Odd this day

Hurrah! It’s the 531st anniversary of the day Rodrigo Borgia became Pope Alexander VI, proving his eligibility for the role by dangling his knackers through a special chair with a hole in.

We know it definitely happened because historian William Roscoe said so…

Why might they have “dispensed with” the test this time round? Well, partly because he was a Borgia — a prominent member of a not exactly shy and retiring family — so you’d think they’d have known if he was an Actual Chap or not.

And partly because he was known to have several mistresses and an indeterminate number of children — the whole celibacy thing apparently not being insisted on quite so much in The Olden Days. But why would a pope need his knackers inspected? Well…

9th (or possibly 11th) century pontiff John of Mainz had been poping successfully for two years, one month, and four days when his maleness was brought into question by him, er… going into labour during a procession from St. Peter’s Basilica to St. John Lateran Cathedral.

After Pope Joan, every Bishop of Rome had to sit in three chairs during his coronation, the last of which — the sedia stercoraria — was the crucial one. Apparently, a Swiss priest in 1490 described the procedure as follows:

About 150 years later, in 1645, a Swedish lawyer, Laurentius Gunnari Banck, wrote that the installation of Pope Innocent X also involved

a marble seat with a hole … so that, seating upon it [sic], his genitals might be touched

In the 21st century, Peter Stanford, former editor of the Catholic Herald visited the Vatican museum and sat in the chair, writing in his biography of Joan, The She-Pope:

There was only one way of testing this theory against the object before my eyes. My guardian angel had wandered off, leaving me all alone in the Mask Room. … With a glance behind me, I plonked myself down. It felt like a desecration. The Vatican Museum has the aura of a church and all my childhood training revolved around not touching anything in God’s house. Pulse racing, white-faced, I leant back and back and back. As I’d thought, this could not be a commode. The angle of the back was more like a deck-chair. But the keyhole shape, I noticed as I brought my spine vertical, was in precisely the right place for the test. I slid off with a nervous jolt and tried to rake and rearrange the dust patterns with the pages of my notebook to cover my sacrilege before the attendant returned. When he reappeared I was studiously buried in scribbling. With a smile, I hurried off, tripping over the disengaged chain as I made for the exit before a thunderbolt struck.

Tragically, it’s all, er… complete balls (even though, in the 21st century, rigorously peer-reviewed TV series The Borgias shows Jeremy Irons as Alexander VI having his danglers inspected).

Firstly, this is the sedia stercoraria, which does not noticeably have a hole in its seat. Given that its name translates as ‘dung chair’, you might think it needs one, but in fact while Old Popey’s on it, everybody sings Psalm 112.

This includes the words

He raiseth up the needy from the dust, and lifteth up the poor from the dunghill, that he may sit with princes, and hold the throne of glory

apparently to make sure the pontiff remembers his humbler origins even while exercising power (a bit like the supposed tradition of successful Roman generals having someone whisper “memento mori” — remember you’re mortal — in their ear throughout their triumphal procession through the streets of Rome, which also may well not have happened).

Secondly, the chairs haven’t been used in papal installations since the 16th century, so a Swedish lawyer, not noted for his fondness for Catholicism, writing in the mid-17th century, may not be the most reliable witness.

Thirdly, William Roscoe was writing about the late-15th century Alexander VI in the late 18th/early 19th century, so wasn’t exactly going on first-hand information himself.

Finally, the chairs business predated Pope Joan, which rather undermines her story (although, if I was writing a glossy TV show about her, I’d make the cleric who verified her genitals complicit in some way — ideally, father of her child…)

Yes, this is all very disappointing, but it shouldn’t distract us from the fact that if popes did have to dangle their gonads through a chair, it would be very funny.

…and Peter Stanford is

convinced that Pope Joan was an historical figure, though perhaps not all the details about her that have been passed down through the centuries are true.

The Catholic church was a rather chaotic thing at the time and she may have “achieved that papacy at a time when the office was hopelessly debased and corrupt”. Well, we can dream, can’t we?

If you want to know more about Joan, and weird pope-related nonsense in general, you could start here:

Four Unusual Papal Legends

…and if you’re just interested in gonads, I got some of this from this entertaining (if perhaps deservedly obscure) book: