How Pope Joan Became the High Priestess

all the way to pope. This woman pulled off her scheme for a while, until one day she the pope, was riding on horseback and went into labor, revealing her deception to the Romans. The citizens of Rome dragged her by horseback and stoned her as punishment for breaking the rules. This short, scandalous story raised a number of questions. Who was this woman, where was she from? And how did she make it through the gauntlet of Catholic politics without

getting caught? How did she get pregnant? If this happened in eleven hundred, then why is this a female pope? Objectively a massive deal only being reported for the first time one hundred and fifty years later. Why is The one detail we get about her time as pope that she gave birth on horseback, which, while impressive and interesting, doesn't seem to be the main headline of the story, which again is that a woman was pope for the

first and only time in recorded history. This handwritten chronicle from the monastery is even more ambiguous about the pope's gender than you might imagine. While the headline explicitly calls the pope in the story a woman, the text itself never refers to the pope with any female pronouns, instead opting for gender neutral pronouns like it and the neuter animated, which is a Latin tense that defaults to male. The publication notes that the story is quote to be verified,

seeming to hedge the scandalous nature of the story. In spite of these inconsistencies, the story of the alleged popess spread among the medieval Catholic world, with various authors filling in their own details about the legend. The popees became an english woman from Maines. As a young woman, she fell in love with a scholar and accompanied him to Athens. While she was intellectually voracious, the Athenian professors wouldn't let her into their classrooms, and so she disguised herself as

a man and moved to Rome. Admired for her vast knowledge of scripture, she so successfully embedded herself in the Catholic Church that she was unanimously elected Pope. She served in the position for two years until she suddenly gave birth, traveling from Saint Peter's Basilica to Saint John Lantern, which uncovered her deception. Carved busts reveal her name Johannes the Eighth, or Pope Joan, but there is still one massive problem with that more detailed history. There is no actual evidence

to prove that Pope Joan ever existed. The story I just told about the englishwoman from Maines. It became the most popular version of the legend, but that story was cobbled together from hundreds of different accounts with wildly desparate details. Some versions of the Pope Joan story take place in the year nine hundred, others in eight hundred and fifty, others in eleven hundred. In some accounts, Joan is named agnes Anna or Gilberta, and the length of her papacy

varies from two months to two years. One would think that such a scandal would have produced some documentary evidence. She might have been depicted in paintings or sculptures, or mentioned in articles or letters, But there were no references to her to be found. So I have to be the unfortunate bearer of bad news on this story and make it very clear to you, the listener, that it is incredibly unlikely that a female pope ever existed. One would think that this lack of evidence would deter people

from spreading the story, but the opposite happened. There wouldn't be a single source questioning the validity of the Pope Jone story until three hundred years after the initial chronicle was published in twelve fifty, and Jon's legend would continue to spread for centuries after that, surviving debunking after debunking. In fact, Pope Joan became a kind of Catholic forest gump, popping up throughout pivotal moments in the history of the

Catholic Church and playing central roles in religious conflicts. She even spread far beyond the church into secular life, popping up in plays, novels, and even card games. How did the almost certainly false myth of Pope Joan manage to survive for almost a millennium in spite of shoddy evidence and multiple debunkings. In this episode, we'll try to solve the mystery, tracing the story of a woman who, as Catholic scholar Tom Noble put it quote, never lived, but

who nevertheless refuses to die. I'm Danish Schwartz and this is noble blood. To solve the mystery of how and why the legend of Pope Joan spread, we should look more closely at the first mention of her, the Monastery Chronicle from twelve fifty five. Unfortunately, we don't know much about it. The author of this text was a Dominican monk named Jean de Maii, but scholars don't know much about him other than that he wrote this article and

one other book of legends. We don't know where he got his information about Pope Joan from, or what his intentions were for this story, or if he believed the story himself, but Maille's role as a Dominican monk gives us a clue. Maye wasn't alone in reproducing sketchy rumors. In fact, it was a matter of principle for friars to document as many stories as possible, no matter how apocryphal. It didn't even seem to matter whether or not the

author believed the story they were reporting. Jean de Meili wrote about plenty of legends he didn't personally believe. For example, he wrote an account of the Nativity where Salome, one of Jesus' disciples, wanted to confirm Mary's virginity before she gave birth, so Salome felt her up, which caused her arm to wither away. At the end of the piece, Meilee concludes that this event probably never happened. This might raise the question if Malee didn't believe the story himself,

then why did he spread it? After all, all, the Salome story, like the Pope Joan story, was not widely known. Mainly wasn't debunking a popular rumor. He was simply telling the story and then mentioning that he didn't find it plausible. Pope Joan scholar Elaine Borough argues that Dominican writers of that era emphasized quantity over quality. Part of this was

politically motivated. After the end of the Crusades, the Catholic Church had more cultural power than ever, and they flexed that power by trying to explain and account for anything and everything, even traditions that seemed to challenge the Catholic Church's authority. Reproducing rumors, even ones that cast doubt on the authority of the Catholic Church or undermined biblical accounts, made them less threatening. Recording rumors and apocrypha was also

a matter of religious doctrine. According to the Bible, Jesus appeared in the middle of human history rather than in the beginning, suggesting that a seismic divine event could occur at any time. Therefore, it was crucial that Catholic writers document any rumor because it may gain religious significance later. In the minds of these writers, it would be way worse to leave out a potentially significant event than it would be to spread a rumor that turned out to

be irrelevant or untrue. Other Catholic writers would echo this logic when reproducing the story of Pope Joan. For centuries after that first story was originally published, it became something of a self fulfilling prophecy. The story had become so widespread that it would be weirder not to include it.

One Catholic writer, Platina, would say this explicitly when he wrote his version of the story of Pope Joan in fourteen seventy nine, writing that he wasn't certain that Pope Joan actually existed, but he did not want quote to omit too obstinately and tenaciously what everyone affirms. Peer pressure wasn't the only reason the story gained traction. Another reason the story spread was that it was useful in clearing

up some inconsistencies around papal infallibility. Around the time that Pope Joan appeared in the record in the twelve fifties, monks were pretty unhappy with the pope, Pope Innocent the Fourth, who limited Franciscan monk's right to preach and hear confession. This made the pope hugely unpopular, but he was difficult to criticize because, according to Catholic doctrine, he was ordained

by God to rule. By suggesting that a woman could have ascended to the papacy, the Pope Joan story showed that the Church had made mistakes before, so it wouldn't be out of the question if it allowed an unworthy man like Pope Innocent to rule. In twelve seventy nine, an archbishop Martin of Opava emphasized that reading when he published another account of the female pope in his book

of Legends. He explained that Pope Joan was intelligent and well respected, and that she was unanimously elected to the papacy. Even so, her reign was invalid because a woman could not be pope, suggesting that pope's could be illegitimate even if they were elected fairly. It's worth noting that we don't know for sure whether or not Martin of Opava actually intended to include the Pope Joan story in his work.

Doesn't appear in early editions of the book, and the story actually first appears in editions of the book around thirteen oh four in different handwriting, leading many scholars to believe the story was added later by a different writer. Still, Martin of Opava's story became the definitive account of Pope Joan. His book was a best seller, and it spread the

rumor throughout Europe, getting translated into several languages. It wasn't just popular, it was also the first version of the story that actually attempted to give historical evidence for her reign. Opava gave the pope a name John, which would later be feminized to Joan. He changed the date of her reign from eleven hundred to the eight fifties, and suggested that she ruled after Pope Leo the fourth. It's unclear how he came up with these details. There was a

Pope John John the eighth in the eight hundreds. Like Joan, his reign was brief. He reconciled a schism between Western and Eastern branches of Catholicism through compromise, which many fellow Catholics considered weak and quote womanish Opava may have conflated criticisms of his quote effeminate nature into the idea that he was actually a woman disguised as a man the whole time. It also wasn't totally out of the question for a woman to have sought political power through the

Church at that time. In the tenth century, there was what people called a government of harlots, or later a pornocracy in Rome, where a few wives and mistresses of noblemen attempted to manipulate papal succession from behind the scenes. A noble woman in Rome named Theodora advanced several men to the papacy, one of whom she allegedly slept with and another who had a child with her daughter, Morosia. Morosia herself would later advance her own son to the papacy.

People mockingly called these women popouses, since these women seemed to be the true source of political power and influence, puppeting their popes to advance their own agendas. Many of those popes were also named John, connecting those accounts to Martin of Opava's story. These hypotheseses aren't perfect. The dates don't line up. Opava thought that Joan reigned in eight point fifty, while the quote effeminate Pope John the Eighth held the throne in eight seventy, and Theodora and Morosia

rose to power in the nine hundreds. Still, they suggest that there was a pervasive anxiety in the Catholic Church about the influence of women and femininity in religious life, which brings us to another reason the story of Pope Joan proved useful to the Catholic Church. It discouraged women

from pursuing political power within the church. Another writer from the twelve hundreds, at Tande bourbonc published a fiery polemic about Pope Joan, suggesting she was a harlot who had what he called quote the audacity or rather insanity to become pope. According to him, Joan solicits the help of the devil himself, who helps her achieve her political ambitions.

This version of the story has a clear moral the Church should be wary of wily women with the audacity to seek religious power, because it clearly means they are in league with the devil. Opava and Bourbon's version of

the Pope Joan stories couldn't be more different. Opava's account is even keeled, based in true or not what purports to be historical detail, and it's slightly critical of the Catholic Church, while Bourbone's account is salacious, over the top and fiercely defensive of the Church, suggesting that the only way a woman could have become pope was through black magic. But still, the differences in these stories suggest that Pope Joan was useful to Catholic writers with a variety of

styles and agendas. By the fourteen hundreds, the story of Pope Joan had become so widespread that Pope jon became even more entrenched in the Catholic canon, beyond just compilations of legends. When the Duomo of Siena commissioned a series wories of busts of past popes to display in the giant ornate Cathedral, they included Pope Joan, proudly displaying her alongside seminole figures in Catholic history. The bust of Pope

Joan wouldn't last forever. Two centuries later, on August seventh, sixteen hundred, the Governor of Sienna delivered an edict commanding quote remove the pope ess from the cathedral. Just two days later, the bust of the Pope est was altered to depict Pope Zacharias, essentially disguising Joan as a man once more. This was the culmination of the work of Florimond de Raymond, who had campaigned for months to have the bust removed, suggesting that the legend was a hoax.

This event, the bust removal, marks a massive shift in the Pope Joan story. The ledgend had lasted for almost four hundred years without question, but now people were calling the story blasphemous. So what happened in fourteen fifteen, more than four hundred years after she supposedly lived. Pope Joan appeared in an unlikely place, a heresy trial. The defendant, Jan Hus, was a czech Man who was once the rector for Prague University, but he had turned his back

on the Church and became its best known critic. He was especially harsh about the sinful behavior of clergy, bishops, and even the papacy, arguing that the true authority of Catholicism wasn't the Pope but Christ himself. Unlike Jesus, who was infallible, popes and other clergy were subject to the same sinful urgent as everyone else. This belief was controversial, especially for the Catholic higher ups who capitalized off of

their presumed infallibility. Hughes had been dragged to Constance, a small university town in Germany, to defend his beliefs in court or be executed. At the trial, he was asked to give examples of sinful or illegitimate popes. He listed a few, but the clergy struck each of them down

one by one, with a single exception, Pope Joan. Hughes had written earlier in the century that Pope Joan was proof that quote, the most unlettered layman or a female or a heretic and Antichrist may be Pope end quote. The clergy, which had been disproving and discrediting us at every turn, could not challenge him on this point. This event mark's a turning point in the legend of Pope Joan. When it initially appeared, the Pope Joan myth was pretty harmless.

It was a fanciful, salacious rumor that actually proved useful as a way for the Church to explore and explain doctrinal inconsistencies. But now Pope Joan was being used by enemies of the Church as a way to challenge the Pope's very existence. It wasn't just use using Joan to undermine the authority of the pope. At this time, the Catholic Church was in a political crisis. It had managed to elect two popes, one based in Rome and another

in Avignon, who were fighting for legitimacy. A council in Pisa tried to resolve this by picking a new pope altogether, but this plan backfired. The two deposed popes stood their ground and kept control over their territories, so instead of one pope, Pisa now meant that there were three. While a pseudo pope like Joan may have been a funny anomaly in the thirteenth century. By the fifteenth century, with illegitimate popes and anti popes cropping up right and left,

it was less funny. In the bitter debate about what to do with all of those popes, both sides used Joan to defend their positions. On the one hand, Pope Joan proved that there was a precedent for governing bodies to depose of an unfit pope. On the other hand, Pope Joan was a warning that deposing a pope could cause chaos because, according to another legend, after Pope Joan was executed, Catholic leadership struggled to replace her church was

left popeless for two years. This reasoning was accidentally kind of progressive, because these thinkers are arguing that Pope Joan should have stayed in power and that it was better to have a female pope than no pope at all. And even though hus was successfully convicted of heresy and burned at the stake, his threat to the church only grew stronger after his death. His execution sparked a new religious movement, the Hussites, who rejected core Catholic doctrines like

Latin masses, the veneration of Saints, and even churches. The movement started expanding across Bohemia. They too brought up Pope Joan as evidence that Church authorities were not infallible. In fourteen fifty one, the Bishop of Siena traveled to a Hussate stronghold in Tubor to debate them on that point. To discredit them, he undermined the veracity of the Pope Joan story, albeit in a fairly weak way, saying tentatively

quote the story is not certain. This moment foreshadows the way the Catholic Church would majorly turn on Pope Joan in the sixteenth century, as threats to the Church's authority continued to spread, while the Holy Roman Empire managed to quash the Hussite Revolution by the end of the fifteenth century. In fifteen seventeen, a new threat to the Catholic Church emerged in the form of Martin Luther's ninety five Theses. Luther, like jan Hesse and the Hussites, would invoke Pope Joan.

In one of Luther's informal talks, he mentioned seeing a statue of Joan during a trip to Rome, but he didn't make much of it. Instead, he wonders why the Church would put such an embarrassing object on public display, which is actually a pretty effective dis Though Martin Luther himself didn't spend much time delving into Pope Joan, he would of course spark the Protestant Reformation, which in turn

caused an avalanche of Pope Joan discourse. From fifteen fifty to seventeen hundred, Protestants and Catholics would produce at least forty pamphlets devoted exclusively to Pope Joan, which doesn't include reprints, new editions, translations, and publications that are lost that are cited in surviving texts. Protestants started this century's long debate in the fifteen fifties, seizing on Joan as proof that

the Catholic Church was toast. In fifteen fifty six, Italian Protestant Pierre Paolo Bulgario argued in over the top fiery prose that Joan seized the papacy by magical arts and gave the Catholic Church a whore for a leader and a mother for a father. John Calvin, the Protestant who would inspire his own namesake Christian sect, Calvinism went even further. According to him, not only did Pope jon prove that individual popes could sin, she also potentially undermined the whole

structure of the Catholic Church. He argued that Catholic bishops couldn't claim to be directly descendants of Jesus's apostles if a fraudulent pope disrupted the chain. Similarly, in the two years she allegedly reigned, Pope Joan would have ordained priests and bishops, and those priests and bishops would have gone on to ordain other priests and bishops, and so on and so on, and so. If Pope Joan was illegitimate, her bishops and priests would be two, and so would

all of the bishops and priests in their downlines. By that logic, the existence of Pope Joan could potentially render the entire structure of the Catholic Church illegitimate. Though Pope Joan had originally been a Catholic propaganda tool, after decades of watching the Protestants use her to discredit them, the Catholic Church had enough. In fifteen sixty two, they finally decided to fire back with a book by Anophrio Panvinio, which set out to definitively disprove the Pope jon myth

for the final time. Like the Bishop of Siena who had argued about Joan with the Hussites in fourteen fifty, Aenophrio took a reasonable cautious approach to undermine the story, focusing on the lack of documentary evidence, the confusing dates, and the tentative language in even the earliest retellings of the story. In fifteen eighty seven, a French Catholic writer named Flora and Raymond made a much bigger splash in

his book length debunking of the Pope Joan myth. He argued that the introduction of Pope Joan in the thirteenth century was actually part of a German anti Catholic conspiracy. He thought that the Germans, who in his mind, were too promiscuous, wanted to undermine the Church's chastity. Those licentious Germans created this salacious story to make the Church seem hypocritical and giving them more licensed to sleep around. This was a bizarre claim, founded more on Raymond's bias against

Germans than on any historical facts. Pope Jone. Historian Elainborough says that Raymond swung for the fences rhetorically speaking because

of his quote relatively unenlightened mind end quote. Nevertheless, in his big mic drop moment, Raymond suggested that it was ironic that the Protestants were so fixated on Pope jan when they were under the spell of their own female usurper of religious authority, namely Queen Elizabeth I, who declared herself the leader of the Anglican Church after becoming Queen of England. Raymond's rebuttal pushed the Protestants to get even

more conspiratorial. In sixteen ten, Alexander Cook wrote an elaborate, fervid defense of Pope Jones's existence to match the Rams and Takedown. Echoing contemporary clickbait, Cook bragged that Catholics quote hate him. Cook claimed that the lack of documentary evidence for Joan pointed to a Catholic cover up. According to Cook, Catholics were intentionally destroying textual evidence of Pope Joan in order to suppress her threats to the papal line of succession.

The claim was just not true. If anything, Catholics of the fourteenth century were the Ones, adding in the story of Pope Joan into older texts to make her seem more legitimate. But in his enthusiasm to prove the existence of Pope Joan, it's pretty apparent that Alexander Cook lost

the forest for the trees a little bit. One of the main tenets of Protestantism is that the Bible was the core of religious life, rather than legends of saints or elaborate ritual like Latin masses or ornate churches and cathedrals. Without documentary evidence of Pope Joan, Cook was turning to exactly the random books of legends and paintings that Protestants like Martin Luther and Jan Hess built their careers on. Repudiating. The massive reversal suggested how far the Pope Jones story

had come. The story became so symbolically important that it had Catholics turning on each other and Protestants lionizing Catholic apocrypha. David Blondell, a seventeenth century Calvinist minister and writer, recognized the absurdity of the situation. In sixteen forty seven, he broke with his fellow Protestants and wrote a debunking of the Pope Jones story, which many considered a betrayal of

the cause. Looking back on the time fifty years later, one source says, quote would it not have been better to leave the Papists the trouble of wiping their own filth away? End? Quote? Some even thought that he must have been in league with the Catholics, but it seems that Blundell was just motivated by the truth, and many Protestants and Catholics were convinced by Blundell's account Because of his unbiased approach. One could take issue with the Jones

story for reasons other than defending Catholicism. After Blundell published his book, The Pace of Pope Joan, articles slowed down on both sides. Blundell set the stage for the modern attitude about Pope Joan that the story was largely a hoax. You might think that this was the last we'd hear about Pope Joan, But it turns out that the legend of the female Pope would take on a life of its own in the secular world, a life that would

keep her legend alive for centuries to come. While the Catholics and Protestants were having their own centuries long flame war about Pope Jones's clerical legitimacy. Joan was gaining traction in the secular world as a folk hero, perhaps to the Church's chagrin. The Pope Jones story had broad appeal. What's not to love about a wily, plucky woman who outsmarted the church and also managed to get laid while

doing it. In thirteen sixty, long before the Protestant Revolution and a century after the first mention of Pope Joan, Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio included a particularly salacious version of the story in his book On Faces Women, a compilation of stories of notable women from myth and history. Unlike his religious contemporaries, Boccaccio didn't care whether or not Joan was legitimate or an illegitimate pope. Instead, he focused on the more lurid aspects of her story, her alleged lust

for sex, knowledge, and power. Boccaccio's story begins with Pope Joan falling in love with a student and accompanying him to Athens, disguising herself as a man to be able to pursue her studies as well as to be able to pursue her true love. In sort of an Ellwood's

legally blonde situation. But when her lover dies, she continues her pursuit of religious knowledge as a tribute to him, and Joan becomes so widely recognized for her intellect that she is disguised as a man and unanimously elected Pope. The Devil doesn't enter the picture until after she's elected. Pope. The Devil encourages her to give in to temptation and start sleeping around, which she does. She gets pregnant, and the Romans discover her deception and stone her to death.

In the ending shared by most Pope Joan accounts that said, in a stark departure from other Pope Jone stories, Boccaccio celebrates Joan for remarkable achievements, whether those achievements are eloping with her lover, cross dressing, advancing as a scholar, or pursuing clerical power. It's only after she starts seducing other men that Boccaccio begins to criticize her. Her tragic downfall is that she refused to remain loyal to her dead lover,

even though she fell prey to lust. Eventually, Boccaccio's Pope Joan was a sympathetic portra of a woman as she amassed power. What gave Boccaccio's Pope Joan's story such remarkable staying power wasn't just that it was sympathetic to Joan, but that it presented Joan as an archetype rather than

a historical figure. Women usually got political power in history through familial succession or through marriage, and they tended to express that power by manipulating men in their lives, at least according to the stories women like Theodora or Morosia the Mother Daughter power duo from the nine hundreds. But in Boccaccio's story, Pope Joan gained her power through a meritocracy,

and she exercised it fairly. She was elected into the papacy as a result of her scholarly achievements and her ability to deceive the Romans by disguising herself as a man. Illustrated editions of Boccaccio's book spread the story of Pope Joan throughout Europe, with images of her sitting placidly on the throne, wearing her papal robes and an ornate triple tiara. These images of Pope Joan found their way into a tarot card deck, which was introduced into Europe around fourteen fifty.

Tarot decks, like decks of playing cards, include various suits and numbers that a tarot reader interprets to tell you your fortune. But what distinguishes tarot decks from regular old playing cards are special symbolic cards like the World and the Moon, and these cards form what's called the major arcana. One card of the major Arcana is the High Priestess. Back in the fourteen hundreds, when the taro was initially

introduced to Europe, this card was the pope Us. The oldest surviving tarot deck, commissioned in fourteen fifty by Filippo Maria Visconti, Duke of Milan, and by his successor and son in law, includes an image of the popis one that resembles the wood cut prints of Joan from the Boccaccio illustrations. In this image, hand painted with silver and gold leaf, the Popess sits on a throne, holding a pontifical staff and wearing the typical papal triple tiara, much

like the Boccaccio illustrations. It wasn't until the late seventeen hundreds that the popess would transform into the high priestess. In the midst of the French Revolution, the Catholic Church was considered unpopular and corrupt. French tarot decks began to decenter images of the clergy, a shift that would eventually result in the development of the high priestess card in the nineteenth century. But while Pope Joan was being scrubbed from the tarot deck, she was about to have a

major moment of resurgence in revolutionary France. In seventeen ninety three alone, three plays about Pope Joan debuted in France, all body farces aimed at satirizing the monarchy and the Catholic Church. Like Boccaccio's version of the Pope jon myth, these plays had almost no interest in confirming or denying the veracity of the story. Instead, they held up Joan as something of a folk hero, willing to thumb her nose at the Church's authority in the pursuit of true love.

But even as Pope Joan established herself firmly as a folklore figure, even today, there are some scholars who stubbornly assert that Joan could have been a real historical figure in spite of the lack of evidence. After all, even from the few primary sources presented in this episode, I think it's pretty clear that the textual record is contentious

and confusing. Some scholars think that the primary sources were later altered to provide proof of Pope Jones's existence, but others think, like the Protestants in the sixteen hundreds, that the lack of documentary evidence is more likely a result of Catholics frantically scrubbing the pope ess from the archive. There is always the possibility that some historian might stumble upon a long buried primary source that proves that Pope

Joan was a real historical figure. Stranger things have happened, But until then, it is Joan's ambiguity that makes her compelling, at least in my mind. How she was manipulated and used, reinterpreted, and trotted out as evidence on every side of multiple debates. Joan, even in legendary form, fueled centuries of resistance to the Church's misdeeds from the Protestant Reformation all the way through the French Revolution. History is a slippery thing, and it

doesn't work like simple fables with morals. At the end of the story. But if the moral of Pope jones story is resist the constraints of the institutions you're in to fight for more equal opportunities, then that's a pretty good lesson. That's the story of the myth of Pope Joan. Keep listening after a brief sponsor break to hear about one of the silliest myths that still persists in Jon's legacy.

A corollary of the Pope Jone myth was that because a woman snuck into the papacy, their needs to be a final check at the end of the pope election to make sure that all elected popes were male. According to legend, popes had to sit on a special chair with a hole in it so that someone could reach up through the hole and make sure that the Pope to be had testicles. This myth appeared initially in around twelve ninety in an account of Pope Joan from a

Benedictine monk. He wrote, quote it is said that this is why Romans established the custom of verifying the sex of the elected pope through an opening in a stone throne end quote. At around the same time, another Dominican monk wrote of a spiritual vision he had where quote the Spirit of the Lord took hold of him and placed him in Rome, where he saw the chair for himself.

In the next few hundred years, much like the Pope Joan myth, the the Chair ritual myth took on a life of its own and became known as the Right of Verification. Unlike the Pope Joan myth, the Right of Verification had more solid evidence for its existence. There are some eyewitness accounts of the ritual, and not just visions

guided by the Holy Spirit. In fourteen oh four, someone mentioned that they saw the Pope elect sit on a stone throne as part of his inauguration, but it's not hard to poke holes in that account because the person who wrote it wasn't a member of the Roman Curia, so he wouldn't have been able to see the ritual

in the first place. There was another account of the Right of Verification from someone who was actually in the Curia, a humanist and member of the Roman Academy named Platina that you might remember from earlier in this episode, but his version only complied Kate the historical record, since he claimed that the stone throne with a hole in the seat wasn't used to verify the pope's sex, but rather

it was used as a toilet. He wrote, quote that seat was prepared in such a manner so that one who is invested with such great domination will know that he is not God but a man, so he must defecate. End quote. It turns out, starting in ten ninety nine, a pope had to sit on a perforated marble throne as part of the papal election ritual, and in keeping with the spirit of Platina's explanation, it was meant to humble the pope in a moment that he was about

to gain absolute power. The ritual was relatively uncontroversial it was performed up until fifteen thirteen, but the Pope Joan Myth added a rectale for the perforated chair and imbued the ritual with a scandalous origin story, which allowed it

to become sensationalized and exaggerated for centuries. In tandem with the Pope Joan Myth, the quote right of verification became a hot topic during the Protestant Reformation, although it was less existentially threatening to the Catholic Church after all, As scholar Tom Noble wrote, quote in the early sixteenth century, several writers with grim humor said that the right had fallen out of use because recent popes had so many

bastard children that their sex was not in doubt. Meanwhile, flormand Durraymond, who you might remember as the one who thought that the Pope Joan story was a blasphemous, horny German conspiracy theory, was relatively chill about the right of verification. He wrote, so that the whole thing was quote so gross that the only good response for Catholics was to laugh at the Protestants who repeated it. Noble Blood is a production of iHeart Radio and Grim and Mild from

Aaron Manky. Noble Blood is created and hosted by me Dana Schwartz, with additional writing and researching by Hannah Johnston, Hannah Zwick, Mira Hayward, Courtney Sender, and Lori Goodman. The show is edited and produced by Noemi Griffin and rima Il Kahali, with supervising producer Josh Thain and executive producers Aaron Manke, Alex Williams, and Matt Frederick. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.