Noel has even harsher things to say about Innocent VIII, who issued the notorious Bull Summis Desiderantes in 1484, which ordered the Inquisition in Germany to proceed against witches with the greatest severity. This was the beginning of the witch-hunting craze which lasted for the next quarter- millennium, and Noel claims ‘was arguably the most evil official document ever signed by any sovereign or leader in history’. Noel portrays him as a chronic sinner, especially in sloth and gluttony, who in age grew inert, ‘being able, towards the end of his life, to take for nourishment no more than a few drops of milk from the breast of a young woman’.

So the litany of anti-saints continues. The warlike Julius II, says Noel, was ‘the bisexual father of a family, and a hard-drinking, hard-swearing, swashbuckling pederast’, described by the Emperor Maximilian as ‘a drunken and wicked pope’. Leo X, alleged author of the saying immediately after his election, ‘God has given us the papacy — let us enjoy it!’, was a sodomite who suffered from a fistula and piles, a condition, says Noel, ‘made worse by vigorous homosexual activity’. One of his lovers, Alfonso Petrucci, whom he made a cardinal, subsequently engaged in a plot against his life, and was horribly tortured in the Castel San Angelo dungeons, and later strangled by a Moorish executioner. Leo, says Noel, ‘was to all intents and purposes an atheist’. He seems to be lining up Leo, under whom, of course, Luther’s revolt came to a head, for Alexander’s vacated place as the worst pope of all. However, Noel also points out that the period abounds in scurrilous stories, and ‘few, if any, can safely be accepted at their face value’. So perhaps much of his own book should be taken with a degree of scepticism. Certainly it ought not to be allowed to fall into the hands of people like ‘Hate God’ Dawkins.

Blackwell Bookshop

Purchase your copy here, 10% off RRP