Another legacy brat falls: With the pending fall of Tripoli to the rebels comes word that Saadi Gadhafi, idiot son of the dictator, and the subject of this piece from the early days of my blog, has been arrested. Interestingly, after his soccer "career" ended, he had been investing in the moving pictures, with little luck, before events in the homeland compelled his return earlier this year.

UPDATE [9/16/11]: As it turned out, young Saadi had not been captured by the rebels, and as of this date, is reportedly exiled in the West African nation of Niger, a nation best-known for not providing Iraq with yellowcake uranium, contrary to an infamous set of forged documents.

An opinion of a non-Academy voter:

"A lot of the mannerisms were right. But the problem was the walk -- Forest didn't get that. My father strides and his hands would go like a paddle because of his wide shoulders. Whitaker is knock-kneed -- my father was bowlegged."

--Jaffar Amin, son of the late Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. He returned to Uganda in 1990, and now makes a living, swear to Kobe, doing voiceovers for advertisements. My essay on other scions of deposed dictators can be found here.

Idiot Son Watch: In what could conceivably be the most bizarre romantic coupling in the history of man, the tabs are reporting that Oscar-winning actress Nicole Kidman was seen in the company of...our old friend, Saadi Ghaddafi.

Idiot Son Update: Perugia club owner Luciano Gaucci denounced his team after it lost a home-and-home series with Fiorentina, relegating the team to the minor leagues (Italian Serie B). Promising that he would purge the players he deemed unworthy to play professional soccer at the highest level, he vowed that the only players who could be assured of employment next season were Italian superstar Fabrizio Ravanelli, and, of course, our old friend Saadi Ghaddafi. Apparently the one game he played this season must have made more of an impression on the boss than his frequent "injuries", carousing and positive drug tests.

Idiot son update: After spending his first eight months with Serie A also-ran Perugia on the bench, including a three-month stint in the doghouse for failing a drug test, Saadi Ghadafi, son of the Libyan strongman and U.S. ally in the War on Terror, finally made his debut in Italian soccer, playing 15 minutes as a substitute in his team's 1-0 upset victory over Juventus. His coach, Serse Cosmi, explained later that "Gaddafi came on because he is a player and not because any one of us wanted to go into history as the one who first played the son of a head of state in the Italian championship".

Idiot Son Update: Sending a message to sports leagues and athletes the world over (are you listening, Bud Selig?), the governing authority for Italy's Serie A has suspended Saadi Ghadafi for three months for failing a drug test. Perhaps chastened by the fall of Saddam, Ghadafi admitted taking the banned substance norandrosterone, but claimed it was for treatment of a "back injury", no doubt incurred while sitting on the bench for every single game this season.

Saadi Gaddafi, the soccer-playing son of the Libyan strongman and the subject of this July 26 piece, has tested positive for the banned substance Nandrolone. He faces suspension from the Italian Serie A team Perugia, which signed him in the off-season but has yet to play him in a game.

In what is a blow to soccer fans the world over, FIFA has rejected the joint bid of Libya and Tunisia to host the 2010 World Cup, in spite of the best efforts of Saadi Ghadaffi, number one son of the Libyan strongman. I guess we'll have to settle for North Korea's bid.

Slate reviews the dismal history of dictators' sons, including Oday and Qusay Hussein, Baby Doc Duvalier, and the particularly creepy "Nicu" Ceausescu, who purportedly spent his years in Romania raping women at will, including, allegedly, gymnast Nadia Comaneci. Interestingly, the daughters of dictators have turned out rather well when given the reigns of power, although readers of this site know that hasn't always been the case.

One son in particular who comes in for some rough scrutiny is Saadi Ghadafi, number three son of the Libyan strongman. Like Oday, Saadi runs his country's soccer federation, as well as large shares of Italian power Juventus, the European Champions Cup runner-up (Angelenos who complain about moronic owners like Donald Sterling should note that the team Juventus lost to, AC Milan, is owned by Italian President Silvio Berlusconi, who is literally a Fascist). Ghadafi is not just a team owner, though; he also starts for the Libyan national squad, and was recently signed to a two-year contract to play for Italian power Perugia in Serie A.

So far, his work ethic has failed to impress his new coach or teammates: blowing off practices, insisting on living without roommates on the road, roaming the streets of Italy with a "posse" that includes most of the dregs of the sports world, including Ben Johnson and Diego Maradona. In short, he is acting like the North African version of Allen Iverson. The owner of Perugia, Luciano Gaucci, who received attention when he cut the Korean player who had scored the goal to knock Italy out of the World Cup last year, insists that signing the spawn of Moammar is not a publicity stunt.

Those who remember history are also condemned to repeat it…

Right now, I’m in the middle of reading Garry Wills’ splendid justification of his faith, Why I Am a Catholic. It helps to have had a background in theology or philosophy, neither of which I possess, to understand his religious reasoning, but his book is still readable for another reason: the detailed history of the papacy he provides. Part of his thesis is that since the Pope is not part of the original doctrines of Christianity, his emergence is in direct response to the institutional needs of the Church; Peter, far from being the "Bishop of Rome", never even visited the city, and the true center of the Church’s power, both politically and spiritually, for centuries thereafter was in Greece and North Africa, not Rome.

How the Bishop of Rome eventually became the powerful spiritual, and for a time, temporal, power is a fascinating story. Some of the early “popes”, lets just say, were a rather seedy lot. The papacy was little more than a pawn for various rulers, emperors and kings, and a progressive ruler, like Justinian, Charlemagne, and Otto (the first Holy Roman Emperor) could yield enormous influence over the spiritual tenets of the faith without ever being the pope. For the most part, unfortunately, the power behind the throne was not so beneficent, which leads me to the Theophylact family, and to a period in church history popularly known as the “pornocracy”.

In the first half of the 10th Century, the Theophylacts were the preeminent family in Roman society (Wills, pp.118-9). They did not use their power wisely or well. The patriarch of the family, Teofilatto, and his ambitious wife, Theodora, handpicked several popes, including Sergius III in 904. He was a real piece of work; he became more closely allied to the Theophylact family when he began a relationship with the eldest daughter, Marozia, when she was around thirteen, an arrangement the family seems to have encouraged. Marozia, by all accounts a stunningly beautiful young lady, was married off sometime after that, to Duke Alberic of Spoleto, and bore a son, John. It remains in dispute whether Pope Sergius III was the father. After Sergius went to his just reward, the family chose a loyal retainer who became Pope John X, who had the additional benefit of having been a former lover of Theodora.

By all accounts, Marozia had a bit of an edge to her. More accurately, she may have been the most evil, dissolute woman ever to hold anything close to absolute power anywhere in Christendom. Well, it's either her or Catherine de Medici. Normally, I would be hesitant to rely on the accounts of ancient or medieval historians concerning the lives of powerful women. I think it’s safe to say that Livia did not poison half the men in Rome when she was married to Augustus. The Empress Messalina probably did not compete with a prostitute to see who could sleep with the most men. Contrary to Livy’s account, Tullia (if she even existed) did not run over her old man with a chariot so that she and her husband could seize power. I will even go so far as to assert that the wife of the Emporer Justinian, Theodora the Great, probably held a better social position than her contemporaries claimed. Any strong, ambitious woman would run afoul of the misogynists who have written history over the years. If Tacitus were writing today, he no doubt would have accused Hillary Clinton of all sorts of nasty shenanigans in her ruthless pursuit of power and lust.

Marozia, though, was the real deal. In terms of wickedness, she was all that. I sort of imagine her as having the face and figure of Elizabeth Hurley and the mind and temperament of Ann Coulter. After her father died, she seized control of the family business, which included governing the Holy See, and held the official title, Senatrix. When Pope John X began to act independently of her family, she had his brother executed for treason, then had Pope John arrested, put out his eyes, and suffocated. She hand-picked the next two Popes, both of whom were chosen not for any spiritual insights or piety they might have possessed, but for their willingness to act as caretakers until her aforementioned son was old enough to become Pope. That son, John XI, combined a lack of education with a taste for debauchery, and generally lowered the prestige of the Church.

Finally, Marozia went too far. She allegedly murdered her second husband, then persuaded her son to consecrate her marriage to his brother, Hugh of Arles, the King of Italy, who also happened to be her brother-in-law, in 932. At that point, another son, Alberic II, perhaps concerned about appearances, and reportedly stinging from an insult he received at her wedding party, besieged his mother’s castle, and arrested her and the Pope (King Hugh escaped, apparently realizing that this was one family dispute he didn't need to be a part of). What happened thereafter to our heroin isn’t entirely clear. Most accounts have her dying soon afterwards, while she was in custody, at the age of 37. Another tale has her living well into her nineties, at which time the Church lifted her excommunication, "exorcised" her demons, and executed the former Senatrix of Rome. Better late than never, I suppose.

In the meantime, while Pope John XI lived as his virtual slave, her other son became the power behind the papacy, and for the next two decades handpicked five different popes, culminating with the election of his 16-year old son, John XII. His was not a happy papacy for the devout, as he had taken the licentious proclivities of his family up another notch. Disgruntled bishops organized a synod to remove him, claimed that he was in league with the Devil and accused him of

"... committing incest with two sisters, of playing dice and invoking the Devil to assist him to win, of creating boy bishops for money, of ravishing divers virgins, of converting the palace into a seraglio or stews, of lying with his father's harlot, with a certain Queen Dowager [his mother] and with a widow called Anna and his own niece, of putting out the eyes of his father confessor, of going hunting publicly, of going always armed, of setting houses on fire, of breaking windows in the night ..."

Allegations that he kidnapped and raped female pilgrims visiting the city of Rome were said to have been a drain on church coffers.

It gets better. After being forced to flee Rome by the Holy Roman Emperor Otto in 962, John XII led a revolt two years later, and returned to the papacy. His attempts to resume the life that late he led were thwarted when, according to whichever source you want to believe, he was murdered the same year, either by an irate husband or by family members angered by his unwillingness to share the spoils of victory. Among historians, the consensus appears to be that whoever killed him hammered in his skull, although Wills states he suffered a stroke while having sex with his mistress (p.119). Depending on the source, he was either 25 or 27.

After that, the power of the Theophylact family began to diminish. The grandson of Marozia’s sister Theodora became Pope John XIII, who was by all accounts, a pious and decent man, and Marozia's great-grandson became Pope John XIX. Through marriage, the family gradually melted into the aristocracy of medieval Europe. Life went on.