A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens (25 page)

After almost a century of imperial depravity, something strange happened. Rational rule came to Rome with the Flavian Dynasty. Suetonius gave the Emperor Vespasian and his son and heir Titus the ultimate compliment when he wrote: “There is no cause to be ashamed of their record.” That ringing endorsement was the end of an era of sorts. Certainly there would be many other horrendous reigns before the Roman Empire in the west finally collapsed several centuries later, but the worst was over. It would not be until the popes firmly established themselves in Rome that a renaissance of scandal would begin.

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ll was not lost after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Though the long parade of evil emperors did eventually pass forever out of the Eternal City, a succession of equally rotten popes eventually stepped in to carry on the legacy. “The Papacy,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting around upon the grave thereof.”

For centuries, the popes were the ultimate royals, claiming to be not only Christ’s representatives on earth, but the rulers of kings as well. “All princes are obliged to kiss [the pope’s] feet,” Gregory VII decreed in the eleventh century. And though many monarchs resented this intrusion of papal authority over them, few could rival the least “Holy Fathers” when it came to bad behavior.

Gregory VII: “All princes are obliged to kiss [my] feet.”

 

 

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undreds of men—and one woman of legend—have occupied the throne of St. Peter, but only a blessed few did the great apostle proud. John XXIII was certainly a good and holy man—one of several great popes of the twentieth century, and perhaps the best ever—but twenty-two Johns preceded him.
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And most of them weren’t so hot. In the tenth century, John XIII, for one, had a nasty habit of ordering the eyes of his enemies plucked out; John XXII condemned a number of poor and humble Franciscan monks to be burned at the stake for adopting the “heresy” that Jesus and his apostles lived in poverty; and John XXIII—the original John XXIII, that is—was deposed in 1415 for piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest. Other charges against him were apparently dropped for decency’s sake.

Perhaps the worst John of all was John XII, who came to the throne in 955 at the ripe old age of eighteen. He has been called “the Christian Caligula,” an apt moniker for this papal bad boy. Elected at the urging of his dying father, Alberic II, absolute ruler of Rome, John immediately adopted a lifestyle that shocked even the jaded Romans who were used to all manner of vice. A teenager with unlimited power, he turned his residence at the Lateran Palace into a brothel. He gambled with pilgrims’ offerings and bestowed rich gifts, including golden chalices from St. Peter’s, on his endless succession of lovers. With John and his pals always on the prowl, women were warned away from the church at the Lateran Palace lest they fell prey to the lusty young pope.

Though the people of Rome were too divided among themselves to take any action against John, he did face a threat from Berengar, king of Italy, who was eager to help himself to the wealth of the papal states stretching across central Italy. The desperate pope appealed to the mighty German ruler, Otto of Saxony, who had recently smashed the invading Huns. In return for the coveted blessing and crown from the pope as Christian Emperor and protector of Rome, which John gladly gave, thus establishing the Holy Roman Empire, Otto repelled Berengar.

With this new relationship between pope and emperor established, Otto took the opportunity to rebuke John for all his misdeeds. The stern lecture was not appreciated, and like the insolent child he was, John offered the crown of the empire to his erstwhile enemy Berengar just as soon as Otto returned to Germany. Needless to say, the emperor was not pleased and immediately headed back to Rome to confront the disloyal pope. Terrified, John plundered what was left of the treasure of St. Peter’s and fled to Tivoli.

In his absence, Otto summoned a synod of the church to sort out the situation. Individuals were called, under oath, to provide specific and substantiated evidence of the pope’s misconduct. The charges were stunning: that he had copulated with a long list of ladies, including his father’s mistress; that he charged money for priestly ordinations; blinded his spiritual adviser; and castrated a cardinal!

Regretting that the pope was not present to confront his accusers or defend himself against the charges, Otto wrote John in Tivoli urging his return: “Everyone, clergy as well as laity, accuses you, Holiness, of homicide, perjury, sacrilege, incest with your relatives, including two of your sisters, and with having, like a pagan, invoked Jupiter, Venus, and other demons.” John was unimpressed by the charges, as well as Otto’s plea to return to Rome and face them. “To all the bishops,” he wrote in response. “We hear that you wish to make another Pope. If you do I excommunicate you by Almighty God and you have no power to ordain [any]one or celebrate Mass.” The synod then sent an emissary to Tivoli declaring that unless John presented himself in Rome immediately, he, not the bishops, would be excommunicated. The pope again dismissed them and was deposed as a result.

Otto put a new pope, Leo VIII, on the throne but could not remain in Rome to protect him. As bad as John had been, the Romans resented even more the foreign emperor daring to bring down one of their own and replace him with a pontiff not of their choosing. No sooner did Otto depart than John returned. He quickly exacted his revenge against the bishops who had testified against him. One had his tongue torn out and his nose and fingers cut off; another was scourged, and the hand of a third was hacked off. John also excommunicated his replacement, Leo, who had fled Rome upon his return.

A jealous husband ultimately spared Emperor Otto from having to make yet another trip to Rome to restore order. Finding the pope in bed with his wife, the enraged husband beat John so severely that he died three days later.
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ohn XII reigned during one of the lowest points in papal history, when vice-infected pontiffs ruled at the whim of powerful Roman families and murdered, raped, and plundered their way to infamy. A third of the popes enthroned between A.D. 872 and 1012 died violently, sometimes killed by other popes. Others were deposed for their wickedness and fled Rome for their lives. One pope, Stephen VIII, was so horribly mutilated after having his nose, lips, and ears lopped off that he never showed his face in public again. No pontiff, however, was ever subjected to the abuse Pope Formosus endured under his successor, Stephen VI in A.D. 897—even if he was already dead.

Stephen, quite possibly the craziest pope who ever ruled, ordered the corpse of Formosus dug out of its grave to stand trial on a number of charges—nine months after it was buried. In what became known as the Cadaver Synod, the dead pope’s rotting body was dressed in full papal vestments and propped up on a throne while Pope Stephen, presiding over the “trial,” shouted questions at it.

Formosus was found guilty of perjury and other crimes for which all his papal acts and ordinations were declared null and void. The three fingers of his right hand, by which he had sworn oaths and given blessings, were hacked off and his body was tossed into the Tiber River. Stephen then ordered all clergy ordained by Pope Formosus to submit letters renouncing their ordinations as invalid. Several months after that, Stephen VI was himself deposed, imprisoned, and then strangled to death by supporters of Formosus.

The much-abused body of Pope Formosus, meanwhile, had been fished out of the Tiber and given a decent burial. All his papal acts were restored under subsequent pontiffs loyal to his memory. But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. Formosus still had to contend with Pope Sergius III, who came to the throne in A.D. 904 after murdering the previous pope, Leo V, and Leo’s rival, the antipope
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Christopher.

Having participated in the Cadaver Synod under Stephen VI, Sergius reaffirmed his condemnation of Formosus and once again nullified all his acts. For good measure, he ordered Formosus’s corpse exhumed yet again and had it beheaded. In addition to this important work of the Church, Sergius III made his own contribution to the legend of a female pope when he started sleeping with a fifteen-year-old mistress by the name of Marozia.

 

 

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or centuries, many people believed that in the ninth century a female pontiff known as “Pope Joan” had occupied the throne of St. Peter disguised as a man. Her secret was revealed, the story went, only when she gave birth to a son on the way to Mass one day and died on the spot. After that, subsequent popes were said to go out of their way during papal processions to avoid the blamphemous site.

It has been suggested that the legend, or satire, of Pope Joan, which was finally disproved in the seventeenth century by a French Calvinist named David Blondel, almost certainly arose from the true story of two women—a mother and daughter from the powerful Theophylact family—who virtually ruled the papacy during a period in the tenth century known as “The Reign of Harlots.”

During her affair with Pope Sergius III, Marozia, the daughter, gave birth to the pope’s bastard son, who would later become Pope John XI. Marozia’s mother Theodora, meanwhile, was sleeping with the bishop of Bologna. Not satisfied with his relatively lowly status, Theodora plotted a much grander office for her boyfriend. As Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, wrote at the time, “Theodora, like a harlot, fearing she would have few opportunities of bedding her sweetheart, forced him to abandon his bishopric and take for himself—Oh, monstrous crime!—the Papacy of Rome.” He became Pope John X in A.D. 914.

This was three years after the death of Sergius III. Seeing that the dead pope would no longer be requiring Marozia’s services, Theodora married her daughter off to an up-and-coming soldier of fortune named Alberic. Theodora and her lover John X found Alberic’s skill as a soldier useful in consolidating their power, but Alberic—perhaps at wife Marozia’s urging—eventually tried to seize power for himself. He was killed as a result, and Pope John ordered Marozia to look upon her husband’s mutilated corpse and learn from it. It was a lesson that went unheeded, and when the pope’s lover and protector Theodora died in A.D. 928, Marozia sought her revenge. With the help of her second husband, Guy, a feudal lord of Tuscany, Marozia knocked John X off his throne and had him strangled to death in prison. Thus the pope made by the mother was destroyed by her daughter.

Marozia had papal ambitions for her bastard son by Sergius III, but alas the lad was too young—even by the loose standards of the day—so she allowed two other insignificant pontiffs of her choosing to keep her son’s future throne warm for him. Then, in A.D. 931, when he was about twenty years old, the boy was deemed ready to rule as Pope John XI.

With this ambition satisfied, Marozia next determined to marry Hugo, king of Italy, who happened to be the half brother of her second husband, Guy, and who was himself already married. These marital ties were simple to untangle with her son sitting at the head of the Church. John XI dutifully proffered the necessary dispensations and then presided over his mom’s third marriage to Hugo. Everything would have been perfect except for one problem. In addition to the pope, Marozia had another son, by her first husband Alberic. Alberic Junior, bitter at having been left out of his family’s good fortune, stormed Rome and put his half brother Pope John in prison, where he died four years later. Alberic also jailed his mother. Marozia would remain in a dark cell in the papal fortress of Castel Sant’Angelo for the next half century, though she did live to see her grandson, Alberic Junior’s son, installed as the infamous John XII.

 

 

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ooking back on the dark century of his predecessors, Gregory VII might have hung his head in shame. He didn’t. Instead, he exalted the papacy to levels it had never dared claim before. “The Roman Church has never erred, nor can it err until the end of time,” the dwarfish pope boldly asserted after he came to the throne in 1073. As if the likes of Sergius III and John XII had never existed, Gregory further pronounced that “a rightly elected pope is, without question, a saint, made so by the merits of Peter.”

Gregory clearly felt himself set above ordinary monarchs, decreeing that they could be dethroned at the pope’s command. Christendom could have only one boss, and he was it. “Who does not know that kings and rulers are sprung from men who are ignorant of God,” Gregory thundered, “who by pride, robbery, perfidy, murder, in a word, by almost every crime at the prompting of the devil, who is the prince of this world, have striven with blind cupidity and intolerable presumption, to dominate over their equals, that is over mankind? . . . Who can doubt that the priests of Christ are to be considered the fathers and masters of kings and princes and all the faithful?”