Sex and the (Vatican) City: did a pope write a porn novel?
Hey, so, fun fact, there’s a period of papal history from the tenth century where one family, the Theophylacti, had such sway over who became pope that pretty much everyone who got elected is considered an agent working on their behalf.
This, obviously, caused an enormous outcry both within and beyond the church. Eight popes in total were elected while this family pulled the strings in the Vatican, and one of them was even ruled an antipope, an illegitimate claimant to the title. You might be wondering why I’m bringing up obscure papal history, given the headline of this article, and it’s because the outcry was so strong that critics of the time dubbed the Vatican as under “the rule of prostitutes”.
That’s right. For a while, the Vatican itself was dubbed “a pornocracy”.
Hilarious though this is in hindsight, it wasn’t exactly literal. The criticism was of members of the church going as high as the pope himself whoring themselves out to the Theophylacti and other high-ranking Roman families. Selling themselves and thus, the very soul of the Catholic church to the highest bidder. There was an element of scandal at play, though, one rooted in basic misogyny.
Critics claimed that, since the patriarch of the family, Theophylactus, counted his wife as one of his closest confidantes, she was a temptress who was controlling her husband with her feminine wiles. That all the appointments Theophylactus was making were her lovers. All cobblers, of course, but there’s nothing that stokes up anti-establishment sentiment better than lascivious gossip, just ask the minds behind the French Revolution.
One wonders what all these prudes must have thought had they been around 400 years later. They would have seen the pope do something very improper indeed.
Did a pope write a porn novel?
When Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini was elected pope on August 19th, 1458, he chose the name Pius II. A fine name for the head of the Catholic Church, but one that perhaps had an undercurrent of sly wit behind it in his case in particular. Because fairly recently in his past, the newly elected pope had written the kind of book that many people have gotten excommunicated from the very church he now leads for writing.
It’s true. In 1444, 14 years before the conclave that elected him pope, Pius II was merely Piccolomini, a diplomat serving under the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III. Specifically, he was the secretary to Frederick III’s chancellor Kaspar Schlick. After observing Schlick’s messy personal life, Piccolomini wrote the novel The Tale of Two Lovers, inspired by his several affairs. This was no retiring novel of courtly love either, even today, Piccolomini’s novel makes Bridgerton look like Balamory.
The official word was that The Tale of Two Lovers was inspired by his boss, but looking a little closer, Piccolomini absolutely had a reputation of his own. He was a libertine of his time with children of his own from women who were resolutely not his wives. There’s reason to believe that the graphic exploits he wrote about were inspired by some of his own, yet that did not stop him from becoming pope over a decade later.
I guess it’s true what they say, the good Lord really does forgive.