00:00The Vatican has always been a place filled with mystery, intrigue, and its fair share
00:06of scandals.
00:07Pronto, pronto, get your half-price holy sandals, left and right foot.
00:11I said scandals, not...never mind.
00:15We can make a whole series on the spicier aspects of the papacy, but just to give you
00:20a taste, in this episode we'll take a look at that one time when the Pope was a woman.
00:26Yes, this weird story starts in the middle of the 9th century Germany, where a woman
00:32by the name of Joan lived.
00:34Now juicy bit, she had a lover, and when he moved to Athens to study theology, she had
00:40the clever idea of dressing up as a man and joining him there.
00:45Unexpectedly, she excelled in her studies to the point where she overshadowed not just her
00:50lover, but all her fellow priests.
00:52She eventually caught the eye of Rome, where before long she was teaching liberal arts
00:58as cardinal.
00:59Thank you very much.
01:01Then upon the death of the current Pope, she was unanimously elected to be his successor,
01:06all the while maintaining her male facade.
01:10Say goodbye to all that hair waxing!
01:13Indeed, because in her unshaven state for two years Joan would reign over the Catholic world,
01:19until she made the truly classic mistake of getting pregnant.
01:24Supposedly, she gave birth while riding a horse to the Lateran palace, and her subsequent
01:29fate depends on your preferred source.
01:32She was either a immediately stoned to death, or b exiled to a remote monastery never to be
01:39heard of again, or c was paid a stack of hush money to relocate to the French Riviera and
01:44get identity-changing plastic surgery, which back then was a little rudimentary.
01:50In the wake of this scandal, the Church introduced a new ritual to verify that every future Pope
01:57had the necessary equipment for the job.
02:01Now my friends, if all this sounds just a bit ludicrous, well, that's because it most
02:07probably is.
02:08While the story of Pope Joan was widely accepted as gospel during the Middle Ages, by the end
02:13of the 16th century it was in the process of being debunked.
02:17In the wake of the Reformation, where Lutherans and Calvinists used the story of Pope Joan
02:23to discredit the Church, pious Catholics wrote passionate essays disproving the legend.
02:29Modern scholars agree the earliest record we have of Joan's story is four centuries after
02:35her supposed reign, and there's no contemporary evidence of her existence at all.
02:41So yes, dear viewers, we at SideQuest have now resorted to retelling fake news as a means
02:48of survival.
02:49These are truly desperate times.
02:52SideQuest, you're totally fake news.
02:55Losers.
02:56But there is perhaps one small grain of truth in this whole ordeal.
03:00Around the same time when Chroniclers first wrote about Pope Joan, a mysterious woman was
03:06preaching in Milan.
03:09She was called Guglielmo and claimed to be the daughter of the King of Bohemia.
03:14Her version of Christianity was one with a distinctly feminist flavour.
03:19She prophesied the impending end of the world, a Christian classic, and her own resurrection
03:26as the Holy Spirit incarnate.
03:28When she died in 1279, her followers eagerly began preparing for her coming return and for
03:35the establishment of her new female-led Christian kingdom, where leaving toilet seats down would
03:42indeed become the 11th commandment.
03:44But alas, these grand plans were cut short by our dear friends over at the Inquisition,
03:50who promptly charged all of the Guglielmoites as heretics and burned them to make stake.
03:56Ah, but burned them at the stake.
03:57Oh, dear.
03:59Now of course, we have no concrete evidence that Guglielmo's story was the inspiration for
04:05the legend of Pope Joan, but it does seem like an odd coincidence, don't you think?
04:10In any case, if you'd like to watch more videos on similarly obscure historical coincidences,
04:17please consider supporting us on Patreon.
04:20The Church of SideQuest survives thanks to generous viewers like you.
04:25And you.
04:26And you.
04:27And you.
04:29So, thank you for being awesome.
04:31You can expect to hear from me again in a couple of weeks, give or take, for the next
04:36apostatically sacrosanct episode of SideQuest.
04:57In excelsis Deo, the end.
