The Woman who wanted to be Pope
A group of medieval women tried to take over the Catholic church
Greetings Gold and Silver Level Templar Knights! At the start of the fourteenth century, a group of women believed that the Roman Catholic church needed to be taken over by the female sex. And the next pope had to be a woman. Only in this way, could humanity be saved. Let’s just say - the inquisition disagreed.
This is an astonishing story. Over 700 years ago, a group of women preached that humanity could only be saved by a female takeover of the Roman Catholic church with a woman installed as Pope. They believed that their dead founder - a noblewoman, Guglielma, who had died in 1281 - would soon come back to them as the Holy Spirit. When that happened, one of her most fervent supporters, Maifreda of Pirovano, would become Pope. Enraged, the actual pope, Boniface VIII, unleashed the inquisition against this woman who was after his job. She was decried as a witch.
In life, Guglielma had been revered by many men and women as a saint. Around 1260, she arrived in Milan, Italy, and began preaching, as well as performing miracles. A leading figure in her sect, Andrea Saramita, later confessed to the inquisition that he had seen her cure two men of an eye disorder and a fistula respectively. Andrea was a man as were many of her followers. Guglielma claimed to be related to Bohemian royalty and that the church was so corrupt and wicked that only a female takeover would save it.
All of this smacked of heresy. Surely the Roman Catholic church would have acted rapidly against Guglielma with her radical feminist take on Christianity. However, this was not the case. And while Rome dragged its feet, her sect grew. Guglielma even attracted support among the Catholic clergy in and around Milan. One monk who joined her cult, Marchixius de Veddano, gave a sermon in her honour, and was later elected abbot of his monastery. Association with Guglielma was clearly no obstacle to promotion.
When Guglielma died on August 24 1281, she was buried initially at a small church but then later exhumed and carried through the streets of Milan in a procession attended by some of the city's top families. Her body was laid to rest in the Cistercian abbey at Chiaravalle. It says something about the esteem in which she was held that once her body arrived at the abbey, it was washed with water and wine, then reburied with plenty of religious pomp and circumstance. The Cistercians believed they had a saint in their midst.
An altar was erected over her tomb with a fresco that showed Guglielma being presented to the Virgin Mary by Saint Bernard of Clairvaux - the famous Cistercian abbot who had advocated so doggedly for the Knights Templar in the early 12th century. The Cistercians at Chiaravalle had no hesitation in aligning Guglielma with one of the leading figures of their order.
At this altar, Maifreda of Pirovano, a devoted follower, prayed openly for Guglielma's resurrection and the feminisation of the church. Her hero would return from the dead as Jesus had done - only she would be the Holy Spirit. There would be new female gospels, female laws, and a female pope. Women would cleanse and revive the Catholic church, restoring its original mission and purpose.
By 1300, Pope Boniface had received reports of this heretical activity and wanted it snuffed out. What on earth were those Cistercians up to? Why were they tolerating this talk of a feminine church? And who on earth imagined that the Holy Spirit could be a woman? Guglielma, in the pope's opinion, was nothing more than a witch. Boniface sent the Dominican friars, who ran the inquisition, to begin a series of hearings and interrogations that would annihilate this cult.
At least 33 of Guglielma's devotees were put on trial by the Dominicans who, using their inquisitorial powers, extracted confessions by torture, which had been sanctioned in the previous century by the church. Maifreda of Pirovano, Andrea Saramita, and a woman called Giacoma da Nova were sentenced to be burned at the stake. The monk Vedanno walked away a free man, despite his support for the Guglielmites, and was made an abbot three years after the trio were burned, in 1303.
Having incinerated Maifreda and the two others, the Dominican friars marched up to their Cistercian brethren at the abbey and insisted on exhuming Guglielma - her second exhumation since dying. Only this time, she wasn't getting a reburial. Instead, the woman who had dared to claim she was the Holy Spirit incarnate had her remains burned in the public square. It must have been a truly ghoulish spectacle.
One has to wonder how such a blatantly heretical sect managed to operate for twenty years while its founder, Guglielma, was alive and then continued for another two decades without Rome seeming to take any action. Not only that, but it functioned openly as a mainstream Catholic cult endorsed by local priests and nobility. This suggests that it was not an isolated phenomenon. All over Europe, such cults must have been popping up with the inquisition playing Whac-A-Mole to tackle them.
The role of women, denied leadership roles in the church, is especially telling. The witch trials were only around the corner historically speaking and we can see in Guglielma the kind of woman that Rome wanted silenced by the flames of the inquisition. Within living memory, the Cathars - a heresy that had spread like wildfire across southern France and northern Italy - had allowed women to preach. It took a full-blown, bloody crusade to wipe out Catharism, but its legacy had endured.
Ironically, Pope Boniface faced accusations of diabolism, simony, heresy, and fraud throughout his papacy, condemned in many quarters as a false pope. And even after he died, the king of France, Philip IV, took time out from persecuting the Knights Templar to pursue a posthumous legal campaign against Boniface. He wanted him declared a creature of Satan, disgraced for all time.
In my forthcoming book, Downfall of the Templars, published by Pen & Sword in November 2025 (second instalment of my Templar trilogy), I'll be looking at how the destruction of the Templars was an early example of the forthcoming epidemic of witch trials. They were rounded up across France, imprisoned, tortured, and executed just seven years after Maifreda of Pirovano was burned at the stake. Many of the charges against the Guglielmites and Templars foreshadow the witch trials to come.
Something very sinister was happening in Catholic Europe at the start of the 14th century. An increasing number of people were being accused of heresy and sorcery. The church was on the warpath and it wanted to see those it viewed as a danger to its power burned at the stake. Even people who had once been viewed as acceptable or tolerated found themselves chained to the wall in a dungeon, subject to violent interrogation.
Some historians have tried to play down the heretic and witch hunting activities of the inquisition. I'm always bemused by this revisionism - the playing down of organised brutality. The arguments are a weak attempt to airbrush out the horror: there was less torture than you think and the torturers had to abide by a rule book; women were treated with greater leniency than men; and so it goes on. I suspect these nuances and subtleties were lost on those having their bodies stretched on the rack or shoulders dislocated by the strappado.
These apologists for the late medieval Catholic church have a job on their hands trying to prove that the inquisition was a relatively benign institution. The fact is that the full resources of state and church were brought to bear on men and women guilty of theological thought crime. And we know that the papacy insisted, in no uncertain terms, that confessions be extracted by torture so that the guilty could face the flames as quickly as possible.
If you would like to know more about the Knights Templar, then get your hands on a copy of my book: The Knights Templar – History & Mystery. Published by Pen & Sword and available on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble, and WHSmith. Don’t miss out on your copy!
