Marozia di Roma.
If you’ve heard Marozia’s name at all, it was probably as a footnote to the legend of Pope Joan, a fable about a woman who crossdressed and became pope, only to be found out when she went into labor and gave birth. Marozia and her family may have inspired the legend, but much like Vlad Dracula, the true story is far more interesting than the legend.
Marozia was lover, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and great-great-grandmother of popes. She forged an empire with little more than her wiles and her thighs, and her descendants would rule Rome for centuries, making and breaking popes, and influencing the politics and history of the Western world.
Marozia was the daughter of the senator Teofilatto and his wife, Theodora. Her father was a crony of Pope Sergius III and quite possibly the most powerful man in Rome. Luitprand of Cremona says that “from her early youth, [Marozia] had been inflamed by the fires of Venus”; Marozia set her sights on none other than the pope himself. She flashed him her tits, and soon Sergius III was shacked up with her in happily unwedded bliss. Marozia gave birth to a son, Giovanni, who was widely believed to have been fathered by Sergius III1.
Sergius III, who was probably about the same age as Marozia’s father, died in 911. Marozia’s parents married her off to a soldier-of-fortune, Alberico, who a few years earlier had killed the duke of Spoleto and usurped his lands and title. He was immensely powerful and just as ambitious as Marozia2 and together they had a small pack of children.
Meanwhile, her mother Theodora became enamoured of a deacon and, “captivated by his handsome appearance”, she seduced him and compelled him to come to Rome. “Theodora, like a harlot,” Luitprand tells us, “fearing she would have few opportunities to bed her sweetheart, forced him to abandon his bishopric and take for himself – O monstrous crime! – the Papacy of Rome.” Her lover became Pope John X in 914.
Marozia and Alberico schemed to take more power for themselves. They got on the bad side of Pope John X, who drove Alberico from the city, and shortly afterward Alberico was murdered by Romans who suspected him of conspiring with the Hungarians. Pope John X forced Marozia to look at the mutilated body of her husband and take heed; that just seems to have pissed her off.
Marozia turned right around and married Guido of Tuscany in 925. They moved against Pope John X, seized him and threw him into prison, where he was then smothered. Marozia then hand-picked a couple of guys to be pope for the next couple of years until her own son, Giovanni, was old enough to put on the funny hat and become Pope John XI3.
Her husband Guido having died in 929, and with Marozia not content with merely being a dowager duchess, a dowager marchesa, and the mother of the pope, she decided to go for broke and become queen of Italy. She became engaged to King Hugo of Italy, a marriage that was technically illegal since his half-brother was her deceased second husband, Guido. But that’s what having a pope in the family is good for.
Pope John XI presided over his mother’s wedding in 932 at the Castel Sant’Angelo, but the celebrations were marred by a conflict between Hugo and Marozia’s teenage son, Alberico II 4. During the ceremony, Alberico was holding a bowl of water for Hugo to wash his hands, but spilled a little of it. Hugo slapped him in the face and called him “clumsy”, and the offended Alberico fled the wedding and incited a riot in the streets. The Romans rallied behind him and attacked the Castel Sant’Angelo. Hugo bravely abandoned his wife and shimmied out the window on a rope, leaving Marozia and Pope John XI behind. Alberico and his army of angry Romans drove out Hugo and his men by throwing sticks, stones, shoes, calzones, and anything else at hand at their heads. Eighteen-year-old Alberico II imprisoned his mother and brother and declared himself “glorious prince and senator of all the Romans.” He also added insult to injury by banging his stepsister Alda, King Hugo’s daughter who had also been left behind when her father fled Rome 5.
Marozia died in prison. Her son Pope John XI was allowed to perform purely spiritual duties until his own death in 935. Alberico ably ruled Rome until he died in 954, and on his deathbed he nominated his own son, Ottaviano, as pope.
Ottaviano, son of Alberico II and Alda, became Pope John XII, and continued the proud family tradition by becoming one of the most depraved popes in history. A small sampling of the charges against him in the Patrologia Latina include: ordaining a bishop in a horse stable, blinding and then killing his confessor, castrating and then killing a subdeacon, fornicating with various women including his own niece, turning the sacred palace into a brothel, invoking the names of pagan gods, and toasting to the devil with wine, among many, many others. He died while busily breaking Commandments Six and Nine with a married woman; her husband walked in on them and brained him with a hammer.
Several more popes of this family were to follow, but I definitely don’t want to forget Marozia’s great-great-grandson, Pope Benedict IX, the so-called “child pope” (he was very young when he became pope, probably in his mid-teens). Benedict IX was the nephew of popes Benedict VIII and John XIX. By the time he became pope in 1033, the papal throne was practically a family heirloom. Benedict IX spent his reign snorting blow off the pert asses of whores, throwing wild bisexual orgies in the Lateran palace, and raping female pilgrims 6. He surprised everyone by falling in love with his own cousin and desiring to marry her and produce a family of little deviants. Since a pope can’t exactly get married, Benedict IX sold the papacy to his godfather, but later regretted the decision and tried to forcibly retake his old position several times. He is the only pope to have been pope on three seperate ocassions, and the only pope to have sold the papacy 7.
Such was the legacy of Marozia, who’s descendants made and unmade emperors and kings and guided the souls of millions.
Footnotes:
1. Sergius III’s other accomplishment was digging up the mutilated corpse of Pope Formosus, putting it on trial, finding him guilty posthumously, and beheading him.
2. No minor achievement.
3. As the son of Marozia and Pope Sergius III, Pope John XI is the only illegitimate son of a pope to become pope himself.
4. The eldest of several sons she’d had with her first husband, Alberico.
5. And you thought your teenager was an annoying little shit because he plays video games in the basement all day. It can always get worse.
6. He was born in the wrong era. He should’ve been a mulleted 1980s rock star.
7. Peter Damian records a delightful story that Benedict IX, “a demon from hell in the guise of a priest”, was so evil that instead of dying he mutated into a donkey-bear-man creature cursed to haunt the world until the Last Judgment.
