During this civil commotion the papacy had no distinguished representative, but upon the
whole profited by it. Some of the popes evaded the imperial sanction of their election. The French
clergy forced the gentle Louis to make at Soissons a most humiliating confession of guilt for all
the slaughter, pillage, and sacrilege committed during the civil wars, and for bringing the empire
to the brink of ruin. Thus the hierarchy assumed control even over the civil misconduct of the
sovereign and imposed ecclesiastical penance for ft.
Note. The Myth of Johanna Papissa.
We must make a passing mention of the curious and mysterious myth of papess Johanna,
who is said during this period between Leo IV. (847) and Benedict III. (855) to have worn the triple
crown for two years and a half. She was a lady of Mayence (her name is variously called Agnes,
Gilberta, Johanna, Jutta), studied in disguise philosophy in Athens (where philosophy had long
before died out), taught theology in Rome, under the name of Johannes Anglicus, and was elevated
to the papal dignity as John VIII., but died in consequence of the discovery of her sex by a sudden
confinement in the open street during a solemn procession from the Vatican to the Lateran. According
to another tradition she was tied to the hoof of a horse, dragged outside of the city and stoned to
death by the people, and the inscription was put on her grave:
"Parce pater patrum papissae edere partum."
The strange story originated in Rome, and was first circulated by the Dominicans and
Minorites, and acquired general credit in the 13th and 14th centuries. Pope John XX. (1276) called
himself John XXI. In the beginning of the 15th century the bust of this woman-pope was placed
alongside with the busts of the other popes at Sienna, and nobody took offence at it. Even Chancellor
Gerson used the story as an argument that the church could err in matters of fact. At the Council
in Constance it was used against the popes. Torrecremata, the upholder of papal despotism, draws
from it the lesson that if the church can stand a woman-pope, she might stand the still greater evil
of a heretical pope.
Nevertheless the story is undoubtedly a mere fiction, and is so regarded by nearly all modern
historians, Protestant as well as Roman Catholic. It is not mentioned till four hundred years later
by Stephen, a French Dominican (who died 1261).^263 It was unknown to Photius and the bitter
Greek polemics during the ninth and tenth centuries, who would not have missed the opportunity
to make use of it as an argument against the papacy. There is no gap in the election of the popes
between Leo and Benedict, who, according to contemporary historians, was canonically elected
three days after the death of Leo IV. (which occurred July 17th, 855), or at all events in the same
month, and consecrated two months after (Sept. 29th). See Jaffé, Regesta, p. 235. The myth was
probably an allegory or satire on the monstrous government of women (Theodora and Marozia)
over several licentious popes—Sergius III., John X., XI., and XII.—in the tenth century. So
Heumann, Schröckh, Gibbon, Neander. The only serious objection to this solution is that the myth
would be displaced from the ninth to the tenth century.
Other conjectures are these: The myth of the female pope was a satire on John VIII. for his
softness in dealing with Photius (Baronius); the misunderstanding of a fact that some foreign bishop
(pontifex) in Rome was really a woman in disguise (Leibnitz); the papess was a widow of Leo IV.
(^263) The oldest testimony in the almost contemporary "Liber Pontificalis" of Anastasius is wanting in the best manuscripts,
and must be a later interpolation. Döllinger shows that the myth, although it may have circulated earlier in the mouth of the
people, was not definitely put into writing before the middle of the thirteenth century.