J.J. VON DÖLLINGER

 

THE ENGIMA

ABOUT THE POPESS “JOAN”

 

THE subject of Pope Joan has not yet lost the interest which belongs to it as a fact in the province of historical criticism. The literature respecting her reaches down to the very latest times. As recently as 1843 and 1845 two works on this question appeared from the pens of two Dutch scholars; the one by Professor Kist, to prove the existence of Pope Joan, the other, a very voluminous one, by Professor Wensing, of Warmond, to disprove Kis’s position. In Italy Bianchi-Giovini wrote a book on the subject in the same year, 1845, without being aware of the works of the two Dutch writers. In Germany no one at any rate of those who know anything of history will easily be induced to entertain a serious belief in the existence of the female pope. To do so, one must do violence to every principle of historical criticism. But with the banishment of the subject to the realm of fable all has not yet been completely accomplished. The riddle how this strange myth originated remains still to be solved.

Nothing but the insufficiency and ill-success of all previous attempts at an explanation can account for it that a man like Luden, in his History of the German People does all he can to make the reality of the well-known myth at any rate probable. “It is inconceivable”, says he, “how it could ever enter into any man’s head to invent such a foolish, insane falsehood. He must either have invented his lie out of sheer wantonness in order to scoff at the papacy, or he must have intended to gain some other object by means of it. But of all the dozens of writers who mention Pope Joan and her mishap, there is not a single one who can be called an enemy of the papacy. They are clergy, monks, guileless people, who notice this phenomenon in the same dry way in which they mention other things, that seem to them to be strange, wonderful, laudable, abominable, or in any way worth mentioning”. “And it cannot be imagined”, says Luden further on, “what object could seem to anyone to be attainable by means of such a falsehood. Moreover, it is inconceivable how people in general could have believed in the story, and that without the slightest doubt, for nearly 500 years from the eleventh century onwards, if it had not been true”.

It is here to be noted that Luden make the myth of Pope Joan a matter of general belief from the eleventh century onwards. It would be very much nearer the truth to say that it did not find general belief till the middle of the fourteenth century. The author, however, of the article on Pope Joan in the Nouvelle Biographie Generale, published at Paris by Dr. Hofer, as lately as 1858, goes much further. “This belief prevailed in the Christian world from the ninth century to the Renaissance”. And to crown it all, Hase thinks it, at any rate, credible that the Church, not content with creating facts, annihilated them, also, whenever the knowledge of them seemed critical for the already tottering papacy.

According to Hase and Kist, then, we must state the matter thus: that soon after the year 855 an edict issued from Rome to this effect: “Let no one presume to say a word about the fact of a female pope”, for at that time Rome did not feel her position to be as yet very secure. About the middle of the thirteenth century, however, a counter order issued from the same place: “Henceforth it is lawful to discuss history; we now consider our position safe, and can venture to let the narrative appear in historical works”.

The judgment of Kurtz is, at any rate, more sober and free from prejudice. “The evidence before us”, he says, “forbids us to assign to the myth any historical value whatever”. We must, however, (quite apart from the falsification of the acts, which, in some cases, is manifest, in others is a matter of suspicion, characterize the myth as a riddle, which criticism has as yet not solved, and probably never will).

That the riddle has not yet been solved, that all attempts at explanation which have been made up to the present time, must be held to have miscarried, is true enough; that a solution which may satisfy the historian is, nevertheless, possible, it will be the object of the following pages to show.

Let us first glance for a moment at the explanations which have been set forth up to this time. Baronius considers the myth to be a satire on John VIII “ob nimiam ejus animi facilitatem et mollitudinem”, qualities which he exhibited more especially in the affair of Photius. Others, Aventine to begin with, and after him Heumann and Schrockh, prefer to reckon the supposed satire as one on the period of female rule in Rome, the reign of Theodora and Marozia under certain popes, some of whom were called John; in which case, however, it would have to be transferred from the middle of the ninth century to the tenth. The opinion published by the Jesuit Secchi in Rome, that it is a calumny originating with the Greeks, namely with Photius, is equally inadmissible. The first Greek who mentions the circumstance is the monk Barlaam in the fourteenth century. Pagi’s assertion also, which Eckhart supports, that the myth was an invention of the Waldenses, is pure imagination. The myth evidently originated in Rome itself, and the first to give it circulation were not the Waldenses, but their most deadly enemies the Dominicans and Minorites.

Leo Aliatius thought that a false prophetess called Thiota, in the ninth century, gave occasion to this myth. The explanation invented by Leibnitz is also a forced attempt to meet the exigencies of the case. There might very well, he thinks, have been a foreign bishop (pontifex i. e. episcopus), really a woman in disguise, who gave birth to a child during a procession at Rome, and thus gave occasion to the story.

Blasco and Henke supposed that the myth about the female pope was a satirical allegory on the origin, and circulation of the false decretals of Isidore. This interpretation, however, is entirely at variance with the genius of that century, an age in which men had no sense for satirical allegories ; and then too it refutes itself, for the story of Pope Joan originated at a time when no one doubted the genuineness of the false decretals of Isidore. Nevertheless, Gfrörer has lately taken up this idea, and worked it out in a still more artificial manner. “The whole force of the fable”, he says, “resides in these two points, that the woman was a native of Mayence, and that she came from Greece (Athens), and ascended the papal chair. In the first particular I recognize a condemnation directed against the canons of the pseudo-Isidore, in the second an allegorical censure of the alliance which Leo IV wished to make with the Byzantines. It is said that in the later days of Leo IV the papal power in Mayence and Greece was abused, or to make use of a metaphor, of which the Italians are very fond in such cases, was at that time prostituted!” Side by side with this explanation, which can scarcely fail to provoke a smile from anyone who is acquainted with the Middle Ages, stands the extraordinary circumstance, that there is no authority whatever for this intention of Leo IV to compromise himself more than was right with the Byzantines. It is purely an hypothesis of Gfrörer’s. But the myth about Pope Joan, as thus interpreted, is in turn made to do further service as a proof of the correctness of this hypothesis, as well as for his assumption that the false decretals originated in Mayence.

In short, all the attempts at explanation, which have hitherto been made, split on this rock that the myth had its origin in a much later age; when the remembrance of the events and circumstances of the ninth and tenth centuries had long ago faded away, or at most existed only in the case of individual scholars, and, therefore, could not form material for the construction of a myth. That is to say, I believe, that I can without difficulty produce convincing evidence, that the myth about the female-pope, though it may possibly have had somewhat earlier circulation in the mouth of the people, was not definitively put into writing before the middle of the thirteenth century. This evidence could not have been given with anything like certainty before the present time. For it is only during the last forty  years that all the stores of mediaeval manuscripts in the whole of Europe have been hunted through with a care such as was never known before. Every library corner has been searched, and an astounding quantity of historical documents, hitherto unknown (what a mass of new material exists in the Pertz collection alone, for instance!), has been brought to light. Nevertheless, not a single notice of the myth about Pope Joan has been discovered, which is earlier than the close, or, at the very most, the middle of the thirteenth century. We can now say quite positively, that in the collected literature, whether western or Byzantine, of the four centuries between 850 and 1250, there is not the faintest reference to the circumstance of a female pope.

For a long time it was supposed that the myth, though certainly not to be found in any author of the ninth or tenth century, appeared as already in existence in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Marianus Scotus is said to have been the first to mention the female pope, and he certainly does mention her in the text as given by Pistorius. Now, however, that the text in the great Pertz collection has been edited by Waitz according to the most ancient manuscripts, the fact has come to light, that Marianus knew nothing whatever of Pope Joan. In his case, as in the case of so many other authors, the short mention of the female pope has been interpolated at a later period. In the chronicle of Sigebert of Gemblours, and the supplements of the monks of Orcamp, the notice of the papess is wanting in all original manuscripts. She was first inserted by the first editor in the year 15I3 - Kurtz has lately appealed again to the supposed evidence of Otto of Freysingen.

In the list of the popes, continued down to the year 1513, which is printed with his historical work, Pope John VII (in the year 705) is marked as a woman, without one single word of explanation. And in the edition of the Pantheon, as given by Pistorius, we find in the list of the popes these words, “the Papess Johanna is not reckoned”.

Meanwhile a close investigation of the oldest and best manuscripts of Gottfried's Pantheon and of Otto's chronicle have brought it to light, that originally neither the word “femina” was placed in Otto's chronicle against the name of John VII, nor the gloss “Johanna Papissa non numerator” in the Pantheon between Leo IV and Benedict III; both of which insertions are given in the printed editions.

In the chronicle of Otto the addition to the name of John VII is manifestly the work of a later copyist or reader, who inserted the word quite at random, because he was bound to have a female John somewhere among the popes. The fact that this John comes as early as the year 705 was the less likely to puzzle him, because the list of popes in this chronicle does not give the dates.

The first who really took up the myth is the author of a chronicle, to which Stephen de Bourbon appeals without giving any more exact quotation. That is to say, Stephen, a French Dominican, born towards the close of the twelfth century, died in the year 1261, in his work on the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, which was written just about the middle of the thirteenth century, makes the first mention of Pope Joan, whom he asserts he has discovered in a chronicle. Now seeing that he refers with exactness to all the sources from which he has gathered together the collection of passages which contribute to his practical homiletic object, we can, at least with great probability, show from what chronicle he has obtained this mention of Pope Joan. Among chroniclers he names Eusebius, Jerome, Bede, Odo, Hugo of St. Victor, the “Roman Cardinal”, and John de Mailly, a Dominican. We may set aside all but the two last. The “Roman Cardinal” (or Cardinal Romanus (?) there were several of this name, but none of them, wrote a chronicle) is probably none other than the author of the Historia Miscella, or continuation of Eutropius, whom the Dominican, Tolomeo of Lucca, also quotes later on among his authorities as Paulus Diaconus Cardinalis, but he cannot be distinguished with certainty. It remains then that the lost, or as yet undiscovered, chronicle of the Dominican Jean de Mailly, who, moreover, must have been a contemporary of Stephen, is the only source to which the latter can have been indebted for his account of Pope Joan. And Jean de Mailly, we may be tolerably certain, got it from popular report.

We can, therefore, consider it as established that not until the year 1240 or 1250, was the myth about the woman-pope put into writing and transferred to works of history. Several decades more passed, however, before it came actually into circulation and became really wide-spread. The chronicle of Jean de Mailly seems to have remained in obscurity, for no one, with the exception of his brother Dominican, Stephen, notices it; and even Stephen’s large work great as was its value, especially to preachers, on account of the quantity of examples which it contained, was not possessed by very many, as is proved by the scarcity of existing manuscripts of it. The Speculum Morale, which bears the name of Vincent of Beauvais, was the chief cause of this. For this work appropriated most of the examples and instances given by Stephen, but was superior to Stephen's books both in convenience of arrangement and fullness of matter, and eclipsed it so completely, that the narrative about Pope Joan, in the form in which it appears in Stephen's work, is to be found nowhere else.

The chronicle of Martinus Polonus has been the principal means of giving circulation to the myth. This book, which gives a synchronistic history of the popes and emperors in the form of a dry, mechanical, and utterly uncritical collection of biographical notes, exercised a most extraordinary influence on the chroniclers and historians from the beginning of the fourteenth century onwards, especially on their ways of thinking in the latter part of the Middle Ages. Wattenbach’s statement, that Martinus Polonus became almost the exclusive historical instructor of the catholic world, is not an exaggeration. Of no other historical book is there such an inexhaustible number of manuscripts in existence as of this. All volumes of the Archive fur deutsche Geschichtskunde show this. And indeed the book was held in estimation in almost all countries alike, was translated into all languages, was continued over and over again, and still more frequently copied by later chroniclers. That the effect of such a book, utterly unhistorical and stuffed with fables, was to the last degree mischievous, so that (as Wattenbach says) the careful, thorough, and critical investigation of the history of the early Middle Ages, prosecuted with so much zeal during the twelfth century, was completely choked, or nearly so, by Martin's chronicle, cannot be denied.

The position of the author could not fail to win for his history of the popes an amount of authority such as no other similar writing obtained. Troppau was his birth-place, the Dominican order his profession. He was for a long time the chaplain and penitentiary of the popes; as such lived naturally at the papal court, followed, everywhere, the Curia, which was then constantly on the move, and died [A.D. 1278] as archbishop designate of Gnesen. His book, therefore, was considered to a certain extent to be the official history of the popes, issuing from the Curia itself. And hence people accepted the history of Pope Joan also, which they found in Martinus Polonus, all the more readily and unsuspectingly. The form in which he gives the myth became the prevailing one; and most authors have contented themselves with copying the passage from his chronicle word for word. Nevertheless, Martin himself, as can be proved, knew nothing about Pope Joan, or, at any rate, said nothing about her. Not until several years after his death did attempts begin to be made to insert the myth into his book. It is no doubt correct that Martin himself prepared a second and later edition of his work, which reaches down to Nicolas III, 1277, while the first edition only goes down to Clement IV (died 1268). But the second is exactly like the first in arrangement. Each pope, and each emperor on the opposite page, had as many lines assigned to him as he reigned years, and each page contained fifty lines, that is, embraced half a century. Hence, in the copies which kept to the original arrangement of the author, additions or insertions could only be made in those places where the account of a pope or emperor did not fill all the lines assigned to him, owing to the short period of his reign. But the insertion of a pope had been rendered impossible by Martin himself and all the copyists who kept to the plan of the book, by means of the detailed chronology, according to which every line had a date, and in the case of each pope and emperor the length of his reign was exactly stated. But for this same reason Pope Joan also, if she had originally had a place in his book, could not have been effaced, nor have been omitted from the copies which held fast to the arrangement of the original.

Pope Joan then does not occur in the eldest manuscripts of Martinus. She is wanting especially in those which have kept to the exact chronological method of the author. Nor is the opinion tenable, that Martinus brought her into the latest edition of his book prepared by himself. That theory is contradicted by manuscripts, which come down to the time of Nicolas III, and, nevertheless, contain no trace of Pope Joan. Echard  has already noticed several such manuscripts. The exquisite Aldersbach manuscript, now in the Royal Library at Munich, gives the same evidence. There are, however, manuscripts in which her history is written in the margin at the bottom of the sheet, or as a gloss at the side.  It was thence gradually, and one may add very violently, thrust in the text. This was done in various ways: either Benedict III, the successor of Leo, was struck out, and Pope Joan put in his place, as is the case in a Hamburg codex reaching down to the year 1302. Or she is placed, usually by some later hand, without any date being given, as an addition or mere legend in the vacant space left after Leo IV. Or, lastly merely in order to gain the necessary two years and a half for her reign the whole chronological reckoning of the author is thrown into confusion; either by assigning an earlier date than is correct to several of Leo’s predecessors, and that as far back as the year 800; or by giving to individual popes fewer years than belong to them. This eagerness to interpolate the female pope in the book at all hazards so to speak, without shrinking from the most arbitrary alterations in the chronology in order to attain this object, is certainly somewhat astonishing. Just the very circumstance which above all others conferred on Martin’s book a certain amount of value, viz. the painstaking and continuous chronological reckoning line by line, has been sacrificed in several manuscripts, merely in order to make the insertion of Pope Joan possible; or else only one year has been placed against the name of each pope, either in the margin or in the text, in order to conceal the disagreement between the insertion of Pope Joan and the chronological plan of the author.

It was in the period between 1278 and 1312 that the interpolation took place; for Tolomeo of Lucca, who completed his historical work in the year 1312, remarks that all the authorities which he had read placed Benedict III next after Leo IV; Martinus Polonus was the only one who put Johannes Anglicus in between. By this means two facts are established; first, the industrious collector Tolomeo knew of no writing in which a mention of Pope Joan was to be found, except the chronicle of Martinus; secondly, the copy of Martinus with which he was acquainted was one which had her already inserted, and that in the text. Had the account of her merely been written alongside in the margin, this would undoubtedly have aroused Tolomeo’s suspicions, and he would have noticed the fact in his own work.

Another main vehicle for circulating the myth about the papess was the chronicle Flores Temporum, which exists in numerous manuscripts under the names of Martinus Minorita, Herrmannus Januensis, and Herrmannus Gigas. It was printed by Eccard, and, in another form, by Menschen; and after that of  Martinus Polonus, was the most widely circulated of all the later chronicles. Unlike Martinus Polonus, however, it appears to have come into general use only in Germany. It reaches down to 1290, and is in the main not much more than a compilation from the chronicle of Martinus Polonus, as the author himself states. According to the conjecture of Eccard and others, Martinus Minorita is the original author, and Herrmannus Januensis or Gigas the continuer of the chronicle down to the year 1349. Pertz, on the other hand, is of opinion that what is printed under the name of Martinus Minorita is only a poor extract from the work of Herrmannus Gigas, who brought his chronicle down to the year 1290, and died in 1336.

The relation between the Minorite Martin and the Wilhelmite Herrmann of Genoa appears meanwhile to be this : that the latter has copied the Minorite, with  many omissions and additions, but without mentioning him. Martin the Penitentiary that is Martinus Polonus is given as the main authority. It was from him, then, beyond all doubt, that the story about Pope Joan passed (embellished with additions) into chronicles of considerably later date; for manuscripts in which it is wanting have not come within my knowledge.

The story of Pope Joan has also been inserted in the so-called Anastasius (the most ancient collection known of biographies of the popes), and in precisely the same form as that in which it exists in Martinus Polonus. The literal wording of the text docs not allow the possibility that the story really formed any part of the original text. The interpolation must have been made with the most foolish wantonness, or just as has been done in the Heidelberg manuscripts, by striking out Benedict III, and then inserting Joan in his place. In other copies she has been added by a later hand in the margin, at the side, or quite at the bottom of the page.

The most natural supposition, and the one which Gabler  also follows, seems then to be, that the papess passed from Martinus Polonus into the few, and very much later, manuscripts of Anastasius which contain it. Nevertheless, I am driven to the conjecture that the myth was in the first instance added at the end of some copy of the collection of biographies of the popes which bears the name of Anastasius. For it has long ago been remarked that the life of Benedict III in this collection is the work of a different author from that of the lives immediately preceding it, especially of the very detailed life of Leo IV. There must, therefore, beyond all doubt, have been copies which came to an end with Leo IV, whose biographer was obviously a contemporary. The notice of Pope Joan might then have been added at the end by a later hand, and from thence have passed into the manuscripts of Martinus Polonus.

One sees this from the catalogue of manuscripts which Vignoli gives at the beginning of his edition. The Cod. Vatic. 3764 reaches down to Hadrian II, the Cod. Vatic. 5869 only down to Gregory II; the Cod. 629 to Hadrian I; others to John VIII, Nicolas I, Leo III, and so forth. In Cod. 3762, which comes down to the year 1142, the fable of the papess is added in later and smaller handwriting underneath in the margin.

This conjecture, one must allow, is by no means easy to prove. But supposing it correct, we have then the simplest of all explanations for the interpolation of Pope Joan between Leo IV and Benedict III, where she certainly has not the slightest connection with the history of the time. Meanwhile, I find in Martinus himself reasons for this place being assigned to her, and the following two in particular. The first is a mere matter of chance, arising out of the mechanical arrangement; for Martinus did not know how to fill up the eight lines which he was obliged to devote to the eight years of Leo’s pontificate, so that the first lines of the page which contained the second half of the ninth century remained empty. Here, therefore, the interpolation could be managed without the slightest trouble. But there was a further reason in the nature of the story itself. For the extreme improbability that a woman should be promoted to the highest ecclesiastical office, and be chosen by all as pope, was explained in the myth by her great intellectual attainments. She surpassed everyone in Rome, so it was said, in learning. Naturally then, as soon as a definite historical place had to be assigned to her (the popular form of the myth had not troubled itself with fixed dates), a tolerably early period at any rate, one anterior to the time of Gregory VII had to be chosen for her. For this, however, they were obliged to fall back on a period in which there was only a single instance known of a man being elected to the papacy on account of his preeminent knowledge. Since Gregory the Great there had been no pope who was really very remarkable for learning. In the four centuries between John VI, 701, and Gregory VII, this very Leo IV is the only one whom Martinus notices in particular as a man who “divinarum scripturarum extitit ferventissimus scrutator”, one who already, in the monastery [of St. Martin] to which his parents had sent him for purposes of study, became remarkable for his learning no less than for his mode of life, and on this account also was unanimously  elected pope by the Romans after the death of Sergius. On that occasion, then, it was intellectual attainment which influenced the votes of the Romans; and therefore it might happen that a woman, whose sex was not known, could be chosen as pope by the Romans, because of her intellectual superiority. Now the interpolated Martinus speaks of Joan in much the same terms as of Leo; “in diversis scientiis ita profecit, ut nullus sibi par invenirctur”; and, “quum in urbe vita et scientia magnae opinionis esset, in papam concorditer eligitur”. And hence in Martinus Polonus, who speaks in this manner of no other  pope in that century, the place assigned to Pope Joan was that immediately after Leo IV, whom she resembled in this particular. And since every one took the work of Martinus as their authority, she retained this position.

It is at the stage when the myth was just beginning to gain circulation, and was still received with suspicion on many sides, that the passages on the subject in the Historical Mirror of Van Maerlant and in Tolomeo of Lucca come in. Maerlant’s Dutch chronicle is in verse, and is mainly taken from Vincent of Beauvais, but with additions from other sources. Maerlant says moreover (about the year 1283), “I do not feel clear or certain whether it is fable or fact; but in the chronicles of the popes it is not usually found”. So also a manuscript list of the popes down to John XXII. (13) : “Et in paucis chronicis invenitur”.

One of the first who took the story of Pope Joan from the interpolated Martinus Polonus was Geoffroi de Courlon, a Benedictine of the Abbey of St. Pierre le Vif at Sens, whose chronicle, a somewhat rough compilation, reaches down to 1295.

Next comes the Dominican Bernard Guidonis, in his unprinted Flores Chronicorum, and also (in the year 1311) in his now printed history  of the popes. He inserts Johannes Teutonicus (not Anglicus, therefore, according to him) natione Maguntinus, together with the whole fable about Pope Joan, keeping faithfully to his authority, Martinus Polonus.

About the same period another Dominican, Leo of Orvieto, contributed to the circulation of the fable, by receiving it into his history of the popes and emperors, which reached down to Clement V [1305]. In his case also Martinus Polonus is the source from which he draws in this particular, as also in his whole book.

Now follow in the first half of the fourteenth century the Dominican John of Paris, Siffrid of Meissen, Occam the Minorite (who turned the story of Pope Joan to account in his controversy with John XXII), the Greek Barlaam, the English Benedictine Ranulph Higden, the Augustine Amalrich Augerii, Boccaccio, and Petrarch.

A chronicle of the popes by Aimery of Peyrat, Abbot of Moissac, written in the year 1399, has Johannes Anglicus in the list of popes, with the remark: “Some say that this pope was a woman”.

The Dominican Jacobe de Acqui, who wrote about the year 1370, inserts the name without this remark, but with the extraordinary statement that this pontificate lasted nineteen years.

Of course people in general regarded the circumstance as to the last degree disgraceful to the Roman See, and, indeed, to the whole Church. The woman-pope had reigned for two years and a half, had performed a vast number of functions, all of which were now null and void; and, added to all this, there was the scandal of her giving birth to a child in the open street. It was scarcely possible to conceive anything more to the dishonor of the chair of the Apostle, or, indeed, of the whole of Christendom. What mockery must not this story excite among the Mohammedans!

As early as the close of the thirteenth, or beginning of the fourteenth century, Geoffroi de Courlon introduces the story with the heading Deceptio Ecclesice Romanes.

Maerlant  says sorrowfully :

“Alse die paves Leo was doot Ghesciede der Kerken grote scame“.

“Johanne la Papesse”, says Jean le Maire, in the year 1511, “fist un grand esclandre a la Papalitè”

All state that since that time the popes always avoid that street, so as not to look upon the scene of the scandal.

Now, when we consider that, according to the declaration of the Dominican Tolomeo of Lucca, down to the year 1312, the story was extant nowhere, except in certain copies of Martinus Polonus; that already innumerable lists of the popes, in their chronological order, were in existence, in none of which was there any trace of the female pope to be found, the eagerness, which suddenly meets us at the close of the thirteenth century, to make the fable pass muster as history, and to smuggle it into the manuscripts, is certainly very astonishing. The author of the Histoire Lit. de France has good reason for saying, “Nous ne saurions nous expliquer comment il se fait que ce soit precisement dans les rangs de cette fidele milice du saint-siege que se rencontrent les propagateurs les plus naifs, et peut-etre les inventeurs, d'une histoire si injurieuse a la papauté”

Undoubtedly the thing emanated principally from those otherwise most devoted servants of the Roman See, the Dominicans and the Minorites. It was certainly they, especially the former of the two, who were the first to multiply the copies of Martinus Polonus to such an extent, and thus spread the fable everywhere. The time at which this took place meanwhile solves the enigma. It was in the reign of Boniface VIII, who was not favorably disposed to the two orders, and whose whole policy they abhorred. We see this in the unfavorable judgments which the Dominican historians formed respecting him, and in the attitude which they assumed at the outbreak of the strife between him and Philip the Fair. We notice that from this time, which was in general a crisis for the waning power of the popes, historians among the monastic orders mention and describe with a sort of relish scandals in the history of the popes.

In the fifteenth century scarcely a doubt is suggested. Quite at the beginning of the century the bust of Pope Joan was placed in the cathedral at Sienna along with the busts of the other popes, and no one took offence at it. The church of Sienna in the time that followed gave three popes to the Roman See, Pius II, Pius III, and Marcellus II. Not one of them ever thought of having the scandal removed. It was not till two centuries later, that, at the pressing demand of pope Clement VIII, 1592-1605, Joan was metamorphosed into pope Zacharias. When Huss at the council of Constance supported his doctrine by appealing to the case of Agnes, who became Pope Joan, he met with no contradiction from either side. Even the Chancellor Gerson himself turned to account the circumstance of the woman-pope as a proof that the Church could err  in matters of fact. On the other hand the Minorite Johann de Rocha, in a treatise written at the Council of Constance, uses the case of Johannes Maguntinus to show how dangerous it is to make the duty of obedience to the Church depend upon the personal character of the pope.

Heinrich Korner, a Dominican of Lubeck, 1402 to 1437, not only himself received the story about the woman-pope in its usual form into his chronicle, but stated in addition that his predecessor, the Dominican Henry of Herford (about 1350), whom he had often copied, had purposely concealed the circumstance, in order that the laity might not be scandalized by reading that such an error had taken place in the Church, which assuredly, as the clergy taught, was guided by the Holy Spirit.

The matter was now generally set forth as an indubitable fact, and the scholastic theologians endeavored to accommodate themselves to it, and to arrange their church system and the position of the popes in the Church in accordance with it. Eneas Sylvius, afterwards pope Pius II, had however replied to the Taborites, that the story was nevertheless not certain. But his contemporary, the great upholder of papal despotism, cardinal Torrecremata, accepts it as notorious, that a woman was once regarded by all Catholics as pope, and thence draws the following conclusion: that, whereas God had allowed this to happen, without the whole constitution of the Church being thrown into confusion, so it might also come to pass, that a heretic or an infidel should be recognized as pope; and, in comparison with the fact of a female pope, that would be the smaller difficulty of the two.

St. Antoninus, belonging, like Torrecremata, to the middle of the fifteenth century, and like him a Dominican, avails himself of the Apostle’s words respecting the inscrutability of the divine counsels in connection with the supposed fact of a female pope, and declares that the Church was even then not without a Head, namely Christ, but that bishops and priests ordained by the woman must certainly be re-ordained.

The Dominican order, whose members chiefly contributed to spread the fable everywhere, possessed in their strict organization and their numerous libraries the means of discovering the truth. The General of the order had merely to command that the copies of Martinus Polonus, and the more ancient lists of the popes, of which there were quantities in existence in the monasteries of the order, should once for all be examined and compared together. But people preferred to believe what was most incredible and most monstrous. Not one of these men, of course, had ever seen, or heard, that a woman had for years been public teacher, priest, and bishop, without being detected, or that the birth of a child had ever taken place in the public street. But that in Rome these two things once took place together, in order to disgrace the papal dignity this people believed with readiness.

Martin le Franc, provost of Lausanne, about 1450, and secretary to the popes Felix V and Nicholas V, in his great French poem, Le Champion des Dames, celebrated Pope Joan at length. First we have his astonishment, that such a thing should have been permitted to take place.

“Comment endura Dieu, comment

Que femme ribaulde et prestresse

Eut l'Eglise en gouvernement?”

It would have been no wonder had God come down to judgment, when a woman ruled the world. But now the defender steps forward and makes apology

“Or laissons les péchés, disans,

Qu'elle etoit clergesse lettrée,

Quand devant les plus souffisants

De Rome eut Tissue et l'entrée.

Encore te peut etre montrée

Mainte Preface que dicta,

Bien et saintement accoustrée

Ou en la foy point n'hésita.”

She had, therefore, composed many quite orthodox prefaces for the mass.

It was not until the second half of the fifteenth century that the story came into the hands of the Greeks. Welcome as the occurrence of such a thing would have been to a Cerularius and like-minded opponents of the papal chair in Constantinople, no one had as yet mentioned it, until Chalcocondylas, in the history of his time, in which he describes the mode of electing a pope, mentions also the fiction of an examination as to sex, and apropos of that relates the catastrophe of Pope Joan; an occurrence which, as he remarks, could only have taken place in the West, where the clergy do not allow their beard to grow. It is in him that we get the outrageous feature added to the story, that the child was born just as the woman was celebrating High Mass, and was seen by the assembled congregation.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, says the Roman writer Cancellieri, the romance about Pope Joan circulated widely in all chronicles which were written and copied in Italy, and even under the very eyes of Rome. Thus it appears in print in Ricobaldo’s Italian chronicle of the popes, which Filippo de Lignamine dedicated to pope Sixtus IV in 1474.

So also in the history of the popes by the Venetian priest Stella. For a long time, and even as late as 1548 and 1550, it found a place in numerous Roman editions of the Mirabilia Urbis Roma, which was a sort of guide for pilgrims and strangers.

Felix Hemmerlin, Trithemius, Nauclerus, Albert Krantz, Coccius Sabellicus, Raphael of Volterra, Joh. Fr. Pico di Mirandola, the Augustine Foresti of Bergamo, Cardinal Domenico Jacobazzi, Hadrian of Utrecht, afterwards pope Hadrian VI, Germans, French, Italians, Spaniards, all appeal to the story, and interweave it with their theological disquisitions; or, like Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, rejoice that the tenets of the canonists about the inerrancy of the Church had come to such glaring shame in the deception of the woman-pope, and that this woman, in the two years and a half of her reign, had ordained priests and bishops, administered sacraments, and performed all the other functions of a pope; and that all this had, nevertheless, remained as valid in the Church. Even John, Bishop of Chiemsee, introduces Agnes and her catastrophe as a proof that the popes were sometimes under the influence of evil spirits. Platina, who thought the story rather suspicious, nevertheless would not omit it from his history of the popes (about 1460), because nearly every one maintained its truth. Aventin in Germany, and Onufrio Panvinio in Italy, were the first to shake the general infatuation. But still in the year 1575 the Minorite Rioche, in his chronicle, opposes the certainty of the collected Church to the hesitating statements of Platina and Carranza.

Analysis of the Story

In order to arrive at the causes of the origin and development of the myth, let us now proceed to dissect it. Originally the woman-pope was nameless. The first accounts of her, in Stephen de Bourbon, and in the Compilatio Chronologica in Pistorius' collection, know nothing as yet of a Joan. In the latter authority we read: “fuit et alius pseudo papa, cujus nomen et anni ignorantur, nam mulier erat”. Her own name was not discovered till somewhat late about the end of the fourteenth century. She was called Agnes, under which name she was a very important and useful personage, especially with John Huss; or Gilberta,  as others would have it. For the pope a name was found at an early stage; people took the most common one John. There had already been seven of this name before 855, and in the period during which the myth was spreading, the number reached one and twenty.

Much the same thing happened as to the time at which she was supposed to have lived. The myth while still in its popular form of course did not touch upon this question. But the first authority who relates it at once gives it a date also. The event, says Stephen de Bourbon, took place about the year 1100. He places it therefore (and this is very remarkable) at the very time in which we have the first mention of the use of the pierced chair at the enthronement of the new pope. How people in general came afterwards to assign the year 855 as her date, has been already explained.

Stephen de Bourbon knows nothing up to his time of England, Mayence, or Athens. The woman is as yet no great scholar or public teacher, but only a clever scribe or secretary (artem notandi edocta), who thus becomes the notary of the Curia, then cardinal, and then pope. A century later, in Amalricus Augerii all this is fantastically enlarged upon and coloured. At Athens she becomes by careful study a very subtle reasoner. While there she hears of the condition and fame of the city of Rome, goes thither and becomes, not a notary, as Stephen says, but a professor, attracts many and noble pupils, lives at the same time in the greatest honour, is celebrated everywhere for her mode of life no less than for her learning, and hence is unanimously elected pope. She continued some time longer in her honourable and pious mode of life ; but later on, too much good living made her voluptuous, she yielded to the temptations of the Evil One, and was seduced by one of her confidants.

Particularly astonishing is the disagreement as to the way in which the catastrophe took place. Three or four versions of it exist. According to the first, as we find it in Stephen de Bourbon, it appears that she was with child at the time of her election to the papacy, and the denouement took place during the procession as she was going up to the Lateran palace. The Roman tribunal condemned her at once to be tied by the feet to the feet of a horse, and dragged out of the city, whereupon the populace stoned her to death. In this version of the story, however, Stephen stands quite alone. The usual narrative, as it has passed from the interpolated Martinus Polonus into later authors, makes her, after a quiet reign of more than two years, give birth to a child in the street during a procession, die at once, and forthwith be buried on the very spot. Boccaccio is quite different from this again. According to him all takes place tolerably quietly; there is no death, the enthroned priestess merely sheds a few tears, and then retires into private life. “Ex apice pontificatus dejecta se in misellam evasisse mulierculam querebatur”. And again: “A patribus in tenebras exteriores abjecta cum fletu misella abiit”.  

The attitude which Boccaccio assumed with regard to the episode of the female pope, which was just the kind of thing to please a man of his turn of mind, is particularly remarkable. In his Zibaldone, which he wrote about the year 1350, he included a short chronicle of the popes, which according to his own confession, was entirely borrowed from the Chronica Martiniana. In this the female pope is not mentioned; without doubt because he did not find her in his copy of Martinus Polonus. On the other hand, he has inserted her in two later writings, De casibus virorum et feminarum illustrium, and De mulicribus claris, and has pictured the whole with the enjoyment which was to be expected from the author of the Decamerone. His narrative, however, differs essentially from the usual version according to Martinus; and seeing that it agrees with no other known version, it would appear that Boccaccio has taken it directly from popular tradition (where it would naturally assume very various forms), and worked it up. He knows the length of her pontificate with the greatest exactitude: two years, seven months, and a day or two. Her original name he does not know: “Quod proprium fuerit nomen vix cognitum est. Esto sunt, qui dicant fuisse Gilibertam”.

These fourteenth century witnesses are of no very great importance, for they one and all of them merely copied the interpolated passage in Martinus Polonus, often with scarcely the alteration of a word. On the other hand the recently published Eulogium Historiarum of a monk of Malmesbury, of the year 1366, has a peculiar form of the story to be found nowhere else, although the author in other places borrows freely from Martinus Polonus. The girl is born in Mayence, and sent by her parents to male teachers to receive instruction in the sciences. With one of these, who was a very learned man, she falls in love, and goes with him in man's attire to Rome. Here, because she surpassed every one in knowledge, she was made cardinal by pope Leo. When, as pope, she gives birth to a child during the procession, she is merely deposed. This version, therefore, would come nearest to the description given by Boccaccio. It knows nothing of the journey to Athens.

The catastrophe appears somewhat further spun out in a manuscript chronicle of the abbots of Kempten. There we are told that “the Evil Spirit came to this Pope John, who was a woman, and afterwards was with child, and said : Thou pope, who wouldest be a Father with the other Fathers here, thou shalt show publicly when thou bringest forth that thou art a woman-pope; therefore will I take thee body and soul to myself and to my company”.

Another less severe and uncompromising finale was however attempted. By a revelation or an angel she was allowed to choose, whether she would suffer shame on earth or eternal damnation hereafter. She chose the former, and the birth of her child and her own death in the open street was the consequence.

The story of the papess once believed, many other fables attached themselves to it. It was through the special aid of the devil, we are told, that she rose to the dignity of pope, and thereupon wrote a book on necromancy. Formerly there was a greater number of Prefaces in the missal. The reduction in number which took place afterwards with regard to those whose author and purpose were unknown, was explained by the supposition, that Pope Joan had composed those which were struck out.

Now, how is the first origin of the myth to be explained ? Four circumstances have contributed to the production and elaboration of the fable: 1. The use of a pierced seat at the institution of a newly elected pope. 2. A stone with an inscription on it, which people supposed to be a tombstone. 3. A statue found on the same spot, in long robes, which were supposed to be those of a woman. 4. The custom of making a circuit in processions, whereby a street which was directly in the way was avoided.

In one Street in Rome stood two objects, which were very naturally supposed to be connected, a statue with the figure of a child or small boy, and a monumental stone with an inscription. In addition to this came the circumstance, that solemn and state processions made a circuit round this street. The statue is said to have had masculine rather than feminine features; but certain information on this point is wanting, for Sixtus V had it removed. The figure carried a palm-branch, and was supposed to represent a priest with a serving boy, or some heathen divinity. But the long robes and the addition of the figure of the boy to the group, created a notion among the people that it was a mother with her child. The inscription was then made use of to explain the statue, and the statue to explain the inscription, the pierced chair and the avoiding of the street served to confirm the explanation. This piece of sculpture was not (as has been maintained) first mentioned by Dietrich von Niem in the fifteenth century; but Maerlant says, as early as 1283, i, e., at the time of the first circulation of the myth :

En daer leget soe, als wyt lesen

Noch also up ten Steen ghchouwen,

Dat men ane daer mag scouwen.

The myth now sought, and soon found, further circumstances with which to connect itself. The enigmatical inscription on a monumental stone which stood on the spot, and which hitherto no one had been able to interpret, became all at once clear to the Romans. It referred to the female pope and the catastrophe of the denouement.

The stone was set up by one of those priests of Mithras who bore the title “Pater Patrum”, apparently as a memorial of some specially solemn sacrifice; for the worship of Mithras from the third century of the Christian era onwards was a very favourite one in Rome and very prevalent, until in the year 378 the worship was forbidden and the grotto of Mithras destroyed.

The earliest notice of the stone with the inscription, which was supposed to be the tombstone of the female pope, is to be found in Stephen de Bourbon. According to him the inscription ran thus,

Parce Pater Patrum papissae prodere partum

Now without doubt it did not stand so in as many words. But “Pap.” or “Parc. Pater Patrum” followed by “P. P. P.” was certainly the reading; an abbreviation for “propria pecunia posuit”

“Pater Patrum” appears constantly on monuments as the title of a priest of the Mithras mysteries.

In this case, probably, the name of the priest of Mithras was Papirius.

The remaining letters may have become illegible.

The problem therefore now was to interpret the three “P's”.

One reading was,

Farce Pater Patrum papissas prodere partum;

or as others supposed,

Papa Pater Patrum papissas pandito partum;

or, according to another explanation still better,

Papa Pater Patrum peperit papissa papellum.

Thus was the riddle of the inscription solved, and the myth confirmed in connection with the statue and the pierced chair. The stone had turned out to be the tombstone of the unhappy Pope Joan.

The verse, however, especially in its first and second form, was altogether a most extraordinary one for an epitaph. There must be something more to account for it, and, accordingly, the myth was soon enlarged. It was reported that Satan, who of course knew the secret of the papess, had addressed her in the words of the verse in a full consistory. That, however, did not seem a very satisfactory explanation; and so the supposed epitaph was altered and enlarged, and the story at last ran thus: that the papess, while exorcising a man possessed by a devil, had asked him when the unclean spirit that dwelt in him would leave him, and it had mockingly answered

Papa Pater Patrum papissse pandito partum,

Et tibi nunc edam (or dicam) de corpore quando recedam.

Other instances have occurred of an unintelligible inscription being explained by a story being attached to it. Thus the chronicles, since the time of Beda, declare that an inscription had been found at Rome with the six letters :

R. R. R. F. F. F.

According to other instances of abbreviations in inscriptions, this can at any rate mean

Ruderibus rejectis Rufus Festus fieri fecit.

But people constructed out of it the prophecy of an ancient Sibyl respecting the destruction of Rome, and interpreted

Roma Ruet Romuli Ferro Flammaque Fameque.

While the inscription on the stone occupied more especially the clergy and the more educated among the laity, and stimulated them to attempt explanations of it, the imaginative powers of the populace were chiefly excited by the seat which stood in a public place, and was always to be seen by everyone, on which every newly-elected pope, in accordance with traditional custom, took his seat.

From the time of Paschal II in the year 1099, we find mention of the custom that, at the solemn procession to the Lateran palace, the new pope should sit down on two ancient pierced seats made of stone. They were called porphyreticae because the stone of which they were made was of a bright red kind. They dated from the times of ancient Rome, and had formerly, it appears, stood in one of the public baths; and had thence come into the oratory of S. Sylvester near the Lateran. Here then it was usual for the pope first to sit on the right-hand seat, while a girdle from which hung seven keys and seven seals was put round him. At the same time a staff was placed in his hand, which he then, sitting on the left-hand seat, placed along with the keys in the hands of the prior of St. Lawrence. Hereupon another ornamented garb, made after the pattern of the Jewish ephod, was placed on him. This sitting down was meant to symbolize taking possession; for Pandulf goes on to say: “per cetera Palatii loca solis Pontificibus destinata, jam dominus vel sedens vel transiens electionis modum implevit”.

It was therefore a mere matter of accident that these stone seats were pierced. They had been selected on account of their antique form and the beautiful colour of the stone. Every stranger who visited Rome could not fail to be struck with their unusual shape. That they had formerly been intended to be used in a bath had passed out of every one's knowledge; and the idea of such a use would be one of the last to occur to people in the middle ages. They were aware that the new pope sat, and on this occasion only in his whole life, on this scat, and this was the only use to which the seat was ever put. The symbolical meaning of the act and of the ceremonies connected with it was unknown and foreign to the popular mind. It accordingly invented an explanation of its own, just such a one as popular fancy is wont to give. The seat is hollow and pierced, they said, because they wanted to make sure that the pope was a man. The further question, what need there was to make sure of this, produced the explanation: because, in one instance certainly, a woman was made pope. Here at once a field was opened for the development of a myth. The deception, the catastrophe of the discovery; all that was forthwith sketched out in popular talk. Myth delights in the most glaring contrasts. Hence we have the highest sacerdotal office, and together with it its most shameful prostitution by sudden travail during a solemn procession, followed by childbirth in the open street. This done, the woman-pope has fulfilled her mission. The myth accordingly at once withdraws her from the scene. She dies in childbirth on the spot; or, according to an older version, is stoned to death by the enraged populace.

The story that the newly-elected pope sat down on the pierced scat in order to give a proof of his sex is first found in the Visions of the Dominican, Robert d'Usez, who died in Metz in the year 1296. He relates that in the year 1291, while he was staying at Orange, he was taken in the spirit to Rome, to the Lateran palace, and placed before the porphyry seat, “ubi dicitur probari papa an sit homo”. After him Jacobo d'Agnolo di Scarperia in the year 1405 declares respecting it, in a letter to the celebrated Greek, Emanuel Chrysoloras, in which he describes the enthronization of Gregory XII as an eye-witness, that it is a senseless popular fable. It is consequently not correct to say, what has been frequently maintained, that the English writer, William Brevin, about 1470, was the first to make mention of the supposed investigation as to the sex of the pope.

Of later witnesses it is worth mentioning, that the Swede Lawrence Banck, who minutely described the solemnities which accompanied the elevation of Innocent X to the papacy [Sept. 1644], declares, with all earnestness, that it certainly was the case, that an investigation into the sex of the pope was the object of the ceremony. At that time, however, the custom of sitting on the two stone seats, along with several other ceremonies, had long since disappeared, namely, since the death of Leo X. And, moreover, Banck does not state that he himself had seen the ceremony, but only that he had often seen the scat, and by way of proof that it took place, and with this particular object, appeals to writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Cancellieri, therefore, had good reason for expressing astonishment at the shamelessness of a man, who speaks on other things as an eye-witness, and who had only to inquire of any educated Roman to learn that the custom in question had been given up for more than a hundred years.

But the strongest case of all is that of Giampetro Valeriano Bolzani, one of the literary courtiers of Leo X, and loaded with benefices, according to the immoral custom of the time. This man, in a speech addressed to cardinal Hippolytus dei Medici, printed at Rome with papal privilege, did not scruple to decorate the fiction about the investigation into the sex of each newly-elected pope with new and fabulous circumstances. The ceremony takes places, he declares, quite openly in the gallery of the Lateran church before the eyes of the assembled multitude, and is then most unnecessarily proclaimed by one of the clergy and entered in the register. Thus the wanton frivolity of Italian literati, and the stupid indifference of ecclesiastical dignitaries, worked together to spread this delusion, damaging as it was to the otherwise jealously guarded authority of the papal see, right through the whole mass of the populace. At the same time one could hardly have a more striking instance of the irresistible power which a universally-circulated story exercises over men, even over those of superior intellect. Anyone could learn without trouble from a cardinal, or from one of the clergy taking part in the ceremony, what really took place there. But people never asked, or else imagined that the answer meant no more than a refusal to vouch for the fact. They heard this examination of the newly-elected pope spoken of everywhere, in the streets and in private houses, as a notorious fact.

Did, then, the meaning assigned to the pierced seat influence the explanation of the inscription and of the statue; or did, contrariwise, these two objects give origin to the myth about the ceremonies connected with the seat? That point it is now, of course, out of our power to determine. We can only see that the explanation of the three objects is as old as the myth about the woman-pope.

A further confirmation of the whole was soon found in a circumstance of no importance in itself, and for which a perfectly natural explanation was ready at hand. It was remarked that the popes in processions between the Lateran and the Vatican did not enter a street which lay in the way, but made a circuit through other streets. The reason was simply the narrowness of the street. But in Rome, where the papess was already haunting the imagination of the masses, it was now discovered that this was done to remind men how the woman had given birth to a child as she was going through this street, and to express horror at the catastrophe which had taken place just at that spot. In the first version of the fable, as we find it in the interpolated Martinus Polonus, it is said: creditur omnino a quibusdam, quod ob detestationcm facti hoc faciat. With later writers the thing is thoroughly established as a notorious fact.

It may now be worthwhile to show by a few examples, how easily a popular myth, or a mythical explanation, may be called into existence by a circumstance, so soon as anything is perceived in it, which seems in the eyes of the people to be astonishing, or which excites their imagination.

The bigamy of the Count of Gleichen plays an important part in our literature, and is still believed to be true by numberless people. A count of Gleichen is said to have gone to Palestine in the year 1227, in company with the Landgrave of Thuringia, and there to have been captured by the Saracens and thrown into prison. Through the daughter of the Sultan he obtained his liberty; and the story goes that, although his wife was living, he obtained a dispensation from pope Gregory IX in the year 1240 or 1241, and married the princess; and the three lived together in undisturbed peace for many years afterwards. It is a well-known fact that the very bed itself (an unusually broad one) of the count and his two wives, was shown for a long time afterwards.

This story is told for the first time in the year 1584, that is to say, three centuries and a half later. But from that time onwards it is related in numerous writings, and in the next century became a matter of popular belief, so that henceforth it was printed in all histories of Thuringia, and is to be found in particular in Jovius, Sagittarius, Orlearius, Packenstein. etc. In this case, also, it was a tombstone which gave occasion to the story. On it was represented a knight with two female figures, one of whom had a peculiar head dress decorated with a star. No sooner had the myth which fastened on to this figure begun to weave its web, than relics and signs began to multiply. Not only was the bedstead shown, but a jewel which the pope had presented to the Turkish princess, and which she wore in her turban ; a “Turk's road”, was pointed out, leading to the castle, and a “Turk's room” within it. And not a word about all this until the seventeenth century. In earlier times no one had ever heard a syllable about the story or the relics. l

Another instance is afforded by the Püstrich at Sondershausen, a bronze figure, hollow inside, with an opening in the head. It was found in the year 1550, in a subterranean chapel of the castle of Rothenburg, near Nordhausen, and was brought to Sondershausen in the year 1576, where it still exists in the cabinet of curiosities. Thirty or forty years had scarcely passed before a legend had grown up, which quite harmonized with a time immediately succeeding the great religious contest of the Reformation, and with a country in which the old religion was vanquished. The Püstrich was said to have stood in a niche in a pilgrimage church, and by monkish jugglery to have been filled with water, and made to vomit flames of fire, in order to terrify the people, and induce them to make large offerings. Frederick Succus, preacher in the cathedral of Magdeburg, from 1567 to 1576, relates all this, with many details as to the way in which the deception was managed, adding the remark, “that no one could do the like nowadays, so as to make the image vomit flames, and that many thought it was perhaps brought about by magic and witchcraft”."

Again, everyone knows the story of Archbishop Hatto, of Mayence, who had a strong tower built in the middle of the Rhine, in order to protect himself from the mice; but in spite of that was devoured by them. This event, which would have fallen within the year 970, had it happened at all, is mentioned for the first time at the beginning of the fourteenth century, in Siffrid's chronicle. Before that there is not a trace of it. The Mausethurm, or Muusthurm  (that is, Arsenal), as Bodmann explains, was not built till the beginning of the thirteenth century. Its name with the people slipped from Muusthurm to Mausethurm, and thus, according to all appearance, gave rise to the whole story. In all that is historically known of Hatto II there is not a feature with which the legend could connect itself. The story of a prince or great man, who tried to save himself from the pursuit of mice in a tower surrounded by water, is to be found in several other places. It appears in the mountains of Bavaria; it occurs among the myths of primitive Polish history. In the latter case King Popiel, his wife, and two sons, are followed and killed by mice in a tower in the Goplosee, which to this day bears the name of Mouse-tower. Wherever a tower on an island was to be seen, the object of which could no longer be explained, there sprang up the story of the blood-thirsty mice.

If an unusual hollow was remarked in a stone, a hole of extraordinary shape, anything which the imagination could take for the impress of a hand or a foot, there at once a myth found lodgment. A stone in the wall of a church at Schlottau in Saxony, which is thought to look like the face of a monk without ever having been carved by the hand of man, has given occasion to a legend of attempted sacrilege, and marvelous punishment.

On the Riesenthor (Giant-Porch) of St. Stephen's Cathedral at Vienna, a youth is introduced in the carving of the upper part, who appears to rest a wounded foot on the other knee. A legend has been spun out of that. The architect, Pilgram, is said to have thrown his pupil, Puchsprunn, from the scaffolding, out of jealousy, because the execution of the second tower had been transferred to the latter while still under Pilgram.

The fable of the papess belongs to the local myths of Rome, of which a whole cycle existed in the Middle Ages. Hence it may be worthwhile to compare the birth of such a myth with a Roman example. The legend about the origin of the house of Colonna, whose power and greatness afforded material for the imagination of the people, is so far similar in its origin to that about Pope Joan, as it was a piece of sculpture, viz., the arms of the house with a column, which the legend endeavored to explain. Just as the lozenge of Saxony, the wheel of Mayence, and the virgin of the Osnabruck arms, have called forth legends of their own to explain them.

A smith in Rome notices that his cow, every day, goes of her own accord in the same direction. He follows her, creeps after her through a narrow opening, and finds a meadow with a building in it. In the building stands a stone column, and on the top of it a brazen vessel full of money. He is about to take some of the money, when a voice calls out to him, “It is not thine; take three denarii, and thou wilt find on the Forum to whom the money belongs”. The smith docs so, and flings the three pieces of money to three different parts of the Forum. A poor neglected lad finds them all three, becomes the smith’s son-in-law, buys great possessions with the money on the column, and so founds the house of Colonna.

This, perhaps, is sufficient illustration of the way in which the legend of Pope Joan arose. Two circumstances, however, require special discussion, the statements that the woman came from Mayence, and that she had studied in Athens.

The first mention that we find respecting the original home of the female pope, namely, in the passage interpolated into Martinus Polonus, combines two contradictory statements. It makes her an Englishwoman, and, at the same time, a native of Mayence: “Johannes Anglus, natione Moguntinus”. Probably two stories were extant, of which one made the impostor come from the British Isles, the other from Germany. The reason for one story making her a native of England may have been this. It was a common thing for Englishwomen to go on pilgrimages to Rome: we find St. Boniface even in his day complaining of the number of them, and their dubious character. Or it may have been that the birth, and first spreading of the myth, fell just within that long period of the violent struggle between Innocent III and king John, while England was accounted in Rome as the power which above all others was hostile to the Roman see. For, from the very beginning, the fictitious event was considered as a deep disgrace, a heavy blow struck at the authority of the Roman see; and the myth expressed that by making a country which was considered as hostile to Rome, to be the home of the papess, a woman-pope. In like manner the mythical king Popiel, who was devoured by mice, on account of the wrong done to his father's brothers, is represented in the Polish myth as having married the daughter of a German prince, in order that the guilt of instigating him to the crime might fall on a woman of a foreign nation, and one always hostile to the Slaves.

It is not difficult to explain how the other version of the story, which became the prevalent one, came to assign Mayence as the native place of the papess.

The rise of the myth falls into the period of the great contest between the papacy and the empire, a time when the Germans often appeared in arms before Rome, and in Rome broke down the walls of the city, took the popes prisoners, or compelled them to take to flight. “Omne malum ab Aquilone”, was the feeling at that time in Rome. Germany had then no special capital; no recognized royal or imperial place of residence. No city but Mayence could be called the most important city in the realm. It was the seat of the first prince of the empire, and the centre of government. “Moguntia, ubi maxima vis regni esse noscitur”, says Otto of Freysingen. In the Ligurinus of the Pseudo-Gunther, it is said of Mayence : “Pene fuit toto sedes notissima regno”.

In the cycle of myths which cluster round Charlemagne, and which Italy also appropriated (e.g. in the Reali di Francia, which was extant as early as the fourteenth century, and in other productions belonging to the same cycle of myths), Roman aversion to the German metropolis, Mayence, is glaringly prominent. Mayence is the seat and home of the malicious scheme of treachery against Charles the Great and his house. Ganelo, the arch-traitor, is count of Mayence. All his party, and his associates in treachery, are called “Maganzesi”. They and Ganelo, or the men of Mayence, represent the treacherous usurpation of the empire by the Germans, in violation of the birthright of Rome.

So again in Pulci’s Morgante, and in Ariosto’s Cinque Canti or Ganeloni. The poem, Doolin of Mayence, is, to a certain extent, a German rejoinder to the polemics of Rome, as shown in the Carolingian myths. Here Doolin, son of Guido, count of Mayence, steps forward as the rival of Charlemagne, first fights with him, then after an indecisive battle is reconciled to him, with him goes to Vauclere, the city of Aubigeant (Wittekind), king of Saxony, marries Flandrine, the daughter of the latter, and ends by joining with Charles in the subjugation of Saxony.

Ganelo of Mayence, the treacherous founder of the first German kingdom by separation from the West Frank kingdom, is supplemented in the Italian myth (which thus represents the great contest and opposition between Guelf and Ghibelline) by another native of Mayence, Ghibello. The story is to be found in Bogardo's Italian version of the Pomarium of Riccobaldo of Ferrara. King Conrad II (it is Conrad III who is meant) nominates Gibello Maguntino to be administrator of the kingdom in Lombardy in opposition to Welfo, whom the Church had set up as regent of Lombardy. Gibello is of noble but poor family, had studied for awhile in Italy, acquires then great eminence in his native city, Mayence, becomes chancellor of Bohemia, but is publicly convicted of “baratteria”, i.e., of political fraud or treason. He and Welfo now have a contest together, which ends in Gibello dying at Bergamo, and Welfo at Milan. Gibello of Maganza is, as one sees, a repetition of Gano or Ganelo of Maganza. But it is also evident why Johannes or Johanna must be made to come from Mayence, and why “Maguntinus” or “Magantinus” must be called “Margantinus”

In later times the story, now romancing with an object, endeavored to harmonize the two statements, that the female pope was "”Anglicus”, and also “natione Maguntinus”. The parents of Joan were made to migrate from England to Mayence; or she was called “Anglicus”, it was said, because an English monk in Fulda had been her paramour.  

In Germany, however, people began now to be ashamed of the German origin of Pope Joan. She was thrown in the teeth of the Germans, we are told in the chronicle of the bishops of Verden, because she is said to have come from Mayence. Indeed some went so far as to say that this circumstance of the German woman-pope was the reason why no more Germans were elected popes, as Werner Rolevink mentions, adding at the same time that this was not the true reason. In order to conceal the circumstance, we find in the German manuscripts of Martinus Polonus “Margantinus” constantly instead of “Magantinus”; and the Compilatio Chronica in Leibnitz  knows only of Johannes Anglicus. This feeling that the nationality of the papess was a thing of which Germany must be ashamed even produced a new romance, the object of which was manifestly nothing else than to transfer the home of the female pope and her paramour from Germany to Greece.

The other feature in the myth, that the woman studied in Athens, and then came and turned her knowledge to account in Rome as a teacher of great repute, is thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of mediaeval legends. As a matter of fact, no one for a thousand years had gone from the West to Athens for purposes of study; for the very best of reasons, because there was nothing more to be found there. But that was no obstacle to the myth, according to which Athens in ancient times (that means perhaps before the rise of the University of Paris) was accounted as the one great scat of education and learning. For that there was, and ought to be, only one “Studium”, just as there was, and ought to be, only one Empire and one Popedom, was the prevailing sentiment of that age. “The Church has need of three powers or institutions”, we read in the Chronica Jordanis, “the Priesthood, the Empire, and the University. And as the Priesthood has only one seat, namely Rome, so the University has and needs only one seat, namely Paris. Of the three leading nations each possesses one of these institutions. The Romans or Italians have the Priesthood, the Germans have the Empire, and the French have the University”.

This University was originally in Athens, thence it was transported to Rome, and from Rome Charlemagne (or his son) transplanted it to Paris. The very year of this transfer was stated. Thus we find in the Chronicon Tielense, “Anno D. 830, Romanum studium, quod prius Athenis exstitit, est translatum Parisios”.

Hence in ancient times, according to the prevalent notion, the University was at Athens; and whoever would rise to great eminence in the sphere of knowledge must go there. There were only two ways in which a foreign adventurer could attain to the highest office in the Church piety, or learning. The legend could not make the girl from Mayence become eminent through piety; this would not agree with her subsequent seduction and the birth of the child in the open street. Therefore it was through her learning that she won for herself universal admiration, and, at the election to the papacy, a unanimous vote. And this learning she could only have attained in Athens. For the University, as Amalricus Augerii says, was at that time in Greece.

APPENDIX

THE following additional particulars about the fable of Pope Joan, gathered mainly from Baring-Gould’s Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, the notes to Soames’s edition of Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History, and the article Papesse in Peter Bayle’s Dictionnaire, will be of interest to those who care to pursue the subject further.

It is greatly to the discredit of Mosheim that he should write as follows of this monstrous story :

“Between Leo IV, who died A.D. 855, and Benedict III, a woman, who concealed her sex and assumed the name of John, it is said, opened her way to the pontifical throne by her learning and genius, and governed the Church for a time. She is commonly called the Papess Joanna. During the five subsequent centuries the witnesses to this extraordinary event are without number; nor did any one, prior to the Reformation by Luther, regard the thing as either incredible, or disgraceful to the Church. But in the seventeenth century, learned men, not only among the Roman Catholics, but others also, exerted all the powers of their ingenuity both to invalidate the testimony on which the truth of the story rests and to confute it by an accurate computation of dates. There are still, however, very learned men who, while they concede that much falsehood is mixed with the truth, maintain that the controversy is not wholly settled. Something must necessarily have taken place at Rome to give rise to this most uniform report of so many ages; but even yet it is not clear what that something was”. Book III., part 2, chap, 2., 4.

 One can hardly doubt that it was Protestant prejudice which made Mosheim “wish to believe” (as Gibbon says of a dubious story which pleases him) that the myth of Pope Joan might be true. It matters little to Protestants, as Bayle remarks, whether the Papess existed or not; it matters much that they should not give a handle to people to regard them comme des gens opiniatres, et qui ne veulent jamais demordre des opinions precomçues. Moshcim says, “During the five subsequent centuries the witnesses to this extraordinary event are without number”; he omits to add that they occur in the last of the five centuries. For more than 350 years after the death of Leo IV there is absolute silence about the Papess. Nor is it true that “no one priorto Luther’s time regarded the thing as incredible or disgraceful to the Church”. Most people regarded it as a grievous scandal, and some doubted the fact. Platina, who wrote before Luther was born, after telling the story, says,  “haec quae dixi, vulgo feruntur, incertis tamen et obscuris auctoribus; quae ideo ponere breviter et nude institui, ne obstinate et pertinaciter omisisse videar, quod fere omnes affirmant”, Lives of the Popes, John VII.

It is almost slaying the dead to argue against the Story of Pope Joan; but it is worthwhile to give a specimen of Bayle’s mode of reasoning. Is it conceivable that five centuries hence there will not be a single historian extant of the sixteenth or seventeenth century who mentions the abdication of Charles V, or the assassinations of Henry III and IV of France; but that the earliest mention of these great events will be in some “miserable annaliste” of the nineteenth century? If it should be so, the twenty-fourth century will be very credulous if it believes in these events. To show how impossible it would be for the historians of the ninth century to have suppressed a fact so tremendous as a female pope, who was detected as Pope Joan is supposed to have been detected, Bayle supposed a writer of the eleventh century to narrate as follows: Charles the Great was very desirous that his successor should be his son; it was therefore a great grief to him that his wife was barren. When at length there were hopes of a child, he was beside himself with joy; but when the child proved to be a girl, he was almost as grieved as before. He determined, therefore, to pass the child off as a boy, and gave it the name of Pepin. Six years later his wife bore him a son; but the parents still felt bound to conceal the sex of the first child, who on Charles' death was crowned as his successor. She reigned for three years without detection. The denouement took place as she was addressing the parliament. The woman-king died in childbirth in the midst of the august assembly; and the nobles, in horror, passed a law which would render such an imposture impossible in future. Imagine half a dozen different accounts of the way in which Queen Pepin died, and you have a narrative as like that about Pope Joan “comme deux gouttes d'eau”. What amount of credence should we give to this eleventh century writer?

Some writers appear to have believed that the child which the Papess bore was Antichrist! An eminent Dutch minister considers it as immaterial whether its father was a monk or the devil.

The German and French Protestants of the sixteenth century delighted in the story, embellishing it with details of their own, in order to make capital out of it against the Papacy. Nor did their fancy exuberate in words only. Some of their accounts are illustrated with woodcuts, which would seem to be more curious and graphic than decent. Mr. Baring-Gould gives a copy of one in which the Papess is strung up to a gibbet over the mouth of hell; rather against the version of the story, which says she was allowed to choose whether she would have the public exposure, or burn for ever in hell.

The raison d'etre of the myth, as given by Dr. Dollinger in the text, is probably sufficient. Mr. Baring-Gould, however, has little doubt “that Pope Joan is an impersonation of the great whore of Revelation, seated on the seven hills, and is the popular expression of the idea prevalent from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, that the mystery of iniquity was somehow working in the Papal Court. The scandal of the anti-popes, the utter worldliness and pride of others, the spiritual fornication with the kings of the earth, along with the words of Revelation prophesying the advent of an adulterous woman who should rule over the Imperial City, and her connection with Antichrist, crystallized into this curious myth, much as the floating uncertainty as to the signification of our Lord’s words, There be some standing here which shall not taste of death till they see the kingdom of God condensed into the myth of the Wandering Jew”.