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.