5. The Husband of John X’s Lover Elected Him Pope
John X’s sex life would eventually lead to his downfall. When he was still a priest, Giovanni da Tossignano had an affair with Theodora, the wife of Theophylactus. Whether or not Theophylactus knew that his wife was sleeping with the family priest, Theodora pushed her husband to appoint her lover as the Archbishop of Bologna in 905. If the nobleman did know, it didn’t seem to bother him: Theophylactus elected Giovanni as Pope John X in 914. When Theodora died two years later, her daughter Marozia, the former mistress of Sergius III, took her mother’s place in politics, and supposedly, in John’s bed.
Rumors that Marozia was also John’s lover probably aren’t true, for her enemies recorded them as fact. John X reached unprecedented influence for a pope of the period. After the death of Theophylactus, he lost his influential friends. To curb John’s power, Marozia married Guy of Tuscany, and the couple invaded Rome in 927. Resentful of his relationship with her mother, Marozia arrested John and threw him in the fortress prison, the Castel Sant’Angelo. John X’s death one year later may have been the result of the prison’s conditions, but it is more likely that Marozia and Guy executed him.
