Pope Joan: Only Female Pope in History
- Oguzhan Onaldi
- Apr 10, 2022
- 3 min read
Did you know that there was also a female pope in history? Although the Vatican later tried to deny the situation, available evidence suggests that such a thing may have happened at the time. Let's examine this together.

Source: Wikipedia Common
Pope Joan Eighth, the spiritual leader of Catholics, passed testicle control before being declared by the Vatican in the past, and this tradition started. Although the story of Joan, aka the female pope, is not sure, it is told in history as follows;
She is the first and only female pope in history. She was included in the list of the 100 most famous women in the world up to that time in the work "De Mulieribus Claris," which the medieval Italian writer and historian Giovanni Boccaccio began to write in 1361.
In the middle of the 9th century, the hero of this event, Joan, was adopted into a religious family. Joan, who reached puberty here, later met a priest and fell in love with each other. Knowing that she could not travel comfortably with a girl, the priest disguised her as a boy. Thus the couple began to live in Athens after visiting monasteries in various parts of Europe. During this time, Joan took constant lessons from her lover and gained a great deal of knowledge in religious matters. However, Joan, who left Athens and settled in Rome with the death of her lover, was accepted by the church here and rose in a short time thanks to her wisdom.

Source: Wikipedia Common
In 847, the cardinals unanimously proclaimed her the new pope. Joan, who may not have been recognized as a woman during her tenure of more than two years, made the biggest mistake she could make and had an affair with someone from the church and got pregnant. Trying to hide her pregnancy, Joan started writhing with labor pains during a ritual held around St. Peter's Basilica and gave birth to her baby in public.
A priest named St. Martin, who lived in the 11th century, tells the story in this way and says that the shocked people at the time of birth then stoned Joan and her baby to death.

Source: Wikipedia Common
The 12th-century historian Polonus says that the baby was already stillborn and that only the female pope was lynched to death.
In the 13th century chronicles, At these moments, when the female pope was tied to a horse and dragged to a stone and buried where she died, the crowd shouted, "Father of fathers! Damn the pope giving birth to a child!" It is written that she cried.

Source: Wikipedia Common
After this woman pope incident, the tradition of testicular control started in the Vatican.
Until the 16th century, there was a bust of her among all the popes in the cathedral of Siena, but this bust was removed by order of the papacy on this date.
The existence of a female pope, whose name is found in many written sources during and after the medieval period and was painted by many painters, was rejected by some circles. The Vatican stated that if such a thing happened at that time, it would be expressed by the Catholic enemies of that period.

Source: Wikipedia Common
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