Daughter of a Roman nobleman and senator--the mistress of Pope Sergius II, hated rival to Pope John X--a woman named Marozia would barter her body and soul to win the gilded scepter of power.
In tenth-century Rome, for the first time in history, a woman dared to defy the men who claimed the House of God--exposing the corruption that had destroyed her family and ruined the man she loved--to seize for herself the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church.
This is a remarkable first novel from E.L. Hastings, a book written with extraordinary conviction and power...a revealing portrait of the real woman behind the centuries-old legend of Pope Joan.