Pope Innocent and Vampirism

This little Beasty comes from an early 15th-century manuscript as just part of a doodle or marginalia. It looks vampire-ish enough to set the mood about a pope who lived in the same century and was accused of vampirism.

And I am talking about Pope Innocent (*queue irony for the name*) the VIII. Like other leaders of Western Christiandom at the time, his lifestyle didn’t hold up to the standards of the time for Catholic authorities: here’s a little poem from back in the day making fun of him (I’ll put the OG Latin in the comments):.

“Nine boys, and even so girls did he make with his bone — Thus by this merit he could be called ‘the father’ of Rome”.

All this generating couldn’t stop the progress of time, and six years into the papacy he started to ail. A contemporary of Innocent called Stephanus Infessura was the original accusor of vampirism. He claimed that “a Jewish physician” promised to cure the pope if he could drain the blood of youths and give it to the dying man. The pope ordered three boys to be paid a ducat each for their blood — however, the ten-year-olds died, and Innocent VIII went soon after.

This account is suspicious because of its anti-Semitism and the fact that Infessura is the only attestor of the story. However, it was not an unusual idea that consumption of human blood could revive the ailing. The contemporary Renaissance physician Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499) thought that if a sick person would “suck the blood of an adolescent” who was “clean, happy, temperate, and whose blood is excellent but perhaps a little excessive,” it might be a worthy medicine.

Innocent VIII died in 1492, the same year Columbus brought so much hardship to peoples in the Americas. The pope is also noteworthy for sanctioning the most infamous witch-hunting document in history, the _Malleus Maleficarum_, used so much in the witch trials of the following centuries.