For two thousand years, the leader of the Roman Catholic church has been the Pope in Rome. We think of the Pope as a voice for morality. But in the tenth century CE, the reputation of the Popes hit an all time low. The papal palace was turned into a brothel and sinfulness was actively encouraged during a dark period referred to ever since as: The Pornocracy. It’s also termed the Rule of the Harlots or the ‘Saeculum Obscurum’ (Dark Age).
This was a volatile time for the city of Rome with Muslim armies camped outside its walls. The basilica of St Peter’s had been sacked by the Saracens in the year 846CE carrying off priceless treasures, vestments and reliquaries. It felt as if at any moment, Rome might fall to an enemy that would sweep away the Roman Catholic church and, like Spain and Portugal at that time, the whole of Italy might fall under the sway of Muslim rulers.
Anarchy prevailed in the city. One of Rome’s noble families – the Theophylacti – took advantage of the chaos to effectively seize control of the papacy from behind the scenes imposing its own choice of popes for decades. They used every sinful tactic to rig elections including scandal, incest, and murder. The family members pulling most of the strings was a noblewoman, Theodora, along with her daughter, Marozia Theophylacti. They exerted enormous influence and literally created popes.
So what kind of sinfulness occurred during The Pornocracy?
- The daughter of Theodora – Marozia – became the fifteen-year-old concubine of the 45-year-old pope, Sergius III (c.860-911). They had a male child who became Pope John XI in the year 931CE. Effectively, the papacy became a family dynasty – a branch of the Theophylacti.
- But first there was Pope John X who became pope in 914CE having been Theodora’s lover – bad enough considering he was an ordained priest and she was already married to the Count of Tusculum. After fourteen years as pope, he was violently overthrown, imprisoned in a dungeon, and smothered to death with a pillow – by Marozia, whose influence he had dared to challenge.
- Marozia’s son, the future John XI, was still a little too young to become pope (though youth was not an obstacle at this stage) so two interim popes were tolerated, Leo VI and Stephen VII, both of whom Marozia may have had murdered. Then her son by a previous pope, Sergius, became the new pope.
After Marozia’s death, her grandson was crowned Pope John XII in 955CE and he took the papacy to depths previously unexplored. In effect, John behaved like any other medieval warlord, fighting in full armour to extend his territory. The fact he was head of the Catholic church seemed to have slipped his mind completely. To the extent, according to the chronicler Liudprand of Cremona, that he transformed the Lateran Palace – then the papal residence, not the Vatican – into a de facto brothel.
He was accused of celebrating mass without bothering to take communion; accepting money in return for ordaining people as bishops; ordaining a ten-year-old as a bishop; taking concubines and having sex with the wives of other men; conducting a sexual relationship with his own niece; castrating a cardinal who annoyed him; raising his glass many times to toast the devil with wine; playing dice; and uttering curses while using the names of pagan gods like Jupiter and Venus as well as countless demons. Apparently he never made the sign of the cross.
The sinfulness of these popes came to an end in 965CE and in the next century, a movement for renewal began within the church with the realisation that if the papacy wanted to extend its power over secular kings and princes, it would have to lead by example. The pornocracy had to end.
