Are we living in a new pornocracy? The first one spanned six decades of the 10th century, during which there were 12 popes. Their elections were much influenced by Theodora, wife of the powerful consul Theophylact, and her daughter Marozia.
The idea of loose women running the papacy so excited Edward Gibbon that in The Decline and Fall, he claimed ‘the bastard son, two grandsons, two great grandsons, and one great great grandson of Marozia – a rare genealogy – were seated in the Chair of St Peter.’ In his enthusiasm he mistook Theodora and Marozia for sisters, not mother and daughter.
One of Marozia’s lovers, Pope John X, certainly had other interests, shoring up the Mozarabic liturgy and treating the Old Church Slavonic rite with suspicion, at least in Dalmatia. A brave man, he took the field in person against the Saracens, who had a fort on the Italian mainland.
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