Those who remember history are also condemned to repeat it…

Right now, I’m in the middle of reading Garry Wills’ splendid justification of his faith, Why I Am a Catholic. It helps to have had a background in theology or philosophy, neither of which I possess, to understand his religious reasoning, but his book is still readable for another reason: the detailed history of the papacy he provides. Part of his thesis is that since the Pope is not part of the original doctrines of Christianity, his emergence is in direct response to the institutional needs of the Church; Peter, far from being the "Bishop of Rome", never even visited the city, and the true center of the Church’s power, both politically and spiritually, for centuries thereafter was in Greece and North Africa, not Rome.

How the Bishop of Rome eventually became the powerful spiritual, and for a time, temporal, power is a fascinating story. Some of the early “popes”, lets just say, were a rather seedy lot. The papacy was little more than a pawn for various rulers, emperors and kings, and a progressive ruler, like Justinian, Charlemagne, and Otto (the first Holy Roman Emperor) could yield enormous influence over the spiritual tenets of the faith without ever being the pope. For the most part, unfortunately, the power behind the throne was not so beneficent, which leads me to the Theophylact family, and to a period in church history popularly known as the “pornocracy”.

In the first half of the 10th Century, the Theophylacts were the preeminent family in Roman society (Wills, pp.118-9). They did not use their power wisely or well. The patriarch of the family, Teofilatto, and his ambitious wife, Theodora, handpicked several popes, including Sergius III in 904. He was a real piece of work; he became more closely allied to the Theophylact family when he began a relationship with the eldest daughter, Marozia, when she was around thirteen, an arrangement the family seems to have encouraged. Marozia, by all accounts a stunningly beautiful young lady, was married off sometime after that, to Duke Alberic of Spoleto, and bore a son, John. It remains in dispute whether Pope Sergius III was the father. After Sergius went to his just reward, the family chose a loyal retainer who became Pope John X, who had the additional benefit of having been a former lover of Theodora.

By all accounts, Marozia had a bit of an edge to her. More accurately, she may have been the most evil, dissolute woman ever to hold anything close to absolute power anywhere in Christendom. Well, it's either her or Catherine de Medici. Normally, I would be hesitant to rely on the accounts of ancient or medieval historians concerning the lives of powerful women. I think it’s safe to say that Livia did not poison half the men in Rome when she was married to Augustus. The Empress Messalina probably did not compete with a prostitute to see who could sleep with the most men. Contrary to Livy’s account, Tullia (if she even existed) did not run over her old man with a chariot so that she and her husband could seize power. I will even go so far as to assert that the wife of the Emporer Justinian, Theodora the Great, probably held a better social position than her contemporaries claimed. Any strong, ambitious woman would run afoul of the misogynists who have written history over the years. If Tacitus were writing today, he no doubt would have accused Hillary Clinton of all sorts of nasty shenanigans in her ruthless pursuit of power and lust.

Marozia, though, was the real deal. In terms of wickedness, she was all that. I sort of imagine her as having the face and figure of Elizabeth Hurley and the mind and temperament of Ann Coulter. After her father died, she seized control of the family business, which included governing the Holy See, and held the official title, Senatrix. When Pope John X began to act independently of her family, she had his brother executed for treason, then had Pope John arrested, put out his eyes, and suffocated. She hand-picked the next two Popes, both of whom were chosen not for any spiritual insights or piety they might have possessed, but for their willingness to act as caretakers until her aforementioned son was old enough to become Pope. That son, John XI, combined a lack of education with a taste for debauchery, and generally lowered the prestige of the Church.

Finally, Marozia went too far. She allegedly murdered her second husband, then persuaded her son to consecrate her marriage to his brother, Hugh of Arles, the King of Italy, who also happened to be her brother-in-law, in 932. At that point, another son, Alberic II, perhaps concerned about appearances, and reportedly stinging from an insult he received at her wedding party, besieged his mother’s castle, and arrested her and the Pope (King Hugh escaped, apparently realizing that this was one family dispute he didn't need to be a part of). What happened thereafter to our heroin isn’t entirely clear. Most accounts have her dying soon afterwards, while she was in custody, at the age of 37. Another tale has her living well into her nineties, at which time the Church lifted her excommunication, "exorcised" her demons, and executed the former Senatrix of Rome. Better late than never, I suppose.

In the meantime, while Pope John XI lived as his virtual slave, her other son became the power behind the papacy, and for the next two decades handpicked five different popes, culminating with the election of his 16-year old son, John XII. His was not a happy papacy for the devout, as he had taken the licentious proclivities of his family up another notch. Disgruntled bishops organized a synod to remove him, claimed that he was in league with the Devil and accused him of

"... committing incest with two sisters, of playing dice and invoking the Devil to assist him to win, of creating boy bishops for money, of ravishing divers virgins, of converting the palace into a seraglio or stews, of lying with his father's harlot, with a certain Queen Dowager [his mother] and with a widow called Anna and his own niece, of putting out the eyes of his father confessor, of going hunting publicly, of going always armed, of setting houses on fire, of breaking windows in the night ..."

Allegations that he kidnapped and raped female pilgrims visiting the city of Rome were said to have been a drain on church coffers.

It gets better. After being forced to flee Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto in 962, John XII led a revolt two years later, and returned to the papacy. His attempts to resume the life that late he led were thwarted when, according to whichever source you want to believe, he was murdered the same year, either by an irate husband or by family members angered by his unwillingness to share the spoils of victory. Among historians, the consensus appears to be that whoever killed him hammered in his skull, although Wills states he suffered a stroke while having sex with his mistress (p.119). Depending on the source, he was either 25 or 27.

After that, the power of the Theophylact family began to diminish. The grandson of Marozia’s sister Theodora became Pope John XIII, who was by all accounts, a pious and decent man, and Marozia's great-grandson became Pope John XIX. Through marriage, the family gradually melted into the aristocracy of medieval Europe. Life went on.