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History’s Most Lunatic Events and People

Khalid Elhassan August 21, 2020 34 min

La Belle Alliance - Battle of Waterloo — Blucher, left, meeting Wellington at Waterloo. Wikimedia

32. The Catholic Church’s Most Lunatic Trial

Pope Stephen VI. All That Is Interesting

Throughout the history of the Catholic Church, plenty of popes has known how to hold a grudge. There is no dearth of pontiffs who plotted and schemed against their predecessors, or even straight-up murdered them. Nor does history have a shortage of popes who were quite vindictive towards the very memory of their predecessors.

However, no Holy Father in the nearly two millennia-long history of the pontificate ever came close to the lunatic levels of vindictiveness exhibited by Pope Stephen VI. He was the only pope so vindictive towards a predecessor that he had his corpse exhumed and put on trial, so he could finally tell him to his (dead) face just what he thought of him.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.