Pope Joan (68 page)

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:

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.

T
HE
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:

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.

^*1
Two 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.

^*2
There 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.