The Female Pope Who Reigned for Two Years and Five Months in the Ninth Century and Almost Certainly Did Not Exist

According to a 13th-century chronicle by the Dominican friar Martinus Polonus (or Martin of Troppau), an English-born scholar called Joan disguised herself as a man, travelled with her male lover to Athens to study, then moved to Rome where her learning made her famous. She was elected Pope John VIII in approximately 855 CE and reigned for two years, five months, and four days. During a papal procession from Saint Peter’s to the Lateran she gave birth in the street, was recognised as a woman by the crowd, and was either killed on the spot or deposed and exiled.

The story appears in Martinus Polonus’s Chronicon Pontificum et Imperatorum, written around 1278. From the late 13th century onward it was treated by Catholic chroniclers as historical fact. Pope Joan statues stood in cathedrals at Siena and elsewhere. The 15th-century Vatican librarian Bartolomeo Platina included Joan in his official Lives of the Popes (1479).

The problem

No ninth-century source mentions Joan. None of the contemporary papal records, none of the Frankish chronicles, none of the Byzantine sources who actively criticised the Roman papacy for theological reasons, none of the immediate successor popes’ references to predecessors. The actual John VIII of contemporary record reigned from 872 to 882 and is the documented successor of Hadrian II. The years 855–858 of the supposed Joan reign were occupied by Benedict III, whose surviving correspondence — including letters from Frankish bishops to him as a sitting pope — is well attested.

There is, in short, no chronological space for Joan in the actual 9th-century papacy. The earliest surviving narrative source mentioning her dates from approximately 1255 — four hundred years after the supposed reign.

Why the story spread

The story spread because the high medieval papal court at Rome was politically vulnerable to a narrative of past institutional embarrassment. The 13th and 14th centuries saw periodic anti-papal political movements (notably the Franciscan Spirituals and various imperial-papal conflicts) that benefited from circulating any plausible-looking story of a discredited papal predecessor.

A specific institutional practice may have helped the story stick: 13th-century Rome had a tradition that a newly elected pope, before final installation, would sit on a porphyry seat — the sedes stercoraria — which contemporary observers described as containing a hole. The folkloric explanation that this seat was used by a junior cleric to physically verify the new pope’s male anatomy, in case of “another Joan,” is documented from approximately 1290 onward but is almost certainly retrospective. The actual seat (now in the Vatican Museums) is a Roman-period parturition stool repurposed by 11th-century papal ceremony.

The folkloric explanation was, however, what 14th- and 15th-century pilgrims to Rome were being told.

The 17th-century refutation

The story was demolished in 1647 by the French Calvinist scholar David Blondel, who applied to it the same kind of textual analysis Lorenzo Valla had applied two centuries earlier to the Donation of Constantine. Blondel established the absence of any contemporary 9th-century source, the chronological impossibility of fitting Joan’s reign between Leo IV and Benedict III, and the gradual development of the story between approximately 1250 and 1280 in Dominican chronicles.

Blondel was a Calvinist; his motive was to clarify Protestant polemic by abandoning a claim that could not be defended on the documentary record. Modern Catholic and Protestant scholarship now agree with him: there was no Pope Joan. The story is a 13th-century invention that became fact through four centuries of repetition.

Why it survives

Joan persists in popular reference partly because she is the only female pope figure available — the only way for the general European cultural tradition to have a story of a woman holding the papacy. The 2009 German film Die Päpstin and the 1996 Donna Woolfolk Cross novel Pope Joan on which it was based are the most recent popular treatments.

The fictional pope still does not exist. The papacy has had, in approximately 2,000 years and 266 documented popes, exactly zero women.