Absolute Monarchs (8 page)
By the time he himself reached Rome in November 800, Charles had been firmly reminded by his chief adviser, the Englishman Alcuin of York, that he had no more authority than Irene to sit in judgment over the successor of St. Peter, but he also knew that while the accusations remained unrefuted Christendom lacked not only an emperor but a pope as well, and he was determined to clear Leo’s name. Obviously anything resembling a trial was out of the question; but on December 23, at the high altar, the pope swore a solemn oath on the Gospels that he was innocent of all the charges leveled against him—and the assembled synod accepted his word. Two days later, as Charles rose from his knees at the conclusion of the Christmas Mass, Leo laid the imperial crown upon his head.
CHARLES HAD RECEIVED
, as his enemies were quick to point out, only a title; the imperial crown brought with it not a single new subject or soldier, nor an acre of new territory. But that title was of more lasting significance than any number of conquests; for it meant that, after more than four hundred years, there was once again an emperor in western Europe. There remains the question of why the pope acted as he did. Not, certainly, to engineer a deliberate split in the Roman Empire, still less to bring about two rival empires where one had been before. There was, so far as he was concerned, no living emperor at that time. Very well, he would create one, and because the Byzantines had proved so unsatisfactory from every point of view—political, military, and doctrinal—he would select a Westerner, the one man who, by his wisdom and statesmanship and the vastness of his dominions, as well as by his prodigious physical stature, stood head and shoulders above his contemporaries. But if Leo conferred a great honor on Charles that Christmas morning, he bestowed a still greater one on himself: the right to appoint, and to invest with crown and scepter, the Emperor of the Romans. Here was something new, even revolutionary. No pontiff had ever before claimed for himself such a privilege—not only establishing the imperial crown as his own personal gift but simultaneously granting himself implicit superiority over the emperor whom he had created.
Historians have long argued whether the imperial coronation had been jointly planned by Leo and Charles or whether, as appeared at the time, the King of the Franks was taken by surprise. His first biographer, Einhard, quotes him as claiming that he would not have set foot in the basilica had he had any idea of the pope’s intentions. True, he had never shown the faintest interest in claiming imperial status, and for the rest of his life he continued to style himself Rex Francorum et Langobardorum. Nor, clearly, would he have wished to owe any obligation to the pope. On the other hand, once the thought of the coronation had occurred to Leo, is it really conceivable that he would not have suggested it in advance to Charles, even if only as a simple courtesy? As for Charles himself, would not the advantages of the imperial title have easily outweighed the drawbacks? We are forced to the conclusion that pope and emperor had already discussed the idea at length, probably at Paderborn, and that Einhard’s statement—together with Charles’s own later protestations—was disingenuously designed to deflect the criticism that he was obviously bound to incur.
Of one thing we can be virtually certain: that neither Leo nor Charles would have touched the crown had there been at the time a male Emperor of Byzantium. The concept of two simultaneous emperors would have been unthinkable; it was the presence of a woman on the Byzantine throne that put an utterly different complexion on the matter. At the same time, that very fact gave Charles a further important reason to accept the crown that he was offered: for now, at this one critical moment of history, he recognized an opportunity that might never be repeated. Irene, for all her faults, remained a marriageable widow—and, by all accounts, a remarkably attractive one. If he could but persuade her to become his wife, all the imperial territories of East and West would be reunited under a single crown: his own.
The reaction in Constantinople to the news of Charles’s coronation can easily be imagined. To any right-thinking Greek it was an act not only of breathtaking arrogance but also of sacrilege. The Byzantine Empire was built on a dual foundation: on the one hand, the Roman power; on the other, the Christian faith. The two had first come together in the person of Constantine the Great, Emperor of Rome and Equal of the Apostles, and this mystical union had continued through all his legitimate successors. It followed that, just as there was only one God in Heaven, so there could be but one supreme ruler here on Earth; all other claimants to such a title were impostors, and blasphemers as well.
Moreover, unlike the princes of the West, the Byzantines had no Salic Law. However much they might detest their empress and even attempt to depose her, they never questioned her right to occupy the imperial throne. So much the greater, therefore, was their anxiety when, early in 802, Charles’s ambassadors arrived in Constantinople, and so much the greater still when they realized that Irene, far from being insulted by the very idea of marriage with an illiterate barbarian—for Charles, though he could read a little, made no secret of his inability to write—appeared on the contrary to be intrigued, gratified, and disposed in principle to accept.
Her reasons are not hard to understand. Her subjects loathed her; her exchequer was empty. She had reduced her empire to degradation and penury. Sooner or later—probably sooner—a coup d’état was inevitable. It mattered little to her that her suitor was a rival, an adventurer, and a heretic; if he was as uneducated as reports suggested, she would probably be able to manipulate him as easily as she had manipulated her late husband and her unfortunate son. Meanwhile in marrying him she would preserve the unity of the empire and—in her eyes far more important—her own skin.
There were other attractions, too. The proposal offered an opportunity to escape from the stifling atmosphere of the imperial court. Though twenty-two years a widow—during which time she had lived surrounded by women and eunuchs—Irene was probably still in her early fifties, perhaps even younger: what could be more natural than that she should look favorably on the prospect of a new husband at last—particularly one rumored to be tall and outstandingly handsome, a superb hunter with a fine singing voice and flashing blue eyes? But it was not to be. Her subjects had no intention of allowing the throne to be taken over by this boorish Frank in his outlandish linen tunic and his ridiculously cross-gartered scarlet leggings, speaking an incomprehensible language and unable even to sign his name except by stenciling it through a gold plate, just as Theodoric the Ostrogoth had done three centuries before. On the last day of October 802 Irene was arrested, deposed, and sent into exile; a year later she was dead.
If Charles had married Irene … the speculation is irresistible, even though, like all such speculations, ultimately sterile—would the West have taken over the East or vice versa? Charles would certainly not for a second have considered living in Constantinople; in theory, at any rate, the capital would have moved back to the West. But would the Byzantines have accepted such a state of affairs? It seems most unlikely. A far more probable scenario is that they would have declared Irene deposed and would have crowned a new emperor in her place—just as, in fact, they did—effectively challenging Charles to do something about it; and that he, much as he might have wished to retaliate, would have been unable to do so. The distances were too great, the lines of communication too long. He would have been in a humiliating position, indeed, and powerless to extricate himself. He might never even have acquired the name of Charlemagne. And who in any case was to know that within a few years of his death his own, Western, Empire would effectively crumble away? How lucky he was that the Byzantines took their strong line then rather than later, and that Frankish emperor and Greek empress never came together after all.
POPE LEO III
was an unremarkable man; it is one of the ironies of history that he should have been responsible for one of the most momentous acts ever performed by a pope. He had worked his way up through the hierarchy from relatively humble beginnings, and he remained essentially a simple man, for whom the coronation of Charlemagne meant a simple division of responsibilities. The emperor would wield the sword; the pope would fight for the faith, protecting it and extending it wherever possible, and would provide the spiritual guidance for his entire flock, the emperor included.
All would have been well if Charles could only have seen things in the same way. He had already made a moderately disastrous intervention in the iconoclast debate; in 810 he involved himself yet again in theological matters, this time over another old warhorse, the
filioque
clause. The original Creed determined by the Councils of Nicaea and Constantinople had held that the Holy Ghost “proceeded from the Father”; to this, from the sixth century on, the Western Church had added the word
filioque
, “and the Son.” By Charles’s time this addition was generally adopted throughout the Frankish empire, and in 809 it was formally endorsed by the Council of Aachen, his own capital. Two years earlier, the Frankish monks on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem had introduced it into their services, arousing furious opposition from the Eastern community of the nearby Monastery of St. Saba, whereupon they had referred the question to the pope for a definitive ruling.
Leo was in a quandary. As a devout Westerner, he was perfectly happy with the offending word, for which there was good scriptural authority. On the other hand, he was prepared to admit that the Western Church had had no right to tamper with a Creed that had been drafted by an Ecumenical Council, and relations with Constantinople were already quite difficult enough without sparking off another conflict. His solution was an attempt to have it both ways: to approve the doctrine while suppressing the word itself—which he did, not by means of any inflammatory edict but by having the text of the Creed in its original form—i.e., without the
filioque
—engraved in Greek and Latin on two silver plaques which were fixed to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul. His endorsement of the unity of the two churches in their joint authorship of the ancient Creed could hardly have been clearer.
Charlemagne, however, was predictably furious. He had grown up with the
filioque;
if the East refused to accept it, the East was wrong. And who cared about the East anyway? He was the emperor now; the pope should nail his colors firmly to the Western mast and leave the heretics in Constantinople to their own devices. When Leo ordered him to remove the word from his liturgies, he took no action and sent no reply; and when, in 813, he decided to make his son Louis co-emperor, he pointedly failed to invite the pope to perform the ceremony.
For centuries popes and emperors were to continue their struggle over the demarcation line between their two authorities, each trying to push it as far as possible into the territory of the other; in the short term, however, the bickering continued for only twenty-five years after Charlemagne’s death in January 814, when, on the death of Louis I in 840, the Carolingian Empire fell apart. From then on, the power of the Papacy steadily grew, and before long it was generally agreed that every new emperor must be anointed by the pope personally, in Rome.
But the imperial disintegration meant that the popes must now assume responsibilities which could previously have been left to the empire, and now a new and terrible enemy threatened South Italy. In 827 the Arabs of North Africa had invaded Sicily in strength at the invitation of the Byzantine Governor Euthymius, who was rebelling against Constantinople in an effort to avoid the consequences of having eloped with a local nun. Four years later they took Palermo, and henceforth the peninsula was in constant danger. Brindisi fell, then Taranto, then Bari—which for thirty years was the seat of an Arab emirate—and in 846 it was the turn of Rome itself: an Arab fleet sailed up the Tiber and sacked the city, even going so far as to strip the silver plate from the doors of St. Peter’s. No help was to be expected from the Western Empire, which had effectively ceased to exist.
Once again the city was saved by its pope. In 849, summoning the combined navies of his three maritime neighbors—Naples, Gaeta, and Amalfi—and himself assuming the supreme command, Pope Leo IV destroyed the Arab fleet off Ostia. The hundreds of captives were sent to join local workmen in building an immense rampart around the Vatican and down as far as the Castel Sant’Angelo: the forty-foot-high Leonine Wall, the most spectacular monument of early medieval Rome, sweeping up from the Tiber to the crest of the Vatican Hill and then down again to the river. It was completed in 852, and considerable sections of it still stand today.
1.
It is ironic indeed that the steady breakdown of papal-Byzantine relations should have occurred under Greek popes. Of the twelve elected between John V in 685 and Stephen II in 752, only Gregory II (715–731) was a Latin. At the Sixth Ecumenical Council of the Church, held at Constantinople in 680–681, the entire papal delegation was Greek.
2.
He is sometimes known as Stephen III. The numbering of the Stephens is a little confused, since the Stephen elected on March 23, 752, had died two days later, before he could be consecrated. He is therefore not normally counted. In this book the lesser figure will always be used.
CHAPTER VI
Pope Joan
(855?–857?)
After Leo, John, an Englishman born at Mainz, was pope for two years, seven months, and four days, and died in Rome, after which there was a vacancy in the Papacy of one month. It is claimed that this John was a woman, who as a girl had been brought to Athens in the clothes of a man by a certain lover of hers. There she became proficient in a diversity of branches of knowledge until she had no equal, and afterward in Rome, she taught the liberal arts and had great masters among her students and audience. In the city the opinion of her life and learning grew ever higher, and she was the unanimous choice for pope. While pope, however, she became pregnant by her companion. Through ignorance of the exact time when the birth was expected, she was delivered of a child while in procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran, in a narrow lane between the Colosseum and St. Clement’s Church. After her death, it is said that she was buried in that same place. The Lord Pope always turns aside from this street, and it is believed by many that this is done because of abhorrence of the event. Nor is she placed on the list of the holy pontiffs, both because of her female sex and on account of the shamefulness of the event.
So, in the year 1265, wrote a Dominican monk named Martin in
Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatum.
Originally from Troppau in Poland, Martin had made his way to Rome, where he served as chaplain to Clement IV. His book proved, by the standards of the time, immensely popular, with versions of it—all laboriously copied by hand—circulating throughout Europe. It is largely thanks to him that the legend of Pope Joan, who is said to have reigned from 855 to 857, between Leo IV and Benedict III, has become one of the hoariest canards in papal history.
Martin is not the first chronicler in whose work the story occurs. Several of his predecessors are credited with it, the first of them being Anastasius the papal librarian (there will be more about him in the next chapter) who, if Joan had existed, would have known her personally. But though their histories may have been written earlier, all the surviving copies of them comfortably postdate Martin. Some omit Joan altogether; some refer to her as John VII or VIII;
1
one—an early Vatican manuscript of Anastasius—includes her but in an obvious insertion at the bottom of the page and in a later (fourteenth-century) script; and most of the rest echo Martin’s words so closely as to leave no doubt that they are using him as their authority. A few lend additional glosses to the story—that Joan was killed by a furious populace and buried on the spot, that she ended her life in a convent, that her son became Bishop of Ostia—but the main lines remain intact: that in the mid–ninth century a certain Englishwoman became pope and that she reigned some two and a half years until, by some unhappy miscalculation, she gave birth to a baby on the way to the Lateran.
One chronicler only gives a version of the story different enough to be worth quoting in full. He is Jean de Mailly, another Dominican, who lived at Metz near the German border and was largely responsible for the
Chronica Universalis Metensis
, which first appeared some fifteen years earlier than Martin’s history but achieved nowhere near the same degree of acclaim. “Query:” he writes,
concerning a certain pope or rather female pope, who is not set down in the list of popes or bishops of Rome, because she was a woman who disguised herself as a man and became, by her character and talents, a curial secretary, then a cardinal and finally pope. One day, while mounting her horse, she gave birth to a child. Immediately, by Roman justice, she was bound by the feet to a horse’s tail and dragged and stoned by the people for half a league. And where she died, there she was buried, and at the place is written,
Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum
(“O Peter, Father of Fathers, Betray the Childbirth of the Woman Pope”). At the same time, the four-day fast called “the fast of the female pope” was first established.
A particularly curious feature of Mailly’s version is that he dates Joan’s pontificate to nearly two and a half centuries later than Martin, to 1099—the date usually attributed to Paschal II, whose accession he cheerfully postpones to 1106. Joan is thus allowed to reign for no fewer than seven years—a long time indeed to maintain her deception. But this dating would in any case be manifestly impossible. During the middle of the ninth century Rome, sacked by the Saracens in 846, was still going through her dark ages. All was confusion, records were few and untrustworthy, and the notion of a woman pope was, perhaps, just conceivable. Three and a half centuries later, on the other hand, the times were thoroughly documented; the story of Pope Joan would have been as impossible then as it would be today.
NEVERTHELESS, THAT STORY
had by then been firmly established in the popular mind, and there for centuries it remained. Even Bartolomeo Platina, prefect of the Vatican Library under Sixtus IV (1471–1484), inserts “John VIII” between Leo IV and Benedict III in
Lives of the Popes
and tells the story in considerable detail. “These things which I relate,” he adds, “are popular reports, but derived from uncertain and obscure authors, which I have therefore inserted briefly and baldly, lest I should seem obstinate and pertinacious by omitting what most people assert … although,” he continues, “what I have related may not be thought altogether incredible.”
At the time of the Reformation, Joan became, of course, an admirable stick with which to beat the Church of Rome. As early as the Council of Constance in 1414–1415, the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus was only too pleased to use her as part of his evidence. Significantly, the Council did not deny it: as the French eighteenth-century historian Jacques Lenfant perceptively pointed out, “if it had not been looked upon at that Time as an undeniable Fact, the Fathers of the Council wou’d not have fail’d either to correct John Hus with some Displeasure, or to have laugh’d and shook their Heads, as … they did presently for less cause.” At the same time, the reference to Joan—Hus, like several other chroniclers of his time, actually calls her Agnes—cannot have endeared him to the Council; but he probably knew by then that he could not escape the stake so felt that he had little to lose.
The Welshman Adam of Usk, who spent four years in Rome from 1402 to 1406, gives an account of the coronation procession from St. Peter’s to the Lateran of Pope Innocent VII in 1404, in the course of which he confirms an interesting detail in Martin’s version:
After turning aside out of abhorrence for Pope Agnes, whose image in stone with her son stands in the straight road near St. Clement’s, the pope, dismounting from his horse, enters the Lateran for his enthronement.
The Basilica of St. John Lateran had been built by Constantine the Great on the site of a first-century cavalry barracks and had immediately become—as it still is today—the cathedral of the pope in his capacity as Bishop of Rome. Since it stands at the opposite end of the city from St. Peter’s, there were frequent processions between the one and the other, passing through the center of Rome by way of the Colosseum and the Basilica of San Clemente. It was probably somewhere near the latter, on the Via San Giovanni in Laterano, that the offending statue stood. We can have no doubt that it existed—it is mentioned in all the old handbooks for pilgrims—though there is a considerable difference of opinion as to the form it actually took. Theodoric of Niem, cofounder of the German College in Rome, reported in about 1414 that the image was of marble and that it “represented the fact as it occurred; that is to say, a woman who was delivered of a child.” Martin Luther, on the other hand, who was in the city toward the end of 1510—and was surprised that the popes should have allowed such an embarrassment in a public place—wrote of “a woman wearing a papal cloak, holding a child and a scepter.” We can take our choice. We shall never know, because the statue—together with the stone and its alliterative inscription—is long gone, almost certainly removed in about 1480 by Pope Sixtus IV, who is said to have had it thrown into the Tiber.
Nor can there be any doubt that the place was regularly avoided by the popes. John Burchard, Bishop of Strasbourg and papal master of ceremonies under Innocent VIII and his two successors, Alexander VI and Pius III, ruefully records how he was brave enough to break tradition:
In going as in returning, [Pope Innocent] came by way of the Colosseum, and that straight road where the image of the female pope is located, in token, it is said, that John VII [
sic
] gave birth there to a child. For that reason, many say that the popes may never ride on horseback there. And so the Lord Archbishop of Florence … reprimanded me.
But let us return to Adam of Usk:
And there [in the Lateran] he is seated in a chair of porphyry, which is pierced beneath for this purpose, that one of the younger cardinals may make proof of his sex; and then, while a Te Deum is chanted, he is borne to the high altar.
The fullest description of this
chaise percée
, by means of which the Church made sure that so embarrassing an occurrence should never be repeated, is that given by Felix Haemmerlein (
De Nobilitate et Rusticitate Dialogus
, c. 1490):
up to the present day the seat is still in the same place and is used at the election of the pope. And in order to demonstrate his worthiness, his testicles are felt by the junior cleric present as testimony of his male sex. When this is found to be so, the person who feels them shouts out in a loud voice, “He has testicles!” And all the clerics present reply, “God be praised!” Then they proceed joyfully to the consecration of the pope-elect.
He specifically confirms that this was because of Pope Joan, pointing out that it was her successor, Benedict III, who set up the pierced chair.
What are we to make of all this? Can we honestly believe that successive popes—they would have included Pope Alexander VI, who is known to have fathered any number of children—would have subjected themselves to such undignified gropings?
2
The mists begin to clear when we compare two more fifteenth-century accounts. The first is by an Englishman, William Brewin, who in 1470 compiled a guidebook to the churches of Rome. In the Chapel of St. Savior in St. John Lateran, he tells us,
are two or more chairs of red marble stone, with apertures carved in them, upon which chairs, as I heard, proof is made as to whether the pope is male or not.
The second is once again by Bishop Burchard:
The pope was led to the door of St. Sylvester’s Chapel, near which were placed two plain porphyry seats, in the first of which, from the right of the door, the pope sat, as though lying down; and when he was thus seated, the … prior of the Lateran gave into the pope’s hand a rod, in token of ruling and correction, and the keys of the Basilica and the Lateran Palace, in token of the power of closing and opening, of binding and loosing. The pope then moved to the other chair, from which he handed back the rod and keys.
“Two plain porphyry seats”: these were the so-called
sedia curules
, which for some four hundred years were used in papal enthronements. One was looted by Napoleon’s army and taken to the Louvre;
3
the other remains in Rome, though now in the Vatican Museum, whither it was removed by Pius VI at the end of the eighteenth century. It now stands, unlabeled, in a window recess of the Gabinetto delle Maschere. It has indeed a hole in the seat, cut in the shape of a huge keyhole; more curious, however, is the angle of the back, some forty-five degrees to the vertical. One would indeed sit on it “as though lying down”; it could not possibly serve as a commode. One explanation that has been put forward is that it was originally intended as an obstetric, or “birthing,” chair (“closing and opening, binding and loosing”?) and that it was used in the coronation ceremony to symbolize the Mother Church. It cannot be gainsaid, on the other hand, that it is admirably designed for a diaconal grope; and it is only with considerable reluctance that one turns the idea aside.
The last of the major pieces of evidence in favor of the existence of Pope Joan—or at least of the widespread belief in her legend—is the series of papal busts in the Cathedral of Siena. Their date is uncertain, but the late fourteenth century seems most likely. There are 170 of them, beginning with St. Peter to the right of the crucifix in the center of the apse, and continuing counterclockwise around the building until they end with Pope Lucius III, who died in 1185. Sure enough, Joan was included—in her proper place between Leo IV and Benedict III, her bust carrying the clear inscription
JOHANNES VIII, FOEMINA DE ANGLIA
. Most regrettably, she is no longer there, Clement VIII having had her removed in about 1600.
