“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 hundredancient 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 provides 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.
Nevertheless, readers who argued this point are probably right. Most experts believe that horned helmets were used for ceremonial, not martial, purposes. The most persuasive argument I read was that of one scholar who pointed out that a horned helmet would be a serious disadvantage in battle, for it provided a foe with a convenient handhold to steady you as he slit your throat!
I admit I had trouble letting go of this one, for horned Viking helmets are ingrained in popular imagination. Hagar the Horrible will never be the same for me! But I decided to come down on the side of historical realism, so in this edition the Viking attackers of Dorstadt do not wear horned helmets.
3. Change in Gerold’s age. Some astute readers did the math and realized that Gerold must have fathered Gisla when he was only twelve years old—and naturally they found this puzzling. Boys of that age today are considered children.
Certainly twelve was very young for fathering, even in the ninth century. But back then twelve-year-old boys were considered young adults. They could marry, have children, ride to war, and die in battle alongside their elders. And many did.
However, in consideration of reader sensibilities, Gerold is three years older in this new edition. This was an easy change to effect, for Gerold is an entirely fictional character, born of the need to account for Joan’s death in childbirth, attested to in hundreds of chronicle records.
4. Excision of boiled corn in the meal Joan’s family serves to Aesculapius. Many readers have been troubled by the use of corn in a novel about ninth-century Europe, believing that it is a New World food. But I took the description of this particular meal right off the pages of a ninth-century manuscript. Here’s where the problem arises: Corn is an ancient word, used generically to mean grain or seed. What we call corn is actually maize—a New World crop. Over time, the two words have become confused.
Though not a historical error, the use of the word corn was a poor writer’s choice. Why create doubt in the minds of readers? So in this edition, the family sits down to a meal of boiled barley-corn.
I did make some adjustments in the interest of telling a good story. I needed a Viking raid on Dorstadt in the year 828, although it didn’t actually take place until 834. Similarly, I had Emperor Lothar descend twice upon Rome to chastise the Pope, though in fact he actually dispatched his son Louis, King of Italy, to do the job for him the first time. The bodies of Ss. Marcellinus and Peter were stolen from their graves in 827, not 855; John the Antipope, Sergius’s predecessor, was not killed after his deposition but merely imprisoned and then banished. Anastasius died in 878, not 897. These deliberate errata are, I trust, exceptions; on the whole I tried to be historically accurate.
Some things described in Pope Joan may seem shocking from our perspective, but they did not seem so to the people of the day. The collapse of the Roman Empire and the resulting breakdown of law and order led to an era of almost unprecedented barbarism and violence. As one contemporary chronicler lamented, it was “a sword age, a wind age, a wolf age.” The population of Europe had been almost halved by a disastrous series of famines, plagues, civil wars, and “barbarian” invasions. The average life expectancy was very short: less than a quarter of the population ever reached their fifties. There were no longer any real cities; the largest towns had no more than two to three thousand inhabitants. The Roman roads had fallen into decay, the bridges on which they depended disappeared.
The social and economic order which we now call feudalism had not yet begun. Europe was as yet one country: Germany did not exist as a separate nation, nor did France, or Spain, or Italy. The Romance languages had not yet evolved from their parent Latin; there were no French or Spanish or Italian languages, only a variety of forms of degenerating Latin and a host of local patois. The ninth century marked, in short, a society in transition from one form of civilization, long dead, to another not yet born—with all the ferment and unrest that this implies.
Life in these troubled times was especially difficult for women. It was a misogynistic age, informed by the antifemale diatribes of church fathers such as St. Paul and Tertullian:
And do you not know that you are Eve? … You are the gate of the devil, the traitor of the tree, the first deserter of Divine Law; you are she who enticed the one whom the devil dare not approach … on account of the death you deserved even the Son of God had to die.
Menstrual blood was believed to turn wine sour, make crops barren, take the edge off steel, make iron rust, and infect dog bites with an incurable poison. With few exceptions, women were treated as perpetual minors, with no legal or property rights. By law, they could be beaten by their husbands. Rape was treated as a form of minor theft. The education of women was discouraged, for a learned woman was considered not only unnatural but dangerous.
Small wonder, then, if a woman chose to disguise herself as a man in order to escape such an existence. Apart from Joan, there are other women who successfully managed the imposture. In the third century, Eugenia, daughter of the Prefect of Alexandria, entered a monastery disguised as a man and eventually rose to the office of abbot. Her disguise went undetected until she was forced to reveal her sex as a last resort to refute the accusation of having deflowered a virgin. In the twelfth century, St. Hildegund, using the name Joseph, became a brother of Schönau Abbey and lived undiscovered among the brethen until her death many years later.*2
The light of hope kindled by such women shone only flickeringly in a great darkness, but it was never entirely to go out. Opportunities were available for women strong enough to dream. Pope Joan is the story of one of those dreamers.
*1Two of the strongest material proofs against Joan’s papacy are predicated on the assumption that Leo IV died in 855. (1) A coin bearing the name of Pope Benedict on one side and Emperor Lothar on the other. Since Lothar died on September z8, 855, and the coin shows Benedict and Lothar alive together, Benedict could obviously not have assumed the throne later than 855. (2) A decretal written on October 7, 855, by Pope Benedict confirming the privileges of the monastery of Corbie, again indicating that he was at that time in possession of the throne. But these “proofs” are rendered meaningless if Leo died in 853 (or even 854), for then there was time for Joan’s reign before Benedict assumed the throne in 855.
*2There are other, more modern examples of women who have successfully passed themselves off as men, including Mary Reade, who lived as a pirate in the early eighteenth century; Hannah Snell, a soldier and sailor in the British navy; a nineteenth-century woman whose real name is unknown to us but who, under the name of James Barry, rose to the rank of full inspector-general of British hospitals; and Loreta Janeta Velaquez, who fought for the Confederate side at the Battle of Bull Run under the name Harry Buford. Teresinha Gomes of Lisbon spent eighteen years pretending to be a man; a highly decorated soldier, she rose to the rank of general in the Portuguese army and was discovered only in 1994, when she was arrested on charges of financial fraud and forced by the police to undergo a physical exam. In 2006, Norah Vincent published her book Self-Made Man, in which she describes the year she spent in male disguise, during which time she spent three months in a monastery with her true identity completely undetected.