14 May: the 1,059th anniversary, obviously, of the demise of Pope John XII due to a stroke brought on by sexual excess, or a cuckolded husband transforming into Satan and taking him away, or said husband beating him to death, or throwing him out of a window.
Born Octavian, John was the son of the splendidly named ruler of Rome, Alberic II of Spoleto. His mother was either Alberic’s wife/stepsister, Alda, or of one of Alberic’s mistresses. Depending on which, ‘John’ was either 18 or 25 when he became pope.
So, he… hadn’t had time to mature into the role, let’s say — and only went into the church because Alberic decided his son was going to be both prince of Rome and leader of the Roman Catholic Church. Towards the end of his life, the old man got to work on this in earnest.
That’s an excerpt from a book by historian E. R. Chamberlin, entitled — and I think this may be considered something of a clue — The Bad Popes. (One of my other sources is The Popes in the Days of Feudal Anarchy, which again seems eloquent).
Chamberlin suggests that had he had time, Alberic might have raised Octavian to be in “control of the subtle balance of forces that enabled the offices of prince and pope to be distinct but harmonious”, but he didn’t, and John XII was… of a different character.
Not that you have to be young to have those qualities — apart from the “considerable personal courage” bit, it doesn’t sound unlike a recent British Prime Minister, who was definitely on the wrong side of ‘old enough to know better’. But I digress.
John XII was a wrong ’un and no mistake. Chamberlin says “he was … the grandson of Marozia and Hugh of Provence, the two most accomplished debauchees that Italy had seen in many years”, and continues:
In his relationship with the Church, John seems to have been urged toward a course of deliberate sacrilege that went far beyond the casual enjoyment of sensual pleasures. It was as though the dark element in his nature goaded him on to test the utmost extents of his power, a Christian Caligula whose crimes were rendered peculiarly horrific by the office he held. Later, the charge was specifically made against him that he turned the Lateran into a brothel; that he and his gang violated female pilgrims in the very basilica of St. Peter; that the offerings of the humble laid upon the altar were snatched up as casual booty. He was inordinately fond of gambling, at which he invoked the names of those discredited gods now universally regarded as demons. His sexual hunger was insatiable.
Mind you, if you ask A S Rappoport, author of The Love Affairs of the Vatican (1912), it was all the fault of the Accursed Women he was descended from. Obviously.
Anyway, back to Chamberlin: “Fornication was one thing”, apparently, but “what was worse was that the casual occupants of his bed were rewarded not with casual gifts of gold but of land”, and that wouldn’t do. Berengar II, King of Italy, took exception.
He was a(nother) man of violence and “depthless cupidity”, so John needed help to see him off. Enter Otto, King of Germany, who routed Berengar and was rewarded with the title of Holy Roman Emperor — and took it upon himself to get John to change his ways.
According to Horace Mann’s The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages (vol.4, subtitled The Popes in the Days of Feudal Anarchy), he “made strong representations to John to induce him to amend his life”. Unfortunately,
As far as John was concerned, Otto was going to be more of a curb on his lifestyle than Berengar. Berengar had similar interests — power and money — while Otto was something of a diplomat as well as a soldier.
Chamberlin again:
That is: Otto was an adult, and John… well, let’s not labour the point about contemporary politicians.
John did what any indulged halfwit would do, and tried to make friends with Berengar again — and his son, Adalbert. “As soon as Otto had left the city,” Chamberlin says, “John offered the imperial crown to Berengar”.
The twisted motives of John XII are probably beyond hope of reconstruction. The lunatic gesture may have arisen from the most trivial form of pique, a means of hitting back at Otto for his heavy-handed lectures. He may perhaps have wished to show that he could summon a king, make him an emperor, and unmake him if he so pleased. He may perhaps have seen — though he did not usually look ahead — that the Roman faction which had supported him as the son of Alberic would infallibly reject him as the protégé of Otto. From whatever cause, he deliberately set about his own destruction.
Otto didn’t return straight away. First, he sent envoys
…at which point, Otto decided enough was, indeed, enough. He marched on Rome; John grabbed what valuables he could (or did a little light looting, depending how you want to put it) and legged it to Tivoli; and Otto called a synod, which summoned John.
Did John respond with a new-found maturity? In fact, no. He sent a not especially grammatical letter and went off hunting.
He was replaced by Leo VIII, but Rome was not happy at this imposition of Otto’s — they were heartily sick of John, but also of the papacy being held by the same powerful families. Otto left again, leaving a few men behind to protect Leo… but not quite enough of them, because John marched back in. And set about building bridges with a new-found diplomacy and maturity? Er…
At this point, Otto could have marched back, but was busy fighting Berengar’s son Adalbert — so he must have been mightily relieved when news reached him that he would no longer need to deal with John.
But it was not by the hand of the Holy Roman Emperor that Christendom was freed of its burden. The imperial army was still marching to Rome when news came that John had died, violently, but not in battle or by a political assassin. The champion of Christendom was an outraged cuckold who had caught his Holy Father in the act and cudgeled him so severely that he died three days afterward. Or so the gossip ran in Rome, to be picked up by Liudprand and elaborated into a moral tale in which the injured husband was transformed into the devil himself, come to fetch home his most faithful servant.
(Liudprand was a 10th century bishop, diplomat and historian, who sadly seems to have missed out the defenestration story.)
John would have been about 27 or 34 at the time of his death. Still, he’d packed a fair bit in.
A S Rappoport’s The Love Affairs of the Vatican has a different telling of John’s untimely end — and what he lacks in reliability, he makes up for with prose in an appropriate shade of cardinal purple. The cuckolded husband bursts in bellowing.
“Tremble before your excommunication,” he roared. “You are the very Antichrist-for whose benediction or curse I care little. Heaven will not listen to your requests-and the curse will sooner fall on your own head than mine. Too many are the sinning Magdalenes whom you have taken to your bosom.” And down came the murderous sword. Pope John XII’s life had come to a premature end — for he was only twenty-five. The outraged husband sent him down to his grave without even so much as giving him time for prayer. And yet so great is the strength of habit and inveterate belief, that scarcely did the avenger behold the inanimate, bleeding body of the Pontiff before him, than, without heeding the fainting woman, without a thought for, or fear of, the justice of man, he trembled as he realised his sacrilegious deed. He had assassinated the anointed of the Lord. Madly he rushed from the Lateran and threw himself into the Tiber. Thus ended Pope John XII, darling of the frail and fair ladies of Rome.
…and that’s pretty much the end of the whole sordid tale. Although one 16th century historian, Florimond de Raemond, argues that John may be the source for the myth of Pope Joan.
It is a great pity that one of the best stories of papal preposterousness isn’t true, yes, but some of the stories around Pope Joan are still pretty entertaining…
