Weird Facts I Learned from Books: Magical Impotence and Divorce Court

Can you get divorced in the ecclesiastical courts for magical impotence and does that cause all the churches in a country to be closed?

Short answer? Yes.

Turns out, at one point in history you definitely could. That is until King Augustus of France in the twelfth century tried it in Pope Innocent III’s ecclesiastical court.

Dr. Kate Lister takes on some of the weirdest topics relating to recorded history, humans, and sex in her aptly titled A Curious History of Sex. Lister is a university lecturer and curates The Whores of Yore blog. This book will take you through everything from the evolution of virginity testing to the history of aphrodisiacs.

However, one of the most extraordinary historical occurrences in the book is the attempted divorce proceedings of King Augustus of France and Ingeborg of Denmark. To all appearances Augustus wanted to marry Ingeborg and then the day after the wedding, he wanted a divorce. His first strategy was to try to prove he and his new wife were related, so, he falsified a family tree. Unsurprisingly, Ingeborg protested this.

His second strategy was to claim Ingeborg cursed him. With Impotence.

Pope Innocent III still refused to grant him a divorce.

Instead, King Augustus decided to pull a Mr. Rochester. And if you ware here only for the fun facts and not for the literature, it means he locked his wife away and married someone else. This enraged the Pope. He closed all the churches in France for nine months and threw down the ultimate gauntlet. Any child born during this nine month period would be declared illegitimate. And then, just to ensure this never happened again, Pope Innocent III took magical impotence as grounds for divorce off the table, permanently, for everyone.