Did Pope Joan exist? The sources, the legend, the pierced chair and the tarot card

If a client brought me a document written four hundred years after the events it describes, without a single contemporary source to back it up, my first question would be simple: where did the writer get it from?

It is the right question for Pope Joan too, one of the longest-lived and best-loved stories of the European Middle Ages. A woman disguised as a man, learned and brilliant, who climbs every rung of the Church's career ladder to the throne of Peter, and who is exposed in the most spectacular way imaginable: by giving birth in the street, during a solemn procession.

For centuries many people considered it historical fact. Chroniclers and preachers believed it, Protestants cited it against Rome, and for a time her bust, complete with inscription, stood among those of the popes in Siena Cathedral.

Let's see what the sources can bear.

The story, as they told it

The version that took hold across Europe runs roughly like this.

A young man of English origin, born or raised in Mainz, studies in Athens and arrives in Rome, where he stands out for learning and intelligence. He becomes a notary of the Curia, then a cardinal, and is finally elected pope under the name John. But the young man is really a woman, who disguised herself as a man to follow a lover and to be able to study.

The pontificate lasts two years, seven months and four days. Then the popess becomes pregnant. During a procession from the Vatican to the Lateran, in a narrow street between the Colosseum and the church of San Clemente, she goes into labour and gives birth in front of the crowd. In some versions she dies on the spot; in others she is killed or shut away in a convent. From that day on, it was said, popes avoided that street.

A perfect story: deception, ascent, fall, punishment. Almost too perfect.

First check: when does the story appear?

In an investigation, the chronology of the sources is the first thing to establish. And this is where the story starts to creak.

The key point is this: some four hundred years separate the events from the first source. It is as if someone today were writing for the first time about a seventeenth-century pope whom no document of the period had ever mentioned.

There is more. The story first appears set around 1099, and only a few decades later is moved to 855. A date that shifts by two and a half centuries is not the sign of a memory being handed down: it is the sign of a story looking for somewhere to live.

Interpolations: when someone "updates" a manuscript

Some supporters of Pope Joan cited older sources, such as the Liber Pontificalis attributed to Anastasius the Librarian or the eleventh-century chronicle of Marianus Scotus. But study of the manuscripts showed that in those works the popess appears only in late copies, added in the margin or inserted by later hands, almost always copying Martin of Opava. The oldest manuscripts say nothing about her.

Anyone who works with documents knows the situation well: an authentic text to which someone later added a paragraph. The document is genuine; the addition is not. And until the different copies are compared, the addition looks as old as the rest.

Second check: is there room in the calendar?

The most widespread version places the popess between Leo IV, who died on 17 July 855, and Benedict III. Here evidence more solid than chronicles comes into play: coins and official documents.

• Benedict III was elected immediately after Leo IV's death. His consecration was delayed until the end of September 855 by an attempt by an antipope, Anastasius, to take his place. It is a documented episode that leaves no room for other candidates.
• Coins exist bearing both the name of Benedict III and that of Emperor Lothair I, who died on 28 September 855. They must therefore have been struck in those weeks.
• A charter dated 7 October 855 already bears Benedict III's name, and a letter by Archbishop Hincmar of Reims shows Benedict active as pope in that period.

As a collector, this is the step I find most convincing. A chronicle can be added to, corrected, interpolated. A coin struck in 855 bearing two names is a physical object that is hard to argue with. There is no two-and-a-half-year hole in which to slot a pontificate.

And the version set around 1099? There too the succession of popes, between Urban II and Paschal II, is well documented.

There is one last telling silence. Photius, the patriarch of Constantinople who in the ninth century was one of the fiercest opponents of the Roman papacy and wrote extensively against Rome, never mentions a woman on the throne of Peter. Had it happened, it would have been the perfect polemical weapon.

Third check: the material "evidence"

The legend survived so long partly because it seemed to rest on things that anyone in Rome could see.

The avoided street

It is true that from the thirteenth century papal processions between the Vatican and the Lateran did not take the most direct route, near San Clemente. But there is no evidence that the custom existed before the legend spread. The simplest explanation is that the street was narrow and awkward, and that the legend supplied, after the fact, a more intriguing reason. Once the story had spread, the custom may then have been kept up precisely because of it.

The statue and the inscription

Some writers, from the early fifteenth century, mention a statue of a woman with a child along that street, interpreted as a monument to the popess. More probably it was an ancient statue, perhaps of a pagan deity, reinterpreted to fit the legend. Jean de Mailly also cites an inscription, Petre, Pater Patrum, Papisse Prodito Partum, a play on a string of P's that seems made to be remembered rather than carved.

The pierced chair

And here we come to the most famous, and most misunderstood, element.

The Lateran held porphyry seats with an opening in the seat, probably of Roman date: perhaps seats from a bath complex, perhaps birthing chairs. In the Middle Ages they formed part of the installation ritual of a new pope, who sat on them at one point in the ceremony. They are documented, for example, at the installation of Paschal II in 1099. One of these seats is now in the Vatican Museums, another in the Louvre.

The popular name sedia stercoraria, the "dung chair", and the story of the "check" came later. At the end of the thirteenth century the visionary Robert of Uzès speaks of the seat "where, it is said, the pope is proved to be a man". In the early fifteenth century the humanist Jacopo d'Angelo reports that ordinary people believed sitting on those seats served to prove the pope's manhood. Hence the famous formula duos habet et bene pendentes, "he has two, and they hang well", which historians regard as a later invention, with no basis in any ceremonial.

The investigator's lesson. A real object does not prove the story built around it. The chairs really existed; the check did not. It is the same mistake people make with an authentic artefact carrying the wrong caption, as I described regarding the photographs of the Sarajevo assassination: the object is genuine, the interpretation is not.

So where does Pope Joan come from?

If Pope Joan never existed, an interesting question remains: why did someone invent her, and why was the story so successful? Historians offer several hypotheses, which are not mutually exclusive.

With the Protestant Reformation, Pope Joan became a polemical weapon: proof, according to the polemicists, of Rome's corruption. Catholics rejected it as slander. The paradox is that the most famous refutation came from a Protestant: the Calvinist historian David Blondel published a study in the mid-seventeenth century demonstrating, documents in hand, that the story could not be true. Before him, the Augustinian Onofrio Panvinio and the Frenchman Florimond de Raemond had already dismantled the legend with the tools of textual criticism, and later Leibniz rejected it too. In 1601 the Siena bust was turned into one of Pope Zachary.

In 2018 the Swiss scholar Michael Habicht proposed recognising the popess's name in monograms on ninth-century papal coins. Several historians have disputed the hypothesis, arguing that those coins belong to John VIII, who reigned from 872 to 882. So far it has not changed the consensus.

A real "popess" in Milan, in 1300

There is, however, a less familiar chapter, and one much closer to home, in which a woman really was called "popess".

In late thirteenth-century Milan lived Guglielma, a lay religious woman, possibly of Bohemian origin, who died around 1281 and was buried at the abbey of Chiaravalle. A cult grew up around her tomb. Some of her followers, the Guglielmites, came to regard her as an incarnation of the Holy Spirit and to believe in a future Church led by women.

As the earthly leader of this Church they recognised Maifreda da Pirovano, a nun of the Humiliati order and a cousin of Matteo Visconti, lord of Milan. Maifreda celebrated Mass and was treated by the faithful as a "popess".

In 1300 the Inquisition tried some thirty Guglielmites. Maifreda and two other followers were condemned and burned at the stake; Guglielma's bones were dug up and burned as well. Much of what we know comes from the Inquisition's records, with all the limits of confessions obtained in such conditions.

She was never pope of the Church of Rome, of course. But this Milanese story leads straight to the next chapter.

The tarot card: the Popess

Anyone holding a traditional tarot deck knows her: she is the second major arcanum, a seated woman in religious dress, a tiara on her head and often a book in her hand. She is called the Popess.

Born in Visconti Milan

Tarot, as a card game, was born at the courts of northern Italy in the first half of the fifteenth century. Among the oldest and most famous decks is the one known as the Visconti-Sforza, hand-painted shortly after 1450 for the dukes of Milan and attributed to the painter Bonifacio Bembo. The surviving cards are now divided among several collections in Italy and the United States; the Popess is among those held at the Morgan Library in New York.

On the Visconti-Sforza card the Popess wears a plain monastic habit and a papal tiara, and holds a book and a cross. And this is where one of the most fascinating hypotheses in tarot history begins.

The Maifreda hypothesis

In 1966 the American scholar Gertrude Moakley proposed that the Visconti Popess depicted none other than Maifreda da Pirovano, the Guglielmites' "popess" and a relative of the Visconti family. A family tribute, or a secret memory of a heretic ancestor, painted into a luxury deck of cards.

It is an appealing hypothesis, but it has a weak point: the figure's habit does not match that of the Humiliati, Maifreda's order, and looks more like that of the Poor Clares. Other scholars therefore think of a religious woman linked to the court, or of an allegorical figure.

What does it really represent?

We will probably never know for certain, which is one reason the card remains so fascinating.

From Popess to High Priestess

The card's later history is a small treatise on how images change their meaning:

• In the Tarot de Marseille, widespread in France from the seventeenth century, the card becomes La Papesse, a stern figure with a tiara and an open book.
• In some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century variants, in France and in Switzerland, the Popess and the Pope were replaced by Juno and Jupiter, perhaps to avoid religious figures considered disrespectful. This is the case with the so-called "1JJ" tarot, widespread in Switzerland in the nineteenth century, whose name comes from Junon and Jupiter.
• From the late eighteenth century French occultists, starting with Antoine Court de Gébelin, attributed an Egyptian origin to the tarot, without any historical basis, and read the goddess Isis into the Popess.
• In 1909 the English deck drawn by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, now the most widely used in the world, renamed her The High Priestess, a symbol of intuition and hidden knowledge.

In less than five centuries, a figure probably born in a Milanese court setting, perhaps linked to a medieval legend or to a heretic burned at the stake, has become a universal esoteric symbol. Images, like stories, survive by changing their skin.

In short

Pope Joan never sat on the throne of Peter. But she has had a very long life: in medieval sermons, in the polemics of the Reformation, in the marble of Siena, on the playing cards of the dukes of Milan, in the novels and films of our own time. For a historian she is a textbook case of how a legend is born, grows and defends itself. For an investigator she is a useful reminder: a story told by many people, for a long time, does not become any truer for it.

Main sources: Jean de Mailly, Chronica universalis Mettensis (thirteenth century); additions to Martin of Opava's Chronicon pontificum et imperatorum (late thirteenth century); G. Boccaccio, De mulieribus claris (fourteenth century); D. Blondel, study on the popess (1647); T. F. X. Noble, "Why Pope Joan?", The Catholic Historical Review (2013); Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), entry on the popess, for the chronology of Benedict III and the coins with Lothair I; G. Moakley, The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo for the Visconti-Sforza Family (1966); studies on the Guglielmites and the records of the 1300 inquisitorial trial; Tarot Heritage, on the history of tarot.