Absolute Monarchs (9 page)

What became of the bust is unclear. Cardinal Caesar Baronius, Clement’s librarian, claimed that it was immediately destroyed; but early in the seventeenth century Antoine Pagi, the provincial of the Franciscans in Arles, went to stay at his order’s house in Siena, where he recorded conversations with various priests and churchmen. According to them, rather than break up the bust it had been decided simply to relabel it. After minor remodeling, it became a portrait of Pope Zachary (741–752), who now appears in the series in his correct chronological position.

WITH SO MUCH
conflicting evidence, can we be absolutely sure that Pope Joan never existed? Alas, we can. Two particularly cogent indications emerge, from writings respectively by a patriarch and a pope. The first comes from Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople from 858 to 865, who would therefore have been Joan’s exact contemporary. Photius had no love for Rome, against which indeed he bore a considerable grudge, but he nevertheless specifically refers to “Leo and Benedict,
successively
great priests of the Roman Church.” Two centuries later, Pope Leo IX (1049–1054) wrote to Patriarch Michael Cerularius:

God forbid that we wish to believe what public opinion does not hesitate to claim has occurred in the Church of Constantinople: namely that in promoting eunuchs indiscriminately against the First Law of the Council of Nicaea, it once raised a woman onto the seat of its pontiff. We regard this crime as so abominable and horrible that although outrage and disgust and brotherly goodwill do not allow us to believe it, nevertheless, reflecting upon your carelessness toward the judgment of Holy Law, we consider that it could have occurred, since even now you indifferently and repeatedly promote eunuchs and those who are weak in some part of their body not only to clerical office, but also to the position of pontiff.

Had Leo ever heard of the existence of Pope Joan, is it likely that he would have laid himself open to the patriarch’s obvious retort? And had the patriarch been aware of her, would he not have so retorted? We can only conclude that in the middle of the eleventh century her legend was unknown in Rome.

There is solid evidence, too. Our most reliable sources record that Leo IV died on July 17, 855, and that Benedict III was consecrated on September 29. We also know that the Emperor Lothair I died in the Ardennes within hours of Benedict’s consecration. Naturally, however, the news took some time to reach Rome, during which denarii were minted there with the words
BENEDICT PAPA
on one side and
HLOTHARIUS IMP PIUS
on the reverse. It follows that Benedict could not have succeeded any later than the records state and that there would simply have been no room for Joan.

But perhaps the best argument of all is the sheer improbability of a female pope, a long deception, a hidden pregnancy, a sudden birth in public. Female popes are unlikely enough in the first place, and in real life it is rare indeed for a woman to give birth in the street. Are these events not stretching our credulity just a little too far? Of course they are, yet there is another improbability, almost as great as these, which we are obliged to accept: that this mildly grotesque story was almost universally accepted within the Catholic Church for several centuries, and that poor incautious Joan still has her champions today.
⁴

1.
Both these popes existed in their own right. As it was generally agreed that Joan was to be ignored, the numeration was not affected; but the reputation of the admirable John VIII, a ruthless warrior pope who fortified Rome against the Saracens, founded the papal navy, and came to a violent end, beaten to death after an attempt to poison him failed, regrettably suffered: a book was published in 1530 entitled
Puerperium Johannis Papae VIII.
He deserved better.

2.
The Milanese historian Bernardino Coreo certainly thought so. At the close of his eyewitness account of Alexander’s coronation in 1492 he writes, “Finally, when the usual solemnities of the
sancta sanctorum
ended and the touching of testicles was done, I returned to the palace.”

3.
Is it still there? “When we enquired after the one in the Louvre we were told by a representative that the Museum ‘
ne conserve pas de trône pontifical
.’ ” (Stanford,
The She-Pope
, p. 50).

4.
In the eighteenth century Pope Joan was a popular card game, and as recently as 1972 the legend was the subject of a film starring Liv Ullmann with Trevor Howard and Olivia de Havilland.

CHAPTER VII

Nicholas I and the Pornocracy

(855–964)

P
ope Joan was a myth; Pope Benedict III—who, had Joan existed, would have succeeded her—was a nonentity. After Benedict there came a joke, and after that a giant.

The joke was the bid for the Papacy by Anastasius. He was born in about 815 into a distinguished Roman priestly family; his uncle was the highly influential Arsenius, Bishop of Orte. A man of outstanding abilities and culture, Anastasius mastered Greek at an early age and was created cardinal priest by Leo IV in 847 or 848, but almost immediately he quarreled with his benefactor and fled to Aquileia. Leo, who was well aware of his ambitions and saw him as a potential rival, repeatedly summoned him back to Rome; when Anastasius refused, he was successively excommunicated, anathematized, and deposed. On Leo’s death in 855, his successor was duly elected as Benedict III, but Bishop Arsenius, determined that his nephew should be next on the papal throne, seized the Lateran by force, taking Benedict prisoner.

For three days confusion reigned; but it soon became clear that Anastasius lacked any degree of popular support. How, moreover, could any man under sentence of excommunication be made pope? The Bishops of Ostia and Albano, two of the three by whom the pope was traditionally consecrated, could not be induced—even by threats of torture—to perform the ceremony. Benedict was released from his imprisonment and was finally consecrated, Anastasius stripped of his papal insignia and expelled from the Lateran, but Benedict treated him with more leniency than he deserved, simply confining him to the Monastery of Santa Maria in Trastevere.

But Anastasius bounced back. For the three years of Benedict’s pontificate he remained in obscurity; with the accession of Nicholas I, however, his fortunes changed dramatically. He had made a fool of himself, but he remained one of the foremost scholars of his day; and Nicholas, fully aware of his abilities, appointed him first abbot of his monastery and then librarian of the Church—in which position, thanks, presumably, to his knowledge of Greek, he became chief adviser to the Curia on Byzantine affairs.

Nicholas I was an aristocrat and autocrat. For him, the pope was God’s representative here on Earth—and there the matter ended. Emperors might enjoy the privilege of protecting and defending the Church; they had no right to interfere in its affairs. The pope’s authority was absolute; synods were summoned merely to carry out his orders; bishops, archbishops, and even patriarchs were bound to him in loyalty and obedience. When John, Archbishop of Ravenna, got above himself he was called to Rome, excommunicated, and deposed. When Hincmar, Archbishop of Rheims, one of the most powerful churchmen in the empire, dismissed a suffragan bishop and then tried to prevent his appealing to Rome, Nicholas immediately reinstated the bishop; and when Hincmar protested, the pope threatened to forbid him to celebrate Mass. Nicholas also showed his mettle when a synod of Frankish bishops approved the divorce of King Lothair II of Lorraine simply because he wanted to marry his mistress; the pope simply overruled them and ordered Lothair to return to his wife. When the king deserted her a second time, he was excommunicated. The archbishops of Cologne and Trier went to Rome to argue the case; Nicholas excommunicated them too, as accomplices to bigamy. This time it looked as though he might have overreached himself: Lothair’s brother, the Emperor Louis II, marched on Rome, ostensibly to teach him a lesson. The pope, however, called his bluff and refused to budge, and Louis, fuming, was obliged to retreat.

Nicholas’s conception of papal authority extended, it need hardly be said, over the churches of the East. At this time the Patriarch of Constantinople was a eunuch named Ignatius—a blinkered bigot loathed by his flock, which was determined to get rid of him. The leader of that flock was Photius, the most learned scholar of his day, capable of running rings around Ignatius, whose mind was too narrow to encompass any but the simplest theological doctrines. In one particularly successful exercise in patriarch-baiting, Photius even went so far as to propound a new and deeply heretical theory that he had just thought up, according to which man possessed two separate souls, one liable to error, the other infallible. His dazzling reputation as an intellectual ensured that he was taken seriously by many—including, of course, Ignatius, who should have known better; and after his doctrine had its desired effect by making the patriarch look thoroughly silly he had cheerfully withdrawn it. It was perhaps the only completely satisfactory practical joke in the history of theology, and for that alone Photius deserves our gratitude.

On the Feast of the Epiphany 858, Ignatius unwisely refused the sacrament to the emperor’s uncle, who had forsaken his wife for his daughter-in-law. It took a little time to frame appropriate charges, but by the end of the year the patriarch had been arrested and banished. Photius was his obvious successor. His lay status was unfortunate, but that difficulty was swiftly overcome: within a week he was tonsured, ordained, consecrated, and enthroned. He then wrote to Pope Nicholas in Rome, giving formal notice of his elevation. Although the letter itself was a model of tactful diplomacy, containing not one word against his predecessor, it was accompanied by another, ostensibly from the emperor himself, in which Ignatius was said to have neglected his flock and to have been properly and canonically deposed—both of which claims the pope rightly suspected of being untrue. Nicholas received the Byzantine legates with all due ceremony in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore but made it clear that he was not prepared to recognize Photius as patriarch without further investigation. He therefore proposed a council of inquiry, to be held the following year in Constantinople, to which he would send two commissioners who would report back to him personally.

The two commissioners, Zachary of Anagni and Rodoald of Porto, reached Constantinople in April 861. From the moment of their arrival they found themselves under formidable pressure from Photius, swept up into a ceaseless round of ceremonies, receptions, banquets, and entertainments while the patriarch himself remained constantly at their side, dazzling them with his erudition, captivating them with his charm. Well before the Council was to hold its opening session in the Church of the Holy Apostles, Photius had satisfied himself that they would give no trouble. As for Ignatius, they were not allowed so much as to clap eyes on him until he was led into the church to give his evidence. He was then obliged to listen while seventy-two witnesses testified that his former appointment had been invalid, being due to the personal favor of the empress rather than to any canonical election. At the close of the fourth session his deposition was confirmed by a formal document at the foot of which, prominent among the signatories, were the names of Zachary and Rodoald.

When the prelates returned to Rome, the pope left them in no doubt of his displeasure. Their task, he reminded them, had been to discover the facts, not to appoint themselves judges. In doing so, they had betrayed the interests of the Church, succumbing to Byzantine blandishments in a manner more like that of innocent children than of senior ecclesiastics. They had allowed themselves to be made dupes by the patriarch and had shown themselves unworthy of their rank and position. He would consider their futures later. Meanwhile, they could go.

At this point there arrived in Rome an archimandrite
¹
named Theognostus who, having escaped from close surveillance in Constantinople, regaled Nicholas with tales of the iniquity of Photius and his friends and the sufferings which the unfortunate Ignatius had been obliged to endure, ending with his enforced signature to his act of abdication. The pope hesitated no longer. In April 863 he summoned a synod at the Lateran which divested Photius of all ecclesiastical status, restoring Ignatius and all those who had lost office in his cause to their former positions. Zachary and Rodoald were dismissed from their sees. In Constantinople, however, as might have been expected, the papal ruling was ignored, and the quarrel rumbled on. Up to that point, Nicholas’s firmness had served only to show how powerless he was in the East, but now, quite unexpectedly, there came a stroke of good fortune—from, of all places, Bulgaria.

THE BULGARS UNDER
Khan Boris I were at this time a rising power in the Balkans, and in September 865 the formerly Catholic Boris had traveled to Constantinople, where he had been baptized by the patriarch in St. Sophia, the emperor himself standing sponsor. Pope Nicholas was predictably furious, and the fact that Boris had had little choice—the Byzantine fleet was lying off his Black Sea coast, and his country was in the grip of the worst famine of the century—did little to assuage the papal anger. But less than a year after his conversion, Boris was already having second thoughts. Suddenly he had found his country overrun with Greek and Armenian priests, frequently at loggerheads with each other over abstruse points of doctrine incomprehensible both to himself and to his bewildered subjects. Moreover, wishing to keep his distance from Constantinople, he had requested the appointment of a Bulgarian patriarch—and had been refused.

In this refusal Photius had made a disastrous miscalculation. Now it was the khan’s turn to be furious. He was happy to be the emperor’s godson, but he had no intention of being made his vassal. Fully aware of the state of affairs between Rome and Constantinople and the consequent possibility of playing one off against the other, in the summer of 866 he sent a delegation to Pope Nicholas. It carried a list of 106 points of Orthodox doctrine and social custom which conflicted with Bulgarian traditions, suggesting that much of the opposition to the new faith might be overcome if the latter were permitted to continue and inquiring as to the pope’s views on each.

When Boris had put these points to Photius, they had either been rejected or simply ignored; for Nicholas, here was the chance he had been waiting for. He quickly set Anastasius to work, then dispatched to the Bulgarian court two more bishops, bearing a remarkable document in which he gave thoughtful and meticulous answers to every one of the points on Boris’s list—showing consideration for all local susceptibilities, making all possible concessions, and, where these could not be granted, explaining the reasons for his refusal. Trousers, he agreed, could certainly be worn, by men and women alike; turbans too, except in church. When the Byzantines maintained that it was unlawful to wash on Wednesdays and Fridays, they were talking nonsense, nor was there any reason to abstain from milk or cheese during Lent. All pagan superstitions, on the other hand, must be strictly forbidden, as must the accepted Greek practice of divination by the random opening of the Bible. Bigamy, too, was out.

The Bulgars were disappointed about the bigamy but on the whole more than satisfied with the pope’s answers and, perhaps equally important, by the obvious trouble that he—or more accurately Anastasius—had taken over them. Boris at once swore perpetual allegiance to St. Peter and, with every sign of relief, expelled all the Orthodox missionaries from his kingdom. The Roman Catholic Church was back in the Balkans once more.

NICHOLAS I MARKS
a watershed: he was the last pontiff of any ability or integrity to occupy the chair of St. Peter for a century and a half. His successor in 867, an elderly cleric who took the name of Hadrian II, squandered, in only five short years, virtually all that Nicholas had gained, yielding to Archbishop Hincmar, restoring Communion to King Lothair—now back with his mistress—and allowing Bulgaria to slip back into Orthodoxy. Not content with undoing virtually all the hard work of Anastasius, he even accused the librarian of complicity in the murder of his—Hadrian’s—former wife and daughter, excommunicating him for the second time in his career.
²

But even Hadrian was a paragon in comparison with his successors. Charlemagne’s empire was gone, dissolved among the ever-bickering members of his family; without it the popes were left defenseless against the local Roman aristocracy—principally the Crescentii and the Tusculani—who established complete control over the Church and made the Papacy their plaything. Hadrian’s successor, John VIII (872–882), was at least energetic, but he also had the dubious distinction of being the first pope to be assassinated—and, worse still, by priests from his own entourage. According to the
Annals of the Abbey of Fulda
, they first gave him poison; then, when this failed to act quickly enough, they hammered in his skull. The enthronement of his successor, Marinus I, in 882 is said to have been marked by the murder of a high Roman dignitary, that of Hadrian III two years later by the victim’s widow being whipped naked through the streets. On Hadrian’s death on his way to Germany in 885 foul play was also suspected. The next two popes, Stephen V and Formosus, died in their beds, but on the orders of his successor, Stephen VI,
³
the body of Formosus was exhumed in March 896, eight months after his death, clothed in pontifical vestments, propped up on a throne, and subjected to a mock trial on charges of perjury and of coveting the Papacy: he was said to have accepted the see of Rome while still bishop of another diocese (no crime today). Not unpredictably, he was found guilty: all his acts, including his ordinations, were declared null and void, a judgment which caused indescribable confusion; finally his body—minus the three fingers of his right hand that he had used to give blessings—was flung into the Tiber.
⁴