tried that stunt again). This doesn’t happen today, if it even happened in the past.

  Pope Joan was never meant to be fawned over and admired. She was too scary for that. Instead of illustrating that women can successfully hold power, the story of Pope Joan showed what happens when weak men were in charge—they let women grab their power. It also “proved” that intelligent women were dangerous, since they were probably in league with the Devil to get that smart in the first place. Thus, it became common practice to keep women locked away in the nunneries and the kitchens so they couldn’t test out their smarts.

  Yet to this day, modern women look to Pope Joan to prove how far a smart woman can go—all the way to the top. Martinus Polonus said in his narrative that Joan was a successful pope until she gave birth. Some Protestant writers claimed that she was a better pope than all those really bad male ones—like the ones who had hordes of illegitimate kids or lived like kings instead of priests.

  Just checking . . .

  Pope Joan continues to be a twenty-first-century icon symbolizing what women could accomplish in the Church in the Middle Ages and beyond. Pope Joan really can’t be much more than that today since her story might be just that—a story.

  Chapter

  9

  Homer

  Blind Bard Be Nimble

  Lived: Ancient Greece, Immortal

  Occupation: Traveling Bard, Poet

  Cooler Than a Zombie

  Homer is kind of like a zombie. No matter how many times you kill him, he always comes back. Maybe that’s because studying Homer has been a thing since ancient times, and all signs indicate that won’t change. Just to be clear, we’re not talking about Homer Simpson of donuts and d’oh, but Homer of gods and men and really long stories.

  The legend of Homer is too good to pass up. People love it. A blind bard travels throughout Greece reciting poetry to the masses. Along the way, he single-handedly pens two of the greatest stories in Western culture, The Iliad and The Odyssey, establishing the basis for all literature to follow.

  Unfortunately, almost none of it is true.

  The epics themselves exist. The Ancient Greeks heard them recited at events like public festivals and private funerals. At some point, Homer’s poems made the leap from mouth to papyrus. From there, the stories were copied more times than knockoff Gucci bags. Alas, Homer, himself, did not exist.

  Yes, it’s true. He was faker than a beauty queen’s smile.

  Battlefield reporter, he was not.

  *Warning! Spoilers Ahead*

  Greek epics may start out as historical events with real people and real heroes, but over time, these truths were treated more like LEGO bricks. They were used as the building blocks to create new stories and scenes wherever they were went.

  Our versions of The Iliad and The Odyssey reflect the time in they were written down—Archaic Greece, circa 750 BCE—but with lots of echoes from centuries past. In those times, men were farmers and herders, and they did manly things like raiding other cattle herds and going to war.

  Greece was dusting itself off from its own Dark Ages in the eighth century BCE. For the last few hundred years, people in the Mediterranean were mostly huddled together in small communities, just trying to survive. Art, writing, and other time-wasting pursuits weren’t exactly high priority compared to eating. Then suddenly . . . two fully-formed epics popped out of nowhere. What the Zeus was going on in Greece?

  Well, it was the best of times; it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom; it was the age of foolishness . . . wait, wrong story. This story, The Iliad, is about wrath. All twenty-four books of it.

  The Iliad tells the story of Agamemnon and Achilles, the original mean girls, except they were guys. Despite being on the same side in the Trojan War, these two couldn’t even pretend to like each other. Both were fighting the Trojans in the name of honor, which was a big deal in Ancient Greece and people had no problem dying to preserve it.

  Agamemnon’s kid brother, Menelaus of Sparta, had his wife stolen by Prince Paris of Troy. (Paris wasn’t a girl’s name back then.) Menelaus couldn’t let this slight go unanswered. He had to get his honor and his wife, Helen, back.

  Helen:

  Yes, this is the story of the beautiful Helen of Troy, who was originally Helen of Sparta and then, *spoiler alert* Helen of Sparta at the end.

  Menelaus and Agamemnon talked Achilles, the greatest warrior in Greece, into helping them batter down the doors of Troy, because they heard they couldn’t do it without him. The only problem: Achilles didn’t take directions very well. Or criticism, or insults, or anything but praise. And that’s not exactly the recipe for a good soldier.

  Throughout the Trojan War, Achilles and Agamemnon did little things to show how much they despised each other, which included stealing girlfriends and calling each other names. It didn’t degenerate into hair pulling, but it might as well have. Finally, Achilles got so angry that he refused to fight anymore—which was a problem, since The Iliad is sort of his story. He’s called the best of the Greeks, multiple times, and for good reason. He didn’t look very great, though, moping in his tent for the first nine books of the story.

  See, Achilles knew his way around a sword. Being the son of a goddess helps in the muscle department, of which Achilles had a lot. But being a mama’s boy hindered him in the people skills department. Instead of raising Cain on the wife-stealing Trojans, he raised his voice to the gods, whining about the girlfriend-stealing Agamemnon.

  With Achilles no longer willing to fight, the Greeks knew they had no chance at victory. Morale was sagging, until Achilles’s best friend, Patroclus, decided to take matters into his own hands. He put on Achilles’s armor and rallied the Greek troops. Everyone got really excited, except for the Trojans, of course. They weren’t so thrilled. Sadly, it wasn’t meant to be.

  Patroclus was no Achilles. Sure, he was good, but in the end, he still got himself killed by Hector, Troy’s best warrior. Patroclus’s death finally snapped Achilles out of his temper tantrum. He put aside his petty dislike of Agamemnon and joined the battle, just so he could exact revenge on Hector by killing and decimating his corpse. In Ancient Greece, this was a bigger insult than a “yo mamma” joke. It was an insult to end all insults!

  In the end, it all worked out for Agamemnon. During a battle, Achilles got shot in the heel, his only weak spot. (Hence the tendon near our ankle being called our Achilles tendon.) Achilles died on the battlefield, and Odysseus thought up the Trojan Horse scenario to sneak inside the walls. Helen went back to Sparta, and Agamemnon went home triumphant (where his wife promptly killed him, but that’s another story).

  For the Greeks, The Iliad—with all its honor and killing and revenge—was pure gold. The
y knew they had a hit on their hands, so they decided to make a sequel of sorts—The Odyssey.

  The Odyssey tells the story of that wily coyote, Odysseus, who left the battle of Troy with over six hundred of his men. After the ten-year Trojan War, everyone was ready to get home to Ithaca, but it didn’t take long for them to all buy the farm instead (that means “to die”). What started out as a few days journey at sea turned into another ten years’ struggle to get home. That’s not as catchy as a three-hour tour, like Gilligan’s Island, but it’s way more adventurous.

  While Odysseus’s men were smashed to bits, drowned, or eaten alive one monstrous mouthful at a time, he survived thanks to his cunning and his intelligence (and the gods). There was one god, the sea god Poseidon, who’d rather see Odysseus sleeping with the fishes (another way to say “dead”), but he was overruled.

  In between all that adventure, Homer cuts to Odysseus’s wife and child back home. Despite twenty years, his wife, Penelope, has stayed faithful and kept the kingdom running in his absence. But when men see a single woman with a kingdom attached, they typically try to get a piece of the pie. Soon, Penelope had suitors coming out of her ears, eating all her food and generally being irritating.

  But this story has a happy ending. For Odysseus, anyway. He finally got home, reconnected with his son, and together they bathed in a warm blood bath of suitors to secure his kingdom again.

  All’s well that ends well.