A Treasury of Royal Scandals: The Shocking True Stories History's Wickedest Weirdest Most Wanton Kings Queens

by Farquhar, Michael

  In the end, all his fears were justified. He had executed one dangerous spouse, Messalina, but another soon took her place. Her name was Agrippina the Younger, one of Caligula’s sisters and Claudius’s own niece. She spent years grasping for power, and once having achieved it, completely dominated the emperor. Her influence was such that she was able to persuade Claudius to adopt her son Nero and disinherit his natural son by Messalina, Brittanicus. Then, in A.D. 54, she had Claudius poisoned.

  4

  A Son Should Love His Mother, But . . .

  Claudius’s porcine successor, Nero, had a series of singularly unpleasant experiences with women. This may have had something to do with the fact that he was a feral, sadistic, sexually depraved lunatic—even if he never actually fiddled while Rome burned. Still, you would think he might have found some respect and affection in his heart for Agrippina the Younger, if not because she gave him life from her loins, then because she arranged the murder of his predecessor to make him Caesar.

  But Agrippina crossed the line. She was his mom but she also reportedly became his lover, and, in that dual role, she developed into something of a nag. Nero did not take nagging well. According to Suetonius, Nero deprived his mother-lover of all honors and power before booting her out of the palace. After she moved, he sent people to her house to torment her with lawsuits and scream insults into her windows.

  Then he set out to kill her.

  Three times he tried poison, but she always seemed to have the antidote. He rigged her bedroom ceiling so it would collapse while she was sleeping, but someone warned her in advance. One time he had a boat sabotaged so it would fall to pieces and sink while Agrippina was sailing on it. Sure this plan would work, Nero happily accompanied his unsuspecting mother down the gangplank—kissing her breasts as she stepped aboard. She swam away from the wreck. Finally, he had her stabbed to death and exulted over her corpse.

  Nero’s other relationships fared no better than the one with mom. He tried strangling his first wife, Octavia, on several occasions because she bored him. Finally he simply divorced her and later had her executed. Twelve days after the divorce he married Poppaea Salina, the wealthy wife of a Roman knight whom Nero had to kill to make room for himself. Though he doted on her, Poppaea also proved to be a pest. When she had the temerity to complain when he returned home late from the races, the emperor kicked her to death. She was pregnant. Considering his track record, Claudius’s daughter Antonia refused an invitation to become the next Mrs. Nero. She was charged with attempted rebellion and summarily executed.

  Women! Who needed them anyway, especially when young men could fill the void quite nicely. Nero at one point had an adolescent boy castrated so he could take him as his wife. There was a wedding ceremony, complete with dowry and bridal veil. Then the emperor began squiring the unfortunate lad around Rome in the late empress’s clothes. Both men and women were lucky enough to participate in a novel game Nero invented. According to the rules, the frisky emperor would dress up in the skin of a wild animal and pace around in his cage. When the cage door was opened, he would bound out, run up to his play-mates, who were tied up to stakes, and attack their private parts.

  Eventually, even Rome’s notoriously licentious citizenry had enough of Nero’s nonsense. He was hounded into suicide. Savage and nutty as he was, though, this emperor deserves a little credit. He did banish all mimes from Rome.

  5

  The Year of Living Dangerously

  The death of Nero in A.D. 68 was followed by civil wars and the brief and insignificant reigns of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. All three came and went within about a year.

  Galba’s biggest claim to fame during his seven months in power was his grossly undignified demise. After being murdered, as was the established pattern among Roman emperors, Galba was decapitated by a private soldier. Being completely bald, the dead emperor’s severed head was difficult to grasp, so the soldier improvised and carried it to Otho, the new emperor, with his thumb stuffed into its mouth.

  Otho then handed off the head to the gathered crowd, who carried it away on a spike. They made wicked fun of the gruesome trophy, chanting insults. Galba had once made a bit of an ass out of himself by quoting Homer in response to a passing compliment on his robust appearance. “So far my vigor undiminished is,” he said at the time. The mob now gleefully responded: “Galba, Galba, Cupid Galba, Please enjoy your vigor still!”

  Otho, who with his own supplanter, Vitellius, led the assassination of Galba, earns distinction for instigating what was perhaps the most pathetic scene in all of antiquity before he came to power. He had been one of Emperor Nero’s chief cohorts during that reign, arranging, for example, the murder of Nero’s mother. Because of his close connection to the throne, Otho must have considered himself immune from Nero’s wrath. How else to explain what happened next?

  He was put in charge of protecting Poppaea Sabina, whom Nero had stolen from her husband to have for himself. Otho, however, fell madly in love with her and decided to steal her from the boss. Ordinarily this would have been a fatal mistake, but for some reason he got away with it. As Suetonius reports, instead of ordering the rival suitor killed, Nero stood outside the locked door of the room where Otho and Poppaea were staying and pleaded for his girl. He was ignored. Like Galba, Otho didn’t last long as emperor; defeated in the civil war by his rival to the throne, Vitellius, he stabbed himself to death.

  Rounding out this triumverate of flash-in-the-pan emperors, all of whom were deposed in the year A.D. 69, Vitellius came from a family of professional bootlickers. He distinguished himself by kissing the behinds of four emperors in a row, in one case quite literally, before coming to power himself. According to Suetonius, Vitellius spent his boyhood and adolescence as a member of Emperor Tiberius’s stable of male prostitutes, earning in the process public promotions for his equally obsequious father. A debauchee himself, Vitellius naturally was a hit with Caligula, who admired his chariot-racing skills, and Claudius, who loved tossing dice with him. Nero in particular was a big fan, for Vitellius rendered a service near and dear to this emperor.

  Fancying himself quite a musician, Nero was always eager to compete in musical contests, but had to feign modesty. That’s where good old Vitellius came in. While Nero would leave the theater and pretend to disappear, Vitellius would rev up the audience with the idea of convincing their emperor to play for them. Then Vitellius would chase down the apparently reluctant Nero and, on behalf of the people, beg him to play.

  After he won the throne from Otho, Vitellius became decadent in his gluttony. Surviving coins from his era faithfully reproduce the fat rings overwhelming the back of his head. One of his favorite dishes, with ingredients shipped in from all over the Roman empire, consisted of pike livers, pheasant and peacock brains, flamingo tongues, and lamprey milt, which are the male reproductive organs of the fish. But Vitellius would eat just about anything, snatching sacrificial foods off altars or devouring half-eaten food scraps left over from the day before.

  Like those of his two predecessors, Vitellius’s reign was very brief. He was captured trying to escape the forces of future Emperor Vespasian, trapped like a dog in his hiding place—a janitor’s closet with a bed and mattress jammed against the door. Yanked out by rebels looting the palace, Vitellius at first tried to deny he was the emperor but was quickly recognized. His hands were tied behind his back and a noose was flung around his neck. Then, amid a jeering crowd, he was dragged away half-naked to the Forum, his remaining clothes in tatters. Excrement was thrown at him, while people screeched “glutton” and similar insults. Finally, he was tortured by the soldiers with little sword cuts, à la Caligula, before he was at last dispatched and tossed into the Tiber River.

  After almost a century of imperial depravity, something strange happened. Rational rule came to Rome with the Flavian Dynasty. Suetonius gave the Emperor Vespasian and his son and heir Titus the ultimate compliment when he wrote: “There is no cause to be ashamed of their record
.” That ringing endorsement was the end of an era of sorts. Certainly there would be many other horrendous reigns before the Roman Empire in the west finally collapsed several centuries later, but the worst was over. It would not be until the popes firmly established themselves in Rome that a renaissance of scandal would begin.

  PART VIII

  Papal Vice

  All was not lost after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Though the long parade of evil emperors did eventually pass forever out of the Eternal City, a succession of equally rotten popes eventually stepped in to carry on the legacy. “The Papacy,” wrote Thomas Hobbes, “is no other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting around upon the grave thereof.”

  For centuries, the popes were the ultimate royals, claiming to be not only Christ’s representatives on earth, but the rulers of kings as well. “All princes are obliged to kiss [the pope’s] feet,” Gregory VII decreed in the eleventh century. And though many monarchs resented this intrusion of papal authority over them, few could rival the least “Holy Fathers” when it came to bad behavior.

  Gregory VII: “All princes are obliged to kiss [my] feet.”

  1

  Not So Dear Johns

  Hundreds of men—and one woman of legend—have occupied the throne of St. Peter, but only a blessed few did the great apostle proud. John XXIII was certainly a good and holy man—one of several great popes of the twentieth century, and perhaps the best ever—but twenty-two Johns preceded him.33 And most of them weren’t so hot. In the tenth century, John XIII, for one, had a nasty habit of ordering the eyes of his enemies plucked out; John XXII condemned a number of poor and humble Franciscan monks to be burned at the stake for adopting the “heresy” that Jesus and his apostles lived in poverty; and John XXIII—the original John XXIII, that is—was deposed in 1415 for piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest. Other charges against him were apparently dropped for decency’s sake.

  Perhaps the worst John of all was John XII, who came to the throne in 955 at the ripe old age of eighteen. He has been called “the Christian Caligula,” an apt moniker for this papal bad boy. Elected at the urging of his dying father, Alberic II, absolute ruler of Rome, John immediately adopted a lifestyle that shocked even the jaded Romans who were used to all manner of vice. A teenager with unlimited power, he turned his residence at the Lateran Palace into a brothel. He gambled with pilgrims’ offerings and bestowed rich gifts, including golden chalices from St. Peter’s, on his endless succession of lovers. With John and his pals always on the prowl, women were warned away from the church at the Lateran Palace lest they fell prey to the lusty young pope.

  Though the people of Rome were too divided among themselves to take any action against John, he did face a threat from Berengar, king of Italy, who was eager to help himself to the wealth of the papal states stretching across central Italy. The desperate pope appealed to the mighty German ruler, Otto of Saxony, who had recently smashed the invading Huns. In return for the coveted blessing and crown from the pope as Christian Emperor and protector of Rome, which John gladly gave, thus establishing the Holy Roman Empire, Otto repelled Berengar.

  With this new relationship between pope and emperor established, Otto took the opportunity to rebuke John for all his misdeeds. The stern lecture was not appreciated, and like the insolent child he was, John offered the crown of the empire to his erstwhile enemy Berengar just as soon as Otto returned to Germany. Needless to say, the emperor was not pleased and immediately headed back to Rome to confront the disloyal pope. Terrified, John plundered what was left of the treasure of St. Peter’s and fled to Tivoli.

  In his absence, Otto summoned a synod of the church to sort out the situation. Individuals were called, under oath, to provide specific and substantiated evidence of the pope’s misconduct. The charges were stunning: that he had copulated with a long list of ladies, including his father’s mistress; that he charged money for priestly ordinations; blinded his spiritual adviser; and castrated a cardinal!

  Regretting that the pope was not present to confront his accusers or defend himself against the charges, Otto wrote John in Tivoli urging his return: “Everyone, clergy as well as laity, accuses you, Holiness, of homicide, perjury, sacrilege, incest with your relatives, including two of your sisters, and with having, like a pagan, invoked Jupiter, Venus, and other demons.” John was unimpressed by the charges, as well as Otto’s plea to return to Rome and face them. “To all the bishops,” he wrote in response. “We hear that you wish to make another Pope. If you do I excommunicate you by Almighty God and you have no power to ordain [any]one or celebrate Mass.” The synod then sent an emissary to Tivoli declaring that unless John presented himself in Rome immediately, he, not the bishops, would be excommunicated. The pope again dismissed them and was deposed as a result.

  Otto put a new pope, Leo VIII, on the throne but could not remain in Rome to protect him. As bad as John had been, the Romans resented even more the foreign emperor daring to bring down one of their own and replace him with a pontiff not of their choosing. No sooner did Otto depart than John returned. He quickly exacted his revenge against the bishops who had testified against him. One had his tongue torn out and his nose and fingers cut off; another was scourged, and the hand of a third was hacked off. John also excommunicated his replacement, Leo, who had fled Rome upon his return.

  A jealous husband ultimately spared Emperor Otto from having to make yet another trip to Rome to restore order. Finding the pope in bed with his wife, the enraged husband beat John so severely that he died three days later.34

  2

  A Matter of Grave Consequence

  John XII reigned during one of the lowest points in papal history, when vice-infected pontiffs ruled at the whim of powerful Roman families and murdered, raped, and plundered their way to infamy. A third of the popes enthroned between A.D. 872 and 1012 died violently, sometimes killed by other popes. Others were deposed for their wickedness and fled Rome for their lives. One pope, Stephen VIII, was so horribly mutilated after having his nose, lips, and ears lopped off that he never showed his face in public again. No pontiff, however, was ever subjected to the abuse Pope Formosus endured under his successor, Stephen VI in A.D. 897—even if he was already dead.

  Stephen, quite possibly the craziest pope who ever ruled, ordered the corpse of Formosus dug out of its grave to stand trial on a number of charges—nine months after it was buried. In what became known as the Cadaver Synod, the dead pope’s rotting body was dressed in full papal vestments and propped up on a throne while Pope Stephen, presiding over the “trial,” shouted questions at it.

  Formosus was found guilty of perjury and other crimes for which all his papal acts and ordinations were declared null and void. The three fingers of his right hand, by which he had sworn oaths and given blessings, were hacked off and his body was tossed into the Tiber River. Stephen then ordered all clergy ordained by Pope Formosus to submit letters renouncing their ordinations as invalid. Several months after that, Stephen VI was himself deposed, imprisoned, and then strangled to death by supporters of Formosus.

  The much-abused body of Pope Formosus, meanwhile, had been fished out of the Tiber and given a decent burial. All his papal acts were restored under subsequent pontiffs loyal to his memory. But the ordeal wasn’t over yet. Formosus still had to contend with Pope Sergius III, who came to the throne in A.D. 904 after murdering the previous pope, Leo V, and Leo’s rival, the antipope35 Christopher.

  Having participated in the Cadaver Synod under Stephen VI, Sergius reaffirmed his condemnation of Formosus and once again nullified all his acts. For good measure, he ordered Formosus’s corpse exhumed yet again and had it beheaded. In addition to this important work of the Church, Sergius III made his own contribution to the legend of a female pope when he started sleeping with a fifteen-year-old mistress by the name of Marozia.

  3

  Her Holiness?

  For centuries, many people believed that in the ninth century a female pontif
f known as “Pope Joan” had occupied the throne of St. Peter disguised as a man. Her secret was revealed, the story went, only when she gave birth to a son on the way to Mass one day and died on the spot. After that, subsequent popes were said to go out of their way during papal processions to avoid the blamphemous site.

  It has been suggested that the legend, or satire, of Pope Joan, which was finally disproved in the seventeenth century by a French Calvinist named David Blondel, almost certainly arose from the true story of two women—a mother and daughter from the powerful Theophylact family—who virtually ruled the papacy during a period in the tenth century known as “The Reign of Harlots.”

  During her affair with Pope Sergius III, Marozia, the daughter, gave birth to the pope’s bastard son, who would later become Pope John XI. Marozia’s mother Theodora, meanwhile, was sleeping with the bishop of Bologna. Not satisfied with his relatively lowly status, Theodora plotted a much grander office for her boyfriend. As Liutprand, bishop of Cremona, wrote at the time, “Theodora, like a harlot, fearing she would have few opportunities of bedding her sweetheart, forced him to abandon his bishopric and take for himself—Oh, monstrous crime!—the Papacy of Rome.” He became Pope John X in A.D. 914.

  This was three years after the death of Sergius III. Seeing that the dead pope would no longer be requiring Marozia’s services, Theodora married her daughter off to an up-and-coming soldier of fortune named Alberic. Theodora and her lover John X found Alberic’s skill as a soldier useful in consolidating their power, but Alberic—perhaps at wife Marozia’s urging—eventually tried to seize power for himself. He was killed as a result, and Pope John ordered Marozia to look upon her husband’s mutilated corpse and learn from it. It was a lesson that went unheeded, and when the pope’s lover and protector Theodora died in A.D. 928, Marozia sought her revenge. With the help of her second husband, Guy, a feudal lord of Tuscany, Marozia knocked John X off his throne and had him strangled to death in prison. Thus the pope made by the mother was destroyed by her daughter.