Rome is a beautiful city at any time of the year. Its parks, streets, old houses, ruins and squares are magnificent. All a visitor has to do is buy one of the many guides to the Eternal City and follow its descriptions, and his or her curiosity will be easily satisfied. But there are places in the city about which the printed guides tell nothing, even though things have happened there that are worth telling.
One of them is the square, which is not really a square at all, but just a meeting point of different routes, where the Via dei Quarceti widens out into other streets. The architecture of this remote Roman quarter, squeezed between the Colosseum and the great Lateran Palace – once the centre of Christianity until the popes decided to move to the Vatican on their return from Avignon in the 14th century – is nothing to talk about, at least not in the opinion of the Romans. But, as in every other corner of Rome, there are a few places that in any other city in the world would at least be marked with signs. But in Rome, the Basilica of San Clemente, built on the ruins of a pagan temple, the 11th-century church of Santi Quatro Coronati and the seminary of the College of Ireland, with its beautiful statues, are second-rate sights.
Most visitors pass by all these buildings calmly, as the whole area resembles an island cut off from the everyday life of Rome, with the Lateran Basilica bustling two streets away. The island is located between what the Romans call the “centro storico” – the historic centre – and the apartment blocks behind the Basilica. It is an enclave with modest gardens full of flowers and shrubs overgrowing the crumbling walls, and where even traffic is very modest.
And because everything is as it is, the visitor’s attention is also avoided by a modest memorial – the Romans call them “edicole” – which looks like a kind of watchtower, pressed up against the wall and facing where the Via dei Santi Quatro Coronati begins its steep ascent from this square to the church of the same name. Only occasionally can a few wilted carnations be seen alongside it.
Anyone who looks closely at the memorial can hardly make out the faded fresco of the Virgin Mary with Jesus in her arms behind the bars. The whole thing looks more like abandoned tombstones in a remote cemetery. Only one guidebook to Rome – at least as far as is known – describes what happened here, and that was written by an English historian. In it, he says that the house of Pope Ivana stood here.
Only a remnant of the classic relief, which once depicted a whole woman with her breasts bared and a child in her arms, marks the site. The relief was removed and the house demolished in 1550 by order of Pope Pius IV. It is not clear what this house had to do with a story that has been known here for many centuries, the story of an Englishwoman called Joan who succeeded in getting Pope Johannes VII elected. What is known, however, is that her secret was revealed in this place, as she gave birth to a child in the street. “She and the child were killed by a dishevelled mob and buried on the side of the road,” says the guidebook.
Is it just a legend? Anyone who has ever studied the history of popes will know that the only English pope was Nicholas Break-Spear, who took the name Hadrian IV. But a female pope in an organisation that prides itself, at least at the level of priests, on being an exclusive men’s club would be a sensation, especially in view of the debate about whether women can also be priests of the Catholic Church. The Bible nowhere says that this is possible, so the Church appeals to tradition. Women have never been priests and should remain so in the future, the Vatican says. This argument would, of course, not stand up to serious scrutiny if anyone could prove that a woman had once sat on the throne of Peter.
But what about the “edicole”? Perhaps the fresco is not of Mary with Jesus, but of another woman, her opposite, the deceiver, clutching the bastard to her breast, just minutes before she was killed for her abuse.
A poop seat?
The international centre of Catholicism is, after all, a place where the contradictions between outward signs of humility and faith and what goes on behind closed doors are not so rare. In a certain sense, many of the rituals associated with specific places in Rome can be traced back to pagan imagery. For example, in the 6th-century vestibule of the church of Santa Maria there is an unusual statue of a masked face. Known as the Bocca della veritá, visitors are supposed to stick their hand in its open mouth to see if they have sinned. The face is supposed to bite off the hand of the one who has fallen into the path of sin and lies. The Church authorities see nothing pagan in this practice.
The Vatican Museums are full of treasures. There are four well-marked trails that lead visitors through the different areas of the museums. But even those who choose the most strenuous route can only see a small part of what is hidden in the museum rooms. In the various anterooms and dusty corners, it is possible to find things that are not meant to be seen. They have no inscriptions, no illumination and are of interest only to visitors who get lost or peer into dusty corners out of curiosity. When they see all these forgotten treasures, they usually give up the hike along the predefined route.
One of these unusual rooms is the “gabinetto delle Maschere”, which has a rather unusual chair. This room can only be accessed by special permission, although it is a kind of auxiliary storage room. Lights, stands and wrapping paper obscure its main attraction, the mosaic floor, which comes from Hadrian’s Villa in nearby Tivoli. Masks can be seen on the mosaic, hence the room’s name. The mosaic is so beautiful that a visitor usually does not notice the reddish marble chair in the window recess. There is no inscription on it to symbolise what it is supposed to represent, and it is covered with a thick layer of dust.
The chair is unusual because it is very high and has a large keyhole-shaped opening in the seat. The backrest is tilted backwards so that it is not comfortable to lean against. This piece of furniture, also called the ‘sedia stercoraria’ or excrement seat, was intended to be used to determine the sex of the Pope before he was handed the keys of St Peter’s. The cardinal who was elected as the new Pope had to sit on it once before his election became valid, and one of the cardinals reached into the keyhole and felt his genitals.
The story of the sex determination of the new Pope might seem like a ridiculous legend if it were not for the fact that there was apparently a suspicion among the cardinals that the Pope might be a woman. Could it be that bad experience has taught them that?
The Vatican Library contains 150,000 manuscripts, which can serve as a great source of information. It also contains the manuscripts of the great Inquisitor Bernardo Gio, who had the task, among other things, of separating the wheat from the chaff among the Christian legends circulating in Europe at the time. He always wrote of Pope Ivana as something “people tell stories about”. He never claimed that the legend was true, but he also never dismissed it as fiction.
There are a bunch of other puzzles posed by the existence of Pope Ivana. For example, the role played by the Dominicans in spreading the legend. Some argue that the solution to the riddle of Pope Ivana must lie with them. This religious order was founded in 1216 by a Spaniard, Dominic Guzmán, who entered the world of history because he wanted to compete with the Pope. Their adherents came mainly from the ranks of the educated merchants and nobility and were therefore more willing than other priestly orders to resist the arrogance of the Popes.
At the time when Dominican authors first mentioned Pope Ivana – Jean de Mailly in 1225, Martinus Polonus in 1265 – their order was in fierce conflict with the Pope. The Dominicans and Pope Innocent IV (1243-1254) had a dispute over the right of Dominicans to occupy the majority of professorships at the University of Paris. Innocent IV died shortly afterwards, but passions were not calmed because the Dominicans held different views from him on many important issues of the Christian faith. For a long time, some historians have argued that the Dominicans simply invented Pope Ivana in order to damage the Pope’s reputation.
The same arguments were later used to claim that Pope Ivana was the product of a Protestant conspiracy. The Catholic Church has traditionally rejected the narrative of Pope Ivana and referred to her as a Protestant fake. It claimed that after the Reformation, the followers of Luther, Calvin and Henry VIII forged old manuscripts and inserted fictitious things in order to defame the Pope’s supposedly God-given universal authority. This was done so persistently that it was later impossible to distinguish the original from the forgery. Readers were thus given the impression that the story was true.
Between the early Middle Ages and the end of the 17th century, the story of Pope Ivana was taken up by more than 500 chroniclers working on the history of the Church. Among them were several papal officials and even a few bishops. At first sight, the Protestant conspiracy thesis seems plausible. The literature on Pope Ivana flourished mainly between 1200 and 1600, a time when there was no mass printing of books. The first printed writings can only be traced back to the end of the 15th century, when Gutenberg invented the printing press. Before that time, texts were reproduced by copying, and each copy had to be copied word for word by hand onto parchment.
In the early Middle Ages, up to 1200, the copyists were almost always monks, who had plenty of time to do the work, but who could nevertheless make mistakes or deliberate embellishments and corrections during the copying process. At the time when Ivana is said to have sat on Peter’s chair, there is no information about her other than these manuscripts.
… and she had a baby
If Pope Ivana had a biographer in the Middle Ages, it could only have been the Dominican Martinus Polonus, whose Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatum was published in 1265, almost 400 years after Ivana was supposed to have sat on the papal chair. He was one of the most respected chroniclers of the time and many of his writings have survived. Although the original chronicle has not survived, there is a 14th-century transcription preserved in the Berlin State Library.following account of the death of Pope Leo IV
in 855
“After the aforementioned Leo, Johannes, an Englishman by birth who came from Mainz, sat on Peter’s throne for two years, five months and four days. He died in Rome. It is often asserted that he was a woman. In her youth she is said to have come to Athens with a lover, dressed in men’s clothes. There she quickly educated herself. She then taught in Rome and her pupils included many famous people. She was unanimously elected Pope. Then she became pregnant by someone close to her.
She didn’t know when she would give birth and, because she had a miscarriage on the way from St Peter’s to the Lateran, she gave birth between the Colosseum and the Church of San Clemente. Then she died and, as the story goes, she was buried in the same place. Since then, the Holy Fathers have avoided this route because of the revulsion they feel at the mention of this event. She is not on the official list of the Holy Fathers, both because of her sex and because of the vileness of her act.”
This story has been supplemented by another page of a later date in the Berlin manuscript, with surprising new information. Among other things, it states that the Pope’s lover was a deacon, that the street where she gave birth was then called Vicus Papissa, that after giving birth she was not killed but deposed and banished to a women’s convent where she did penance, and that she saw her son appointed bishop of Ostia.”
Martinus Polonus was not the first to write about Ivana, but he was the first to give most of the details. Another interesting figure of the time was a certain Anastasius, who was the papal librarian in the 9th century and who described the popes in his Liber Pontificalis. He was a dubious personality and a schemer who tried to ascend the throne of Peter in 855 – the time when Ivana was supposed to have been born and died.
He was the nephew of one of the richest Romans, used his money to buy himself a bishopric, and was convinced he had a right to the papacy. His attempt failed and he had to leave the papal throne after just three days. Some authors later claimed that he was the father of the stillborn child and Ivana’s lover. He was a few years older than her, came from a German family and was said to have studied in Fulda.
This finding raised the important question of where Ivana was supposed to have come from. Martinus Polonus wrote that she was English and that she came from the German city of Mainz, one of the most important centres of Christianity in the early Middle Ages and a stronghold of English missionaries who came to Germany to convert pagans to the true faith.
It is also interesting to note what the French Dominican Jean de Mailly wrote in his Cronici Universalis in 1225. The original edition for 1099 also contains the following account:
“There is talk of a pope who was a woman. She was passing herself off as a man. Because of her sharp intellect, she became secretary of the papal curia, then a cardinal, and finally a pope. One day, when she got off her horse, she gave birth to a child. Immediately afterwards, Roman magistrates tied her feet to the horse’s tail and people stoned her for more than half an hour. On the spot where she died and where she was buried there is an inscription: ‘Petre, Pater Petrum, Papisse Prodito Partum’.”
Some historians claim that Martinus Polonus borrowed the story of Ivana from Mailly and wrote it down. The difference in dates – Martinus Polonus speaks of 855 and the Dominican Mailly of 1099 – has kept historians busy for some time.
The Bodlerian Library in Oxford holds over ten thousand medieval manuscripts, including Martin Polonus’s Chronicon Summorum Pontificum et Imperatorum Romanorum, which is marked in the library only as manuscript 452. On folio 31, Johannes VII was listed in the usual place between Leo IV and Benedict III as Joannes VII. Cognomento Anglicis Natione Maguntinus (Johannes VII, known as the Englishman born in Mainz).
Somehow strange was the comment in the margin in a different font, probably written by an upset reader: ‘Ffemina fuit pp’. In medieval abbreviations, the double f was just a capital letter, and the pp was papa, i.e. Pope. The notation could therefore be translated as Pope was a woman.
Whether this commentary was written by a Protestant or by a seminarian who was disturbed by the author’s claim is, of course, impossible to determine. The main text later states that Johannes VII could not be included in the regular list of popes because of his sex. The problem facing the Church and individual historians was therefore well known and no one at that time denied the existence of Pope Ivana.
The central issue of Pope Ivana is her timing. If we accept the most frequently mentioned papacy of Ivana between 853 and 855, then 400 years elapsed before her mention in Martinus Polonus, and even the Dominican Mailly reduced this period by only 50 years. During these 400 years, however, no one mentioned Ivana and no one wrote about her. This time gap was proof to some that Pope Ivana belonged to the realm of fantasy.
Others claimed that the Church had forbidden speaking about it during this period. But the church at that time was weak and without the authority to order such a thing. Still others note that Ivana was the widow of Pope Leo IV and that after his death, the Romans put her on the throne of Peter out of respect for him. It is certainly possible that the Pope was married at the time. In the 9th century, marriage was considered the proper state for priests. It was not until the Council of Trent in 1545 that a sharp distinction was made between the priestly profession and the marital state.
There are also several different lists of Popes, some of them officially authorised. The National Library of Paris holds a special list of Parisinus Lat. 5140 from the 11th century. Pope Ivana is not mentioned in it at all. The continuation of the list of popes with Leo IV is unclear, since there is no record of his successor, Benedict III. Instead of Benedict III, there is only the nameless Pope, whom many historians take to be Benedict, and some also take to be Pope Ivana.
The unnamed Pope mentioned is said to have been a child in his youth, who was soon taught by his father all the necessary arts of the time. Later, under Leo IV, he became a deacon. After the death of Leo IV and the election of Pope Benedict, he played a prominent role in the administration of the Church, and Benedict did almost nothing without him. When Benedict died, he and the other deacons carried his coffin. After Benedict’s death, the people gathered in the church of St Dionysius and, after a long debate, chose a deacon without a name as the new Pope. The deacon was frightened and told them that he was not worthy of the honour, but gave no reason.
This narrative fits the story of Pope Ivana. But the people stuck to their choice and escorted the new Pope to the Lateran Palace, placed him on the Apostolic See and proclaimed him Pope. But there is no evidence for the thesis that Ivana became Pope after Benedict.
They suffered for the faith
Today’s Christianity – especially that led from Rome – tends to present to the world its own authorised version of church history, to the exclusion of Ivana and the many other women who, in the early days of church history, worked side by side with men to spread the word of God. This despite the fact that they suffered for the faith as much or more than men.
The story of Mary Magdalene is itself instructive. She is mentioned only fourteen times in the New Testament. But in all the Gospels, she is always present at the crucifixion. But even here her role is small until, after Christ’s death, it becomes immeasurably large. On the third day after his death, she went to his tomb to anoint his body. There, an angel, or Christ himself, announced to her that he had risen from the dead and instructed her to inform his disciples. But here is where the problem arises. Why her? Why a person who is only fleetingly mentioned before and, above all, why a woman?
Since all the Gospels, which are just collections of oral traditions, mention this, it means that everyone at the time believed it really happened. In the time and land where Jesus lived, Jesus sometimes behaved very strangely. In Samaria, when He spoke to a woman at a well, His disciples were astonished. A Jew does not speak to a woman in public unless he is related to her. But in the Gospel of Luke, a woman, a sinner, probably a prostitute, comes into the house where he was eating with Simon, washes his feet with her tears and dries them with her long hair. Christ says that this “sinful woman” gave him more love than Simon himself.
Here, the positive side of Mary Magdalene still prevails. It was not until Pope Gregory, in a sermon in the 6th century, that one of the few independent women was made a despicable prostitute.
But even as such, Mary Magdalene was an incredible success in Christian Europe. Legend has it that she came by boat to Marseille, preached in the south of France and then took refuge in a cave near Marseille, where she wept, prayed and lamented her shameful past. After her death, she became one of the most popular saints of France, second only to the Virgin Mary.
What attracted the faithful was that Mary Magdalene was always full of compassion. In medieval depictions of the crucifixion, her face is full of despair as she kisses Christ’s bloody feet. She knows that he died also for her sins. Compared to her, the Virgin Mary seems to be a more reserved person. And when the faithful were overcome by fear of their sins and a sense of guilt, they did not turn to the Virgin Mary, but much preferred Mary Magdalene.
In the 1960s, the Catholic Church wanted to bring order to the overly eventful lives of the saints, and in 1969 changed the liturgical calendar. It abolished a whole series of venerations of the saints because there was simply no fulcrum to justify such glorification. The legends of the saints were rewritten, including that of Magdalene. Now she was no longer a prostitute for the Catholic Church, but no hymns were to be read in her honour. But people did not rejoice in such a purified Magdalene. Others began to wonder who she was and why she had been so vilified for centuries.
Crucial to its story was the discovery in Upper Egypt in 1945 of a collection of thirteen papyrus codices, carefully preserved in a pottery jar and dating back some 1500 years, now known as the Nag Hammadi Library. Bible scholars have long known that the Catholic Church is only a part of that church which managed to come to the fore after bitter struggles with other rival sects, especially the Gnostics. All that researchers of early Christianity know about these alleged heretics is what the Church Fathers said or wrote bad things about them.
But in December 1945, an Arab farmer went into the mountains near Nag Hammadi to collect fertiliser for his fields. But what he found was not only fertiliser, but also a 90 centimetre pottery barrel in a grave. To his disappointment, it contained only a pile of leather-bound papyrus. He took them home and his mother used some of them to make a fire, while others were exchanged for cigarettes. After much wandering, the papyri ended up in the hands of experts, who judged them to be of the greatest value.
The 52 Gnostic texts were written down in Coptic by someone in the 4th century and translated from the original Greek, which dates from the 2nd century. In their Gospel of Mary, Mary Magdalene plays a central role. Not only is she no prostitute, but she is a courageous missionary and Christ’s favourite disciple. In these texts, the risen Jesus preaches to his disciples that there are no more sins and that they should follow no authority and recognise no rules.
Then he turns and leaves his astonished disciples. Among them is Peter, who then says that he knows that Jesus loved no woman as much as Mary Magdalene, so he asks her if she knows something that Jesus told only her. Mary Magdalene then describes her vision. Here, however, there are many pages missing among the papyri. Peter then asks in amazement, “Did Jesus really speak to the woman with four eyes and we did not know it?” Could it be that she had a privileged position?
Another Gnostic text speaks of a dialogue between Jesus and the disciples. Thirty-nine of the 46 questions they asked Jesus were asked by Mary Magdalene, so much so that Peter finally complained that this woman would not let anyone speak. Another text says that she is his companion and that he often kisses her. From this many readers assumed that she was his mistress or wife, although kissing was not uncommon in the Middle East at that time.
When Jesus was then asked why he loved her more than the other disciples, he replied, “The blind man and the seer are actually the same in the darkness. But when the light comes, the seer will see the light, and the blind will remain in darkness.”
In a famous passage from the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, found in the Nag Hammadi library, Jesus even had the habit of kissing Mary Magdalene on the mouth. “The Saviour loved her more than all His disciples and often kissed her on the mouth.”
While the Catholic Church has gradually removed women from positions of importance, the Gnostic sects have taken a different path. This is one of the reasons why the Catholic Church considered the Gnostics to be heretics and why, as early as the 4th century, they felt so threatened that they hid their texts in earthen pots and buried them in remote places.
“Christian memory has simply excluded the women who shaped early Christianity, made their mark on it and finally faded into oblivion,” says many historians. But the silencing of women’s historical contribution is not a uniquely Christian characteristic. Pliny the Elder wrote in his Naturalis historia that the historiography of his time deliberately withheld information about the work of women doctors because they worked quietly and invisibly.
When else is there a sermon about Joan, the wife of one of King Herod’s administrators, who was a disciple of Jesus? Or about those women who, according to apostolic history and the letters of St Paul, gave help and shelter to young Christian congregations? Out of revolutionary conviction and hatred of hierarchy and pomp, Christians in the first two centuries gathered not in churches and chapels but in private houses. Many women from well-known and wealthy families supported the new religion by inviting Christians into their homes.
But already in the 3rd century, the institutionalisation of these house churches began. Solid organisational forms and a pyramid-like structure of bishops, priests, dioceses and ecclesiastical communities emerged. When Christians, who had hitherto practised a cult forbidden by the authorities, were granted the status of a religion by the Emperor Constantine in 313, this new religion had to adapt to the cultural and sociological notions of the role of women that were in force at the time. In the Greco-Roman world – and to some extent in the Mediterranean countries today – women controlled the home and the family, while public affairs were reserved for men.
Women priests
The first female protagonists of Christianity have thus gradually been superseded by a new generation of male leaders. But not completely. Today, tombstones dating from the 5th century can be found in southern Italy and Calabria, showing that women were “presbyterales” or priests. Such tombstones can also be found in southern France, Turkey and the Balkans. In a letter sent by Pope Galasius (492-496) to his priests in southern Italy, he wrote, among other things:
“We have noticed that spiritual matters have fallen so low that even women are allowed to read the Mass on the holy altar and to perform other tasks reserved for men.”
Priestesses were therefore not according to the rules of Christianity, but they existed. Rome tried to take away the force of this evidence with a side remark, because “presbiterale” is a dubious term. It can also mean the wife of a priest.
The famous mosaic in the Church of Santa Prassede, near the Vatican, is worth a look. It was built on the columns of a pagan temple on a site where early Christians gathered. The mosaic dates back to the 5th century and depicts four women. The head and shoulders of one of them are surrounded by the words Episcopa Theodora or Bishop Theodora. The same inscription can be seen on one of the marble pillars of the chapel.
Other than the title “presbiterale”, it means exactly what we think it means, namely that Theodora was elevated to the episcopate despite different church laws. Yet other evidence in Rome speaks against the Catholic Church’s thesis that there have never been priestesses and never will be. In the Vatican Library itself, one can find a copy of a tombstone from the cemetery of St Valentine’s Basilica in Rome, where a “femina episcopa” (woman bishop) is mentioned.
Under the streets of the Italian capital are 1,800-year-old catacombs. In the early centuries after Jesus’ death, the blood of Christian martyrs flowed in Rome, and men and women who died in the arenas of the Colosseum were buried there. A fresco in them from the 3rd century deserves special attention. It shows seven figures with their hands raised, standing around a table, celebrating. All seven figures, one of them a woman, raise their hands, a gesture still used by priests in the Eucharist today.
All such allegations and alleged decisions are, of course, vehemently denied by the Vatican. But since it cannot rely on the Bible or the words of Jesus, but only on tradition, to reject priestesses, it is no wonder that many scholars are looking for an event to refute these claims of the church. And they don’t have to struggle very hard to find it.
In an era when few people could read and write, information was spread by word of mouth, giving rise to myths, stories and rumours. Particularly common in the 5th century and the early Middle Ages were the so-called Infancy Gospels, which dealt with the childhood of Jesus. They generally painted a less favourable picture of Jesus, describing him as a tyrant and a brute. In one episode, Jesus is said to have turned his companions into pigs during a game and pushed them into a furnace, only to be rescued by his mother Mary.
All this shows that the Church, despite holding the key to much of the information, has failed to prevent these stories and legends. Thus, even the then predominantly male church has not been able to erase the memory of women priests. In Ivana’s time, these memories were still fresh, and although the practice of women running mixed monasteries was dying out, there were still some abbesses who had certain episcopal duties. It was therefore not unusual for Ivana to find women still in positions of leadership in the church in some places, even though they were already being pushed aside by the official church at the time.
However, already in the High Middle Ages, there was a movement against women. Thomas Aquinas’s observation that women are “inferior men” and his assertion that they are inferior and incapable of holding leadership positions are just two examples of this.
The young Ivana was strongly influenced by the undoubtedly virtuous, God-fearing and holy women who followed their ecclesiastical vocation by dressing like men. One such woman was Pelagia, who lived in 4th century Antioch. When she heard a bishop’s sermon, she was so moved by it that she asked him to baptize her. When the townspeople heard this, they wanted to lynch her. Disguised as a man, she fled to Jerusalem and lived there as a hermitess in a cave on the Mount of Olives. She was known among the people as Pelagius, or the beardless monk. It was only after she died that her female gender was discovered. Despite this deception, she was declared a saint.
In many cases, the saints were trying to escape forced marriage, which would have discouraged them from their religious inclinations. Miraculously, they suddenly grew beards, whereupon their fiancé disowned them and their father threw them out of the house. Brigitta, who lived in the 6th century and is still venerated in her homeland of Ireland today, was one of these beards, as is Saint Patrick. Many women at that time became so absorbed in their roles as men that they had schizophrenic fits if the opportunity for a heterosexual relationship presented itself. Living as a monk, for whom sexuality had no meaning, was a great advantage for them.
Ivana undoubtedly heard such stories during her time in Germany, and the influence of these legends cannot be underestimated. Legends of female saints who traded their femininity for male clothing have been interpreted by scholars in different ways. For some, it was evidence that the church continued to worship pagan goddesses in the clothing of saints. Pelagia was thus said to be identical with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of the seas, love and fertility, and in Cyprus Aphrodite was worshipped in rituals during which women dressed in men’s clothes brought her offerings.
In his book Sex, Society and History, an American historian argued, on the basis of the stories of Pelagia and her ilk, that it was common in the Middle Ages to emphasise women’s inferiority by portraying them as “inverted men”. In popular literature, one can also find the idea that women who spread their legs very wide would have their organs fall out and turn into a man.
Hidden in men’s clothing
But other religions also have problems with female-male relationships. In 1983, the film Yentl was made, starring Barbra Streisand as a young girl from Eastern Europe who disguises herself as a man in order to study Talmud. It was not until the modern era that Jewish girls were allowed to study the Talmud. Jews sent their daughters to special schools, but there they gained only limited knowledge. In the film, based on a short story by Nobel Prize winner Isaac Bashevis, Yentl has to hear that “a woman who studies the Talmud is a devil”. But this did not frighten her, she cut her hair, put on men’s clothes, changed her name and was accepted into rabbinical school. The problem only arose when she fell in love with a colleague.
It was the same with young Ivana. At the age of 12, she realised that because of her gender, she had no chance to learn and be educated. This was a common practice in the 9th century. Even women from the upper classes could only be educated if they entered a convent. Since Ivana was not willing to enter a convent, she had to give up every opportunity to learn Latin and Greek and to read the Bible.
By the 11th century, however, groups of independent, self-reliant women were already emerging in Holland, Germany, Italy and Greece, living modestly in small communities and educating themselves there. They were not under Church control, as were the women’s convents. These communities flourished for a while and there were, for example, 99 of them in Cologne, some with only a few members, others with dozens. The Church authorities looked down on them, persecuted them and eventually destroyed them.
Four centuries before, Pope Ivana could have predicted their fate. Why, for example, did she not choose to be educated in one of the many women’s convents? Her parents were, as far as we know, colleagues of English missionaries sent to Germany, or even a missionary couple. Celibacy for priests had only been in force since the 12th century, and Catholic priests married as late as 1545. Her parents probably felt that she would not have gained enough knowledge in a convent, as the Church saw nuns as a lower level of clergy. In addition, nuns had to live a celibate life, while priests were allowed to marry. However, as can be seen from her later life, Ivana was not cut out for the single life.
Clothes make the man, the saying goes, and for Pope Ivana this was literally true when, at the age of twelve, she decided to go to Athens to be educated by a young monk. This monk was either not to discover her deception or was her lover. The essence of Ivana’s deception was that she changed the way she dressed. As the French say, there are three sexes in the world: male, female and clerical. With priests, no one really looks at what is hidden in the uniform and which sex they are is never an issue. Where better could Ivana hide which gender she is if not in her priest’s dress?
The typical priestly dress has its roots in the Romans and was well defined in pre-Christian times, and even later, during Ivana’s lifetime. The Romans considered trousers a sign of barbarism. Early Christians wanted to avoid drawing attention to themselves by dressing differently, so they adopted Roman fashion. The cape was then as universal a garment as jeans are today. But while the world’s fashions were changing, the Church’s fashion clock was going nowhere, and this finally set the priests apart from the rest of the people in dress. So the monk’s dress was the perfect camouflage for Ivana. The sleeves came over the palms of the hands and the hood completely covered the head, so that only the chin was visible.
As far back as the 9th century, priests also wore beards as a rule. It was during the time of Ivana that the Pope decreed that clergy should not wear beards. Therefore, Ivana was fortunate that she was not distinguished from the rest of the clergy by this mark.
As for her physical curves, it should be remembered that life in the 9th century was full of deprivation and scarcity, especially of food, so that many people lived on the verge of starvation. This was also reflected in the physical constitution, and the outward signs of gender were therefore relegated to the background.
Chaos in Rome
But why did Ivana decide to go to Athens? As a city on the edge of the Byzantine Empire, Athens had lost much of its former glory by the 9th century. But it was also a place where Ivana could learn the Greek for which she would become famous throughout Rome. The fact that she spoke both Latin and Greek must have attracted attention in high ecclesiastical circles.
At this time, links between Athens and Rome were still very strong. In the 7th century, there was also a strong Greek colony in Rome between the Tiber River and the Circus Maximus. The Greeks had their own church here and no less than thirteen Greeks sat on the papal throne. What’s more, even the word ‘pope’ comes from the Greek word ‘papas’, which is the popular diminutive form of the word for father. The Greek community in Rome was particularly important because their mother tongue was also the language of bureaucracy, culture and commerce.
But then came hard times for Rome. After Emperor Constantine transferred its capital to Byzantium in 330, Rome lost its former importance as the centre of the Western world. Then the Western Goths, Vandals and Huns arrived in Italy and Rome was relegated to a decaying, second-class provincial city. The only institution that managed to survive was the Church of Rome, headed by the Pope, who was also Bishop of Rome.
When Ivana arrived in Rome in the 1440s, the city was just recovering from a confrontation with the Saracens, who attacked from the sea and sacked it in 846. Pope Leo IV, who was chosen for the post in the year the Saracens attacked the city, was determined to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica and incorporate it into the city walls. After her arrival, Ivana worked as a teacher in a Greek school, distinguished for its public debates and discussions. The Pope became attentive to her, valuing education and loyalty to the Church.
Incidentally, we must look at the situation in Rome and the Christian Church with today’s eyes. A sentence by an English historian on the state of Rome tells us enough: “In the 9th century there was such chaos that even an unusual Pope would have been nothing special. The whole system was degenerate.” There are many examples of this.
Pope Paschal (817-824) ruled Rome with a strong and arbitrary hand. He had many enemies and when he died, no one wanted to bury him in St Peter’s Basilica. His decaying body was left unburied for weeks. Only his successor, Eugenius II (824-827), found another place to bury him. Pope Eugene II was succeeded by the aristocrat Valentine, who reigned for only 40 days in 827. His death was accompanied by violent demonstrations. The Roman people occupied the Lateran Palace and proclaimed their candidate, a deacon named Johannes, Pope. But the Roman aristocracy drove him out of the Lateran and proclaimed an old and sickly priest, Sergius, Pope. King Frank Lothair didn’t like this, so he sent an army against Rome. The besieged Sergius capitulated and left the day-to-day affairs to his corrupt brother Benedict.
When the Saracens invaded Rome in 846, Sergius was on his deathbed. Only his successor, Leo IV, restored the papacy to at least some of its former power. The chronicles mention Ivana as the next Pope, and her election was no different from that of the other popes. According to the custom of the time, she was elected by the Roman population. It is also mentioned that she was a monk, so not a priest at all. Today’s practice of the Pope being elected by the cardinals did not come about until later, as cardinals did not appear until the 11th century.
However, a tradition rooted in the 4th century may have favourably influenced the election of Ivana as Pope. The reigning popes had a group of no more than seven deacons around them – men who had not yet taken the vows of the priesthood – and it was customary for the high priests to elect a new pope from among them. Thus, of course, the Roman people no longer had any influence.
Ivana’s age was no barrier at the time. She must have been just over thirty when she gave birth, which was a very appropriate age for a Pope at that time. Life expectancy was very short then. It is known that Johannes XII (955-964) was elected Pope when he was only 18 years old.
The depths to which the papacy fell during this period are made abundantly clear by the English historian Edward Gibbon, who lived in the 18th century. He joined the Catholic Church while studying at Oxford, but after 14 months turned away from it because, as he put it, he was “cured” by a Calvinist minister. Thereafter, he was a staunch agnostic all his life.
His interpretation of Pope Ivana could be accused of being prejudiced against the Catholic Church, but in his voluminous six-volume work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, published between 1776 and 1778, which is still one of the standard works in all university history lectures, he dismissively dismissed any consideration of a certain Pope.Instead,
gave an alternative explanation for the origin of the story:
“The influence of the two women, mother Theodora and daughter Marozia, two prostitutes, was based on their wealth and their beauty, as well as on their political and love intrigues. The most tireless of their lovers were rewarded with the Roman myth, and their reign probably brought the legend of the Pope to the surface in those dark times. The bastard, the grandson and the great-grandson of Marozia – an unusual line of relatives – all landed on the throne of Peter.”
For Gibbon, Pope Ivana was a cryptic reminder of the power and influence these two women had on the papacy from the late 9th to the mid-11th century. Theodora first appeared in Rome with her husband Theophylact in 890. Theophylact gained power and influence, became a senator and judge, and looked after the Pope’s finances and the Roman police until his death in 920. His wife was also admitted to the Senate, although she had more ambitious plans.
Theodora was determined to create a dynasty and raise one of its members to the throne of the Roman Emperor. But standing in her way was the papacy, a kind of protector and administrator of Rome. So in 904, together with her then-living husband, she pushed her candidate for the papacy, Sergius III, to the throne. Pope Sergius III then married the fifteen-year-old Marozia and bore her a son named Johannes.
After the death of Sergius III, Theodora made sure that the Popes became her candidates again. First Anastasius III (911-913) and then Lando (913-914). The latter was succeeded by her lover Johannes X. After the deaths of Theodora and Theophylact, Marozia became the true ruler of Rome, despite the Pope’s opposition. She planned to make the papacy hereditary.
Her next popes, Leo VI (928) and Stephen (928-931), were only to keep the See of Peter for her son Johannes, and he was indeed elected Pope Johannes XI at the age of 20. But the Romans had had enough of her machinations, so they rebelled against her and overthrew her with the help of her second son Alberich. Thereafter, at intervals, descendants of Theodora and Theophylact succeeded to the papal throne, the last being her great-great-grandson Benedict IX (1032-1048), who became Pope as a young man not yet twenty years old.
On the first Wednesday of every month, a group of women gather in the square outside Westminster Cathedral in London. They walk in a circle around a large candle with the word ‘earth’ written on it. They anoint themselves with oil, then march in silent procession to the cathedral wall and cling to it for seven minutes. Then they sing a few hymns and leave the square.
These women are members of the Catholic Women’s Ordination movement, which was created as a result of the decision of the 1992 General Synod of the Anglican Church to allow women to become priests. They have set themselves the goal of spreading this idea in the Catholic Church. Like Ivana in the past, they firmly believe that women are capable of taking on leadership roles in the church. Their gender should not be an obstacle for the Catholic Church, but an asset.
While they do not refer to Pope Ivana, they cite several other examples that are supposed to prove that women were once priests, such as the clairvoyant of Mainz, mentioned in a 16th century chronicle, who forced her bishop to appoint her as a priest.
The symbolism of their monthly ritual is well defined. All the demonstrators are dressed in scarlet as a sign of their priesthood. Their silence is meant to illustrate the sadness of lost opportunities in the Catholic Church. They are gathered in a democratic circle and the seven minutes they hold on to the walls of the cathedral symbolise the seven sacraments.
The story of Pope Ivana has, however, successfully fought off all attempts to erase her story from the history of the Catholic Church. It proves that women have had important roles in the Catholic Church.
